MGMT Boston - W3, Q1 23 - Hi Marley // Sheila Connolly, Forward Financing
Hi Marley // Sheila Connolly, Forward Financing
As we dive into our 2nd Boston startup, a quick reminder that we’ll be looking at these companies through the eyes of an investor. Because whether you’re investing capital, time (current or prospective employee), or dollars (current or prospective customers) everyone reading this is a potential investor in these companies. I’d like to introduce Hi Marley, a Boston software company worthy of your time and attention.
Hi Marley
Founders: Mitesh Suchak, Mike Greene, John Miller
Founding: 2017
Mission: To empower insurance to communicate simply, build trust and protect what people love
Employees: 100+ & ~75% in Boston area
Workplace: Flexible
Stage & Capital Raised: Series B & $41.7M
Investors: Bain Capital, Brewer Lane, Emergence Capital, Greenspring Associates, True Ventures, Underscore VC
Key Customers: Amica, AAA, Cumberland Mutual, Plymouth Rock Assurance & more here
Glassdoor Rating: 5.0
Valuation (estimated): $100M – $300M (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in the Q1 ‘21 $25M Series B)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Hi Marley is "communication software for insurance companies" or, in their parlance, "simple, lovable communication". You can imagine the daily problems that insurance companies face. Their most engaged customers are coming to them at some of the most difficult times of their lives - car accidents, fires, damaged property you name it. I would know. I got in 3 fender benders before my 18th birthday. And one of them wasn’t my fault, ok? Communication is critical!
Hi Marley provides a texting solution that connects policyholders with their carriers. On the back end their platform seamlessly connects to an ecosystem of adjusters, carrier reps, and even large enterprise systems like Duck Creek & Guidewire. Their belief is that happier customers stick around. Their platform helps insurance companies retain customers and drive higher long term value by giving them a better customer experience. Over their 5 years of existence they have signed up 60+ insurance carriers on a mission to empower insurance to communicate simply, build trust and protect what people love.
The company was founded in 2017 by Mike Greene, John Miller & Mitesh Suchak. Through some internet sleuthing it looks like Mike & Mitesh worked together at IBM before co-founding an insurance services & solutions company called “Futurity” where they were soon joined by John. Futurity grew to approximately 20 employees in 3 years before they were acquired by publicly traded Aon PLC in 2010. President Judy Merante, when asked for a comment about the acquisition, stated Futurity “has been the only company exclusively focused on improving property and casualty claims performance through a unique combination of consulting services and data-driven solutions.”
Can you see the early origins of Hi Marley?
The Hi Marley Founders stayed at Aon for 7 years after the acquisition but you have to imagine startup life began calling back to them. Who wouldn’t be excited about backing this team? Veterans of the industry, they understood better than anyone what those data-driven solutions in a world going digital would be. What I’m trying to say is that if I asked them about insurance, they’d probably give me the skinny on every premium type ever underwritten. Aon, they knew a lot about them. It’s history, how to execute a roadmap, leadership the whole works, right? But they couldn’t stay forever. They clearly saw a market ripe for disruption through software with the skills to make it happen. These are experienced operators! What better way to help transform the insurance industry than through the best value creation style of our generation, SaaS. So off they went.
For perspective, this is a big market with a lot of activity. Local Boston based insurance company Duck Creek Technologies (DCT) was just purchased by private equity giant Vista Equity for $2.6B and Guidewire Software (GWRE), another vertical SaaS company building software for insurance companies, generated $800M+ in 2022 top line revenue. Hi Marley has only raised $41.7M to date which gives them exit optionality too. Veteran moves.
Investors love vertical SaaS companies because they build customized products for a very specific market in a way that makes them more embedded with their customer base. Translation - the revenue is stickier & more lovable. I mean predictable. From there you can build out additional product lines to serve that customer base in a deeper way. Hi Marley started out by serving insurance carriers that didn’t have the resources to build in-house solutions but are still being dragged into the digital world. No different than any other legacy industry, these carriers need to compete to retain customers as communication technology rapidly changes. Hello, Hi Marley.
The team has built a ton of features and laid the groundwork to make it easier for new, larger customers to onboard to their platform like Metlife & American Family. They give every customer a dedicated Customer Success Manager. They can set up a pilot in as quick as 1 business day. They’re SOC2 compliant and support opt in & opt out management. They can support translations in 19 languages. And of course the back end ecosystem drives a ton of value - apps, APIs and layers of intelligence that integrate with core systems such as Guidewire and Duck Creek “to deliver critical insights” to the carriers, according to CEO and co-founder Mike Greene.
More recently, they’ve launched “Coaching” which leverages data, AI and workflows to amplify the voice of the customer. For the startup folks reading this, they use machine learning to figure out what messaging resonates with customers so that they can recommend those talking points to adjusters using automation for faster case resolutions and, again, better customer experience.
Finally, like any great software company in the making, this team knows how to measure their performance. Hi Marley drives a 35% call reduction per claim, 4.8/5 average rating per claim, and 3 day reduction in cycle time. That’s a product worth investing in. Shout out to their marketing team!
Operators to Know:
Jennelle Brosseau, Director of Sales Ops
Mia Buckland, Senior Product Manager
Vanessa Alejandra Farino, Sr Executive Operations Manager
Bryan Ginsberg, Director of Growth
Greg Haynes, Director of Operations, Engineering
Jenna Kluger, Product and Customer Marketing
Dan Ko, Manager, Customer Success
Wanny Munoz, Sr People, Culture & Belonging Partner
Amanda Pennie, Team Lead, Software Engineering
John Tokarowski, Manager, Developer Velocity
Dave Wingert, Director of Engineering
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Hi Marley team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I was interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
Could you share some details about the onboarding process & training? As they reach that “mid size” stage and recruit startup employees without insurance backgrounds, they’ll be institutionalizing training and it’s always good to check in that evolution
What do you foresee as the biggest challenges scaling the team from 100 to 200 employees? This is growing pain territory for any startup. New tools, processes, people, and of course software are needed navigate this next phase of growth
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023 / team(s) that will be growing the fastest? Always critical to uncover where they see their largest areas of investment over the coming year
What is the long term vision for the company? With a team this experienced, you would be remiss not to ask where they see the future of insurance technology headed
My most memorable interview as an interviewer was the candidate who came in late, flustered, and asked to borrow my phone charger. They were nice enough to return it…after they took it with them for a week. A little prep…and arriving on time always goes a long way!
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Hi Marley you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more insurance companies into the digital age. All policy holders applaud your lovable efforts. See you out there!
Sheila Connolly, Principal PM @ Forward Financing
Sheila Connolly had a dream. Her love of politics was going to propel her through undergrad, onto law school, and across the Atlantic Ocean into a career as an international human rights lawyer at the Hague. She did make it across the Atlantic Ocean, but not quite as far as the Netherlands. We’ll get there.
Sheila grew up on a farm in York, Maine where her dad lived his dream working long days as an organic farmer and her mom commuted down to MA as a computer parts executive. She was exposed to the joys of pursuing what you love and working hard from a young age.
Bill Connolly gave an interview to the Portsmouth Herald in 2008 where he shared this advice for aspiring gardeners: “it's not complicated to start a garden but it's imperative that, once you've decided what you want to plant, you read a book or go on the Internet to investigate when that plant grows and how it grows," Connolly said. "You need to understand the basics."
Sheila probably heard something like that around the house and took it to heart. After completing her undergraduate studies at Emmanuel she went off to Galway, Ireland to study law after a memorable study abroad experience. She got her Masters of Laws in 2 years (!) and went to work understanding how things worked at the Hague as part of her graduation thesis evaluating the effectiveness of modern tribunals. If she was going to make a career of it, best to understand the basics of how this system actually functioned.
What she came to learn is that from the Holocaust, to war crimes in Sri Lanka, genocide in Cambodia, and beyond the wheels of justice move slow. The courts are limited in the justice they can administer too. It was a little discouraging. Even if you can live in The Hague.
Instead of continuing East to the Netherlands she returned to the U.S. Northeast and made plans to move down to Boston with her then boyfriend, now husband, Marty to search out a new career with the same intellectual stimulation but a faster pace.
Arriving in the city, she loved that Boston felt manageable. There’s great restaurants and a lot to do but it wasn’t overwhelming. She loves to play golf, especially at some of the prized local muni courses like Franklin Park & George Wright (when she can get on!). She loves Boston sports and going to local establishments to have a Guinness and watch a game. You might find her frequenting one of her favorite restaurants - Coppa - in the South End. On other nights she’s comfortably watching a documentary on white collar crime, her favorite genre. Or if there’s nothing new and interesting she’ll go back to the West Wing. A timeless classic.
Working with a recruiter for roles in the legal or legally adjacent space, she was placed at the FinTech startup Forward Financing located right in Downtown Crossing across from Sam Lagrassa’s. She assumed a Finance company was going to be pretty buttoned up but was pleasantly surprised to see colleagues in jeans, music playing, and a basketball hoop in the back. The team was hardworking but had a lot of fun with their work too. This was a different type of Finance company. Sheila’s transition to startup life was on!
She onboarded as a Closing Analyst helping the company better underwrite their customers. Over time that work led her into a Business Operations role helping to administer internal process through their Salesforce instance. As the company grew she helped streamline the underwriting & operations process and better integrate it into the core product offering by advising on the process infrastructure. While she enjoyed the operational aspects of her role, she loved the top of the funnel decisions - process flow, identifying pain points & visualizing solutions. The ideating & brainstorming gave her energy. No surprise her work caught the eye of a couple colleagues & mentors who encouraged her to transition into the Product org as a Product Manager.
I asked her what her onboarding into the Product role was like: “trial by fire, drinking from the firehose, all those things” she shared. She initially worked on individual workstreams for a specific business unit honing her product skills. From there, she graduated to a Principal Product Manager where the problems got “squishier”. Sheila brought structure to broad business goals. She ran workshops, mind mapping exercises, and now helps kick off larger initiatives while simultaneously gathering buy in from executive leaders. There is a lot more strategy involved!
Sheila shared a number of invaluable insights from her tenure at Forward:
Getting inspiration: Sheila has trained herself to seek inspiration from many different places. Whether she’s booking a flight and noticing how the software filters departure & return dates or seeing any other good user experience during everyday life, she’s learned to pattern match. Admittedly she describes herself as a “chronically online person”. In her own words, when she notices a vendor or product experience she likes “I’ll always take a closer look from a product lens and try to see what’s behind it. What’s the data model? Process flow & systems? The more critically you look at things you use every day the easier it is to think of things from scratch when you’re in the ideation phase of a problem you’re trying to solve”. Brilliant, Sheila!
Emergency Triage: She’s had to learn that “not everything is a 5 alarm fire”. When someone comes to you with a problem, their huge emergency might not be the company’s emergency. She relayed that she’s had to balance having empathy against being a strong steward of the product roadmap integrity. Or, in her own words: “if you take in a request from a stakeholder and they’re struggling with an inefficiency, you have to run it through the metrics pipeline. How often is this issue happening? Is there an established workaround? How long does that workaround take? If we do this, are you OK bumping down this other initiative? When your stakeholder(s) better understands the finite resources and tradeoffs you can collaboratively make the best decision together”
Goal Setting: Sheila relayed that bottoms up goal setting for her team has been an important accountability process. She’s found it really helpful to have the team go through a goal setting exercise whether the goals are on a sprint (bi-weekly), monthly, or quarterly cadence. She has found that proper goal setting helps drive effective prioritization.
Relationship Building: Working in Product is a little different than being a leader on some other teams. Your main stakeholders are definitely not in your reporting line and aren’t necessarily even in the same org. Sheila described to me “being a product manager is difficult because the people that help you achieve your goals don’t necessarily report to you. You can’t just have relationships with your engineering team. You need to reach across the aisle to have business relationships too to help everyone understand why your process is a certain way and why it will help the organization overall to follow that process”. Sounds like that aspiring political career has manifested in a new way! Today, especially with remote work, relationship building has taken on a whole other meaning entirely. Sheila believes she’s needed to put herself out there even more - whether it’s informal video calls with colleagues, quick Slack huddles, or additional “one off” catch up meetings. Bridging the gap between different team members who have different ways of working is a future we all share.
Sheila wants to continue to grow as a Product leader. She loves project management - the details, scheduling, and all the small things. She also really enjoys the bigger strategy & “squishy” problems. Squishy - one of Sheila’s favorite words from our chat - and one I think I’m going to steal! She enjoys tackling big, broad open ended problems the most and wants to continue searching for new white space to color in. Her growth as a strategist will help her drive big impactful change in any direction her career goes. No doubt that it will be forward. From the ground floor to a ten thousand foot view, keep an eye on Sheila because she has the talent, moxie & drive to cover it all.
If you want to learn more about Sheila’s career path in product, reach out to her on LinkedIn or reply to this note and I’m happy to make the connection. Thanks for sharing all your insights Sheila!
Any feedback for me? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt