Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 745+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Osmo - building a first-of-its-kind technology to digitize smell. This team is tackling a solution to a challenging question: if you could capture and define smell, then play it back, what are the applications?
Thanks to Travis D., via Andy P., for the intro to Osmo
Lauren Viscariello, Associate General Counsel @ Candex - a legal leader who has leveraged her expertise to balance legal risks with the business objectives to help her startups succeed
Thanks to Sheila C. for the intro to Lauren
🔥 Upcoming Q1 Event: MGMT Boston B2B SaaS Breakfast - 2/27 @ 9am, co-hosted by Fidelity for Startups 🔥
Inviting Boston-area venture backed B2B SaaS operating leaders, founders & investors to join for a B2B SaaS breakfast on Tues, 2/27 to engage with the MGMT Boston Operators Club, co-hosted by Kristen Craft @ Fidelity for Startups
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
Dillon McDermott, Head of Sales @ Zowie - this one’s for the job hunters out there. A report from the front (more Operators Club Corner content coming in 2024!)
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q1 Operators Highlighted: Parker Lawrence / Herald, Aaron Whittemore / Humatics,
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Tech Superpowers. They have operated in Boston as an IT provider on behalf of startups for the past 30 years for rapidly growing companies & premier clients like the Celtics, Accel, Matrix Partners, etc.
Osmo
Founder: Alex Wiltschko
Founding: 2022
Mission: Giving computers a sense of smell to improve the health and wellbeing of human life
Employees: 30 & 50% Local
Workplace: Hybrid (Mostly In Office)
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $68.5M raised
Investors: Lux Capital, GV, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Key Customers: Coming Soon
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $100M - $500M (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in the Series A fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Osmo is building a first-of-its-kind technology to digitize smell. If you could capture scent in the same type of way that you might take a photograph, what would you do? Would you capture the smell of your pet? Significant other? Your favorite hike? The time of autumn when all the leaves start to fall and they crumple under your footsteps for just an instant? Osmo is tackling a solution to a challenging question: if you could capture and define smell, then play it back, what are the applications?
Osmo is a machine learning company for chemistry, redefining what smell means. While other startups may have historically focused on servicing the seven deadly sins, Osmo is digitizing one of our trickiest five senses to bring smell to computers.
Founded by Alex Wiltschko in 2022, Osmo’s research was incubated at Google Research. After 5+ years of research, with the help of Josh Wolfe at Lux, Krishna Yeshwant at GV, and Andy Palmer, Osmo was spun out to stand on its own with institutional funding from Google Ventures, Lux Capital, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others.
Alex had studied as an olfactory neuroscientist, completing his PhD in Neurobiology at Harvard. While studying for his PhD he co-founded Syllable Life Sciences, using AI and computer vision to decipher body language in an effort to accelerate preclinical development and help build better treatments for disease. The company was later acquired, Alex completed his PhD, and then he went off to Google where he led research at the intersection of machine learning and biology.
Scent is hard to describe. If we say something is blue, you know what that means. But if we describe something as “citrusy”, first you need to know what that means. And it doesn't necessarily translate across cultures or languages. Smell is fundamentally critical to how we understand the world and we’ve been given this big chemical sensor on our faces we don’t totally understand!
Digitizing smell is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. With computers we’ve been able to digitize vision and audio, but we haven’t been able to do it with scent quite yet. The progressive power of machine learning now makes unlocking digital scent possible.
The algorithm Osmo is building already predicts what something might smell like better than humans based on understanding its chemical structure. You can’t teach a computer to smell how a human smells, but you can teach a computer to understand the relationship between smell and chemical compounds. Like large language models have turned letters, words, and sentences into numerical probabilities, the graph neural network that Osmo is building helps pair molecules with “smell labels”. Making their own data repository, they have trained models on olfaction by identifying the taxonomy that describes something like ketchup - acidic, tomatoey, burnt - and on the back end mapping to the molecules that constitute the substance.
Osmo’s first commercial application will be in fragrance. It’s a large, $60B global market, with rapid international growth (src). Fragrance companies are effectively “bespoke chemical manufacturing companies” building scents & flavors. Many of the compounds are expensive to make, hard to resource, toxic, and not exactly biodegradable. Sustainable replacements aren’t being discovered fast enough to take these existing products off the market. The discovery process is manual too.
Fragrance producers will search through the chemical space to find a “hit” and then experiment step by step around adjacencies. By statistically mapping odors Osmo can search for a scent at the molecular level, giving the “olfactory precept” that a researcher might be looking for, and then patent & productize the compound for licensing.
They’re taking the same computational approach used by biotech companies but, instead of looking for an end pharmaceutical use case, they’re looking for “woody” or ”mossy” or “citrusy” outcomes. There are endless uses for defining what it means to smell through a computer; you just need a lot of data to start reading and writing scent.
Today the team represents 30 software engineers and chemists, planning to grow to approximately 50 team members by the end of 2024. They are working in labs between Cambridge and NYC, planning to grow in both locations. New York is home to the F&F (flavors & fragrance) industry and Boston is home to some of the world’s best computational chemists & machine learning researchers at world class universities like MIT & Harvard.
Another interesting segment of their business, the source of the Gates Foundation grants, is their work in insect repellency. Human olfaction and mosquito olfaction tend to be similar and Osmo is leveraging its current models to search and predict molecules that might be more effective than “DEET”, the active ingredient in many repellants.
Osmo believes they are at the cutting edge of olfactory neuroscience research worldwide helping to build cheaper, more environmentally friendly, easier to synthesize molecules for a variety of use cases (starting in fragrance & repellency). In 2024 they are focused on developing their GTM and partnerships strategy, working to get Osmo-developed molecules out into the world, and continuing to build around “reading and writing scent”. What’s the coolest part about working at Osmo on this technology? Getting to be the first person to smell something new.
Operators to Know (Locally):
Charmille Coleen Dizon, Software Engineer
Samuel Gerstein, SRE
Jonathan Hennek, Chief Product Officer
Karen Mak, Senior Software Engineer, Platform Tech Lead
Michael Murphy, Machine Learning Engineer
Harry Pellerin, Operations
James Shaw, Product Manager, Platform
Greg Warren, Senior Director of Computational Chemistry
Richard Whitcomb, VP of Engineering
Sven Karlsson, Consulting CFO
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Osmo team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key opportunities for commercialization and what current obstacles stand in the way?
Could you share some details around the team’s 2024 initiatives and goals?
What is the long term vision for Osmo? What are the key roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Osmo you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring smell into the digital age. All humankind applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Lauren Viscariello, Associate General Counsel @ Candex
Lauren Viscariello is a legal leader who has leveraged her expertise to balance legal risks with the business objectives to help her startups succeed. As the Associate General Counsel at Candex, she is helping to build the legal & operations infrastructure for a software platform that takes the complexity out of tail spend purchasing & procurement.
Lauren grew up near Worcester, where her mom was a guidance counselor and her step dad served as an Air Force JAG attorney before becoming a public defender after retiring from the Air Force. She knew what she wanted to do since she was really young because, well, she was a Law & Order fanatic. From K > JD, Lauren was determined to become a lawyer. A criminal prosecutor, to be exact. And she took basically no time off in between until she achieved her goal.
During her undergrad studies at UConn, she participated in Model UN and rounded out her coursework to prepare herself to be a prosecutor. She loved the big school experience, exploring many programs across a bunch of different disciplines. She mixed & matched her course load and got involved with Greek life too.
After UConn, she went to Suffolk for law school because she wanted to choose a program for what they could offer her outside of the classroom. Suffolk had phenomenal internships and clinicals that Lauren took advantage of, while leaning heavily into mock trial as she was determined to pursue trial work after school. She landed a role at the fast paced, in-your face Suffolk County DA’s office. It was admittedly a constant grind but she really felt like she was part of something bigger there.
Through her work, she made tangible differences in the lives of people with her degree. She wanted that for her career. It felt good to not have to explain what you did to anyone, either. People know what a DA does! Lauren loved trial work, but after a couple years, she began to feel like she wanted to do something different over the longer term.
Through her litigation experience, she learned she was good at coming to compromises and working collaboratively with other people. In an adversarial litigation perspective, where wins & losses are part of your quantifiable record, that didn’t always fit perfectly with her own personality and goals.
The next logical step was to go to a firm. She took a role in civil litigation, living the billable hour mindset. After a few months though, she realized it wasn’t the career path meant for her. It felt like time to take a step back.
Lauren took a few months off and pursued a mindfulness practice, seeking to become more aware of her approach to her career and maintaining a “get to” instead of a “have to” attitude. Through this work she was able to get better alignment with her goals and start to rebuild some momentum. Mindfulness has helped her better uncover how her professional goals align with the person she wants to be outside of the office. Something she admits lawyers don’t often ask themselves! It’s not exactly in their legal training.
Ready to pivot and refocus, she went in house with the Mass Teachers Retirement System. It was a great fit at a state agency, a mix of public service work helping to serve the “greater good” with an in-house flavor.
Just nine months later, Lauren was presented with an opportunity to join fintech startup Forward Financing. She was blown away by their pace and had a real awakening for someone used to the system of public service. Forward Financing was very culture conscious and the chance to join the Boston tech scene was too enticing to pass up!
At Forward, she was primarily focused on litigation & casework that covered customer dispute resolution through arbitration, mediation, and some litigation. Through that work she was able to build processes around each vertical.
After 2+ years, through a recruiter, she found Salary Finance. They were looking for someone to support their General Counsel and it gave Lauren an awesome opportunity to acquire more generalist experience on her path to understanding the scope of a GC role. She wasn’t actively looking, but pursued the hiring process via video through COVID (it was a weird time, ok!) and Megan McCarthy did a phenomenal job helping her get to know everyone.
In her new role at Salary Finance, she took on a broad range of responsibilities as a Corporate Counsel. Her General Counsel, Lisa LoGerfo, made her feel comfortable and helped her grow in the role. Salary Finance partnered with employers to offer a financial wellness suite and she worked alongside large scale employers and employees, supporting a regulatory component around lending to keep her busy too.
Between her and Lisa, the duo handled all the legal work and oversight for the U.S. operations of Salary Finance (with their HQ in London) as the global team grew to over 200 team members. The American subsidiary was then acquired, capping a truly transformative career experience, and when Lisa departed Lauren found a new role at Candex.
Candex, a software platform that handles long tail spend (purchasing & procurement) for large enterprises, gave Lauren the opportunity to work in true Enterprise SaaS for the first time.
In her role at Candex, Lauren handles commercial contracting, from large scale MSAs (master services agreements), NDAs, and a host of other responsibilities. She loves working directly with their General Counsel, Erin Leslie, on “whatever needs to be done” from a legal perspective. They make a great team, if she does say so herself!
Balancing Legal Risk & Business Objectives
Giving advice and balancing risk management is a constant tug of war for attorneys at growing startups. One area in which Lauren has spent her time better understanding is the needs of the business, both short and long term, fitting into a legal framework that will fit the appropriate stage and level of risk the company can shoulder.
For example, the risk management framework of a public company is not going to be the same as a Series B startup. Taking calculated (potential) legal risks by asking the right questions to keep the company safe at each stage is paramount to protect the company and show good faith to keep driving business forward.
Common sense dictates that you’ll just have to make some compromises to land important clients. In order to make sure the needs of the business are upheld and the GTM team is happy, Lauren tries to be proactive in asking questions of the sales team and their executives about “what are the most important things” (clauses) in a given contract or deal. What is the payoff to bring the client in at this current moment?
When needed, Lauren will work with her team to use another company’s legal paper in order to get a deal done. She’ll do the additional legwork to fit Candex’s terms on the client’s paper to find a middle ground and speak their language. It shows good faith that you’ll work alongside your customers and, even if it causes some additional cycles, it’s worth the extra effort to close deals and drive growth forward.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Success is Not Linear - “Sometimes you need to take a step back in title or comp or need to make a pivot. You can’t think about those things as one step forward or one step back. Sometimes you need to take a step aside to pull that slingshot back to get you where you need to go”
Teamwork - “I approach teamwork with an abundance mindset. Rising tides lift all boats. Something good happening to someone else, you can always find a way to make that good for you. That is a critical teamwork mentality, everyone’s success is your own success”
Hard Work - “There is truly no substitute for hard work, especially for in house counsel. You’re never going to be a great one if you only have a cursory knowledge of what your business does, how your industry works, or who your competitors are. You really need to ask why and dig deep. That takes a lot of hard work to get there as a lawyer without a business background to determine what are the most important things going on in the business.”
Eventually, Lauren would love to be a General Counsel at a growing tech company. She’d also love to get more involved in the Boston non-profit space by lending her legal expertise to causes she’s passionate about.
If you’d like to learn more about Lauren, you can find her raising her newborn just outside of Boston, crafting the future business risk frameworks at Candex, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the teams, contracts, and business deals you help close at Candex & startups beyond in the years ahead!
Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt