Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 860+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Neurable - building state-of-the-art brain-computer interface neuroscientific technology and packaging it into wearables, beginning with headphones
Thanks to Henry G. for the intro to Neurable
Bryan Dsouza, Head of Marketing, AI/ML, Mobility, UX @ Aptiv - a man of faith, family, and fun - stepping off the beaten path and venturing out onto the road less traveled, to experiment with emerging trends & technologies
Thanks to Underscore for the intro to Bryan
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
Learnings from 2023 with York IE, Co-Hosted by JP Morgan Startup Banking - whether you’re in the early days of producing revenue, finding product market fit and scaling to single digit millions of ARR, or even leading 2,000 person orgs at multi-billion ARR run rates at Oracle’s cloud unit it’s. all. relative. There are challenges at every stage!
Dana Wensberg, Senior Engineer @ Paperless Parts - 4 Pieces of Advice for the next Manufacturing SaaS Startup
Sean Smith, VP Product @ Denim - lessons from a product guy who spent time moonlighting in revenue
Dillon McDermott, Head of Sales @ Zowie - this one’s for the job hunters out there. A report from the front
2024 Boston Tech Big Board - updated snapshot of 2024 companies to watch. The comprehensive funding list needs work. If anyone knows an easy way to capture this holistic view (ex-biotech), reach out!
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q2 Startups Highlighted: Starburst
Q2 Operators Highlighted: Adam Fisk / Tech Superpowers
Would you like to sponsor MGMT Boston in Q2? Reach out by replying to this e-mail!
Neurable
Founders: Dr. Ramses Alcaide, Adam Molnar
Founding: 2015
Mission: Neurable seamlessly integrates brain-computer interfaces into everyday devices to help people better understand their health, track focus, and prevent fatigue, and open possibilities for how they control their devices. It is on a mission to unlock the human mind’s potential and change the world.
Employees: 15 & 75% Local
Workplace: In Office
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $20M raised
Investors: Pace Ventures, M Ventures, Innospark, Loup Ventures, Lowercase, Mithril, Metaplanet, Point Judith Capital
Key Customers: OEMs, like Master & Dynamic (M&D), and the Department of Defense (DoD)
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $25M - $75M (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in the $6M 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!
Neurable is building state-of-the-art brain-computer interface neuroscientific technology and packaging it into wearables, beginning with headphones. Their groundbreaking research is on the precipice of reaching the mass market to produce arguably the most advanced headphones on the planet Earth – helping us better understand ourselves and the world around us.
Where did the technology from Neurable come from? Well, progress is on the other side of pain.
Founder and CEO Dr. Ramses Alcaide’s uncle was in a trucking accident when he was eight and lost both of his legs. There weren’t great prosthetic options or technology to support the connection between his mind and body. In honor of his uncle and people like him, Ramses studied neuroscience at the University of Michigan to solve the problem of mind & body connection, completing his PhD at the university.
During his time in Ann Arbor, Dr. Ramses Alcaide met his co-founder Adam Molnar. In 2015, they embarked upon the Neurable journey to democratize brain-computer interface technology to give everyone usable insights for the first time, at scale.
In the same way we tell stories to each other, our brainwaves tell silent stories that go largely unnoticed. Unless you’re ready to strap a $20,000 helmet built in a lab or apply some gel to your skull while doing your best Victor Frankenstein impression, what if a team could deliver wearable technology that was digestible for the mass market to help tell us more about the way we worked, focused, or when we needed a break?
Like an Apple Watch or Eight Sleep for our brain, Neurable has been building brainwave software for almost a decade, licensed through hardware partners to change the way we work and hopefully live.
The global wearables market is over $100B (src) and Apple generated over $40B in wearables & accessories sales in 2023 (Apple Watch + AirPods + Apple TV + Speakers) (src). This category is huge and growing as we pack more technology into smarter and smarter devices.
It’s a big vision in a big category. So where do we start? First, professionals who take breaks are more productive and focused. Neurable’s headphones, in collaboration with Master & Dynamic, help track brain data with 90% accuracy (focus estimation paper) and are due to hit the market this summer. You can pre-order them here!
The Neurable mobile app displays brainwave data to help show users when they are most focused, how they can improve or when they need to take a break through a focus score. In fact, one user who tested the app identified a mid-morning dip in focus when they drank coffee too early. Leading with quality, they’ve developed exceptional headphones that are enhanced with this first-of-its-kind technology.
Neurable’s technology could be applied to anything that touches your head, such as earbuds or eyeglasses – making everyday wearable technology 3change the way we think and perform through a new set of vitals. Brainwave data could help us treat or diagnose depression, Alzheimer's disease, and other silent diseases that have previously gone undetected. The brain can offer us insights into burnout that leads to angst or depression. The team plans to explore AR/VR gameplay opportunities too.
Neurable is also working on partnerships with the Department of Defense to better understand traumatic brain injuries. They’ve conducted studies with truck drivers to learn more about fatigue on the road, and are working to develop more OEM partnerships in the future.
From a GTM perspective, Neurable has a B2B GTM motion focused on licensing their technology through proprietary partnerships. For instance, their most recent deal with M&D helps to further democratize the technology, putting it in the hands of the everyday consumer. Their focus is on the United States and Canada but partnerships will quickly take them abroad to EMEA & Asia. They most recently won a significant $2M contract with the DoD’s xTechPrime program and are partnering with Healthspan Digital, a Canadian longevity-focused health tech company.
Neurable is backed by Pace Ventures, M Ventures, Innospark, Loup Ventures, Lowercase, Mithril, Metaplanet, & Point Judith Capital. The team is staying intentionally small until they begin deploying their first product partnership and aim to grow the team on the Growth & Product sides of the business in the second half of the year.
Operators to Know:
Jamie Alders, VP of Product
Darryl Bradley II, People Operations Manager
Shruthi Gujjula, Firmware Engineer
Alicia Howell Munson, Research Scientist
Adam Molnar, Co-Founder and VP Strategic Partnerships
Mavi Peru, Research Engineer
Walter Piper, Research Engineer
Brandon Seibert, Senior Software Engineer
Tessa Sharma, Lab Operations Manager
David Stanley, Lead Machine Learning Engineer
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Neurable team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
More roles coming soon!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key milestones before Neurable headsets are sold in the mass market?
What are the biggest technical challenges to differentiate in this industry?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 // teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Neurable you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more operators into the next generation using brain waves. All forward thinking productivity conscious operators applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Bryan Dsouza, Head of Marketing AI/ML, Mobility, UX @ Aptiv
Bryan Dsouza is a man of faith, family, and fun - stepping off the beaten path and venturing out onto the road less traveled, to experiment with emerging trends & technologies. He trusts that his career can be effectively guided by doing good work with good people to deliver a good purpose. Today he serves as the Head of Marketing for AI/ML, Mobility & UX at Aptiv.
Bryan grew up in Dubai in the 1980s in the decade following the birth of the U.A.E. The city was beginning its transition into a global center of trade and influence. Something that significant becomes part of you, at least through osmosis, and it’s fair to say that it was Bryan’s first hypergrowth experience.
His mom was a teacher and his Dad ran a shipping port in one of the seven Emirates. Dubai was a melting pot of cultures and he learned from an early age that his perspective wasn't the only one. As a kid he enjoyed playing basketball, helping others succeed to help himself and the team succeed. He still hates ball hogs. The seeds were planted for him to one day travel abroad to learn from other cultures and join a competitive team.
Champlain College had a business and science program in Mumbai and Bryan set off to India for his undergraduate studies. He wanted to experience an unconventional higher education system without having to put the significant capital up to study in the U.S. At Champlain, he obtained both quantitative and qualitative skills to start a career in business.
He stayed in Mumbai to take a role in talent development & strategy at the Tata Group, owners of more than 100 brands including Jaguar & Land Rover. There he engaged with executives, compiled market trends, developed insights into skill development, and executed programs and strategies to help position the Tata Group as one of the best places to work in Asia..
Next, he traveled to Phoenix, Arizona to get his MBA at the Thunderbird School of Global Management where he focused on Strategy & Marketing in an effort to continue leveling up. An aspiring jet-setting consultant, he prepared to help clients across the world solve the biggest problems. Well, at least that was the plan.
Loft9 hired Bryan as a Senior Consultant where he focused on product management, program management, processes & operations working with one of their top clients: Microsoft. In Redmond he began to work more deeply alongside Microsoft’s Strategy & Operations team, building relationships with his counterparts. When they offered him a position as a Senior Product Manager in their online commerce group, he couldn’t say no.
Microsoft was Bryan’s rocketship. Around the time he joined the company in 2012, Steve Ballmer was stepping down and there was a massive cultural shift from a sales-centric organization to a customer-centric organization led by new CEO Satya Nadella’s renewed vision. Being in a few rooms with their new leader and watching him work was extremely influential in developing Bryan’s own leadership style and work ethic. He is still close to his General Manager from that time period, Mike Novasio, and colleagues Jeff James, Karin Moore & Chad DeVries.
There was a new function taking shape inside of Microsoft, Product Marketing, and Bryan wanted to give it a try on the Office 365 team as a Senior Product Marketing Manager where they built out an e-commerce platform that redefined how Office 365 was monetized and purchased. They launched Microsoft Teams, which has now become the bread and butter for the group, and they also launched Microsoft 365, the group’s first-ever bundled offering with Office 365, Windows, and Dynamics 365.
Finally, he joined Microsoft Azure as the group was beginning to scale in a Product Marketing role focused on open source & AI, both net new areas for the company that helped Bryan hone his Product Marketing, GTM, and Monetization skills. On the side though, Bryan had been advising & mentoring startups and one of his mentors challenged him to try operating in an earlier-stage environment. Throughout his time at Microsoft, he never really liked working on fully baked stuff, preferring to stay on the bleeding edge of markets and trends, and so he took on this challenge with both hands.
He joined Grammarly during the pandemic to help them scale their Product Marketing team focused on Grammarly Business developing GTM models, monetization strategies, promotional frameworks, and more. By launching Grammarly Business, he was able to bring intentionality and large-scale thinking to this new product and segment by fostering thought processes that challenged the status quo.
During the pandemic, his family also moved to Boston to be closer to his sister and her family. Soon after the move, and leveraging his AI & ML Product Marketing background, he received an amazing opportunity to join Berkshire Grey to help them position their emerging robotic technology as the Head of Product Marketing. He helped them monetize and market their robotics business and was even promoted to CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) while they operated as a public company following a SPAC offering. Today, Berkshire Grey is at the forefront of robotic technology in the supply chain industry, and Bryan attributes this to the intense focus of the team on impactful business use cases that leverage emerging technology - and not the other way around.
Finally, Bryan joined Aptiv where he is helping push the future of autonomous driving at the frontier of emerging markets & technology. He serves as the Head of Marketing for the AI/ML, Mobility & UX Group which includes a wider scope of Customer Marketing while still exercising his passion for Product Marketing and GTM. Bryan works cross-functionally to develop the positioning, messaging, value proposition & GTM strategy of Aptiv’s next-generation, AI/ML-enabled Advanced Safety and User Experience platforms, tracking and identifying key insights within their competitive and market landscape, and observing customer behaviors to better align their product roadmap and customer pursuit strategies.
Curiosity as a Guide to Find the Path Forward
One of the trends that stands out from Bryan’s career is how he has consistently jumped to the front end of emerging trends. What’s his secret??
First, he avoids herd mentality when making career decisions. By following the herd you are usually stifled by background noise and, most importantly, he’s seen herd mentality lead to over hiring. When there’s over hiring you know what happens next.
He’s also quick to point out that you shouldn’t change direction when you see a trend. Just go where the learning is expected to be the most ripe. Bryan encourages people to chase functional & vertical learning. For example, Berkshire Grey gave him the opportunity to work in robotics for the first time and he learned a lot about demand generation as a first-time Chief Marketing Officer beyond his previous Product Marketing scope.
Bryan likes to say that “you learn something twice. The first time is when someone teaches you and the second time is when you teach it to someone else. It’s the second time that drives home the deeper learning”.
Networking with empathy and authenticity has been a critical part of Bryan’s career success. He seeks to better understand people’s careers, motivations, and lives while being careful not to make the mistake of trying to copy someone’s journey. He calls this “compounded anthropology”.
When he is interested in a topic or trend, he will reach out on LinkedIn to experts individually to ask questions and learn more. Networking to Bryan is 1:1. He’ll look up someone’s title and find people who have been in the function for a while. He’ll reach out to connect, thank them for connecting, and lead with authenticity about what he finds interesting about their career. 8/10 times people are willing to chat and tell him about themselves.
It’s all about triangulation - reading, asking, observing, and learning. If there’s one takeaway? Reach out! Put yourself out there! Learn something! Otherwise, what’s the point? Amen to that Bryan.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Collaborate and Help Others Succeed - “I’ve never seen someone fail because they are trying to help others succeed. Fight the forces, urges, or an environment that pushes you to be selfish or cunning or hide work or act individually. Collaborate to succeed”
Choose Your Manager Wisely - “If you don’t have chemistry with your manager, say no to the job. It can be hard if you’ve been recently laid off or are just coming out of school, but heavily vet this. Life is too short to live with insanity”
Invest in Relationships - “Measure how successful you’ve been in a job with how many relationships you’re carrying forward from that experience. I’ve never been asked in an interview ‘Which relationships are you most proud of from your last role?’ Employers only ask about projects. Isn’t that crazy? Staying in touch with former trusted colleagues has added immense value to my career”
Bryan loves working with startups and bringing his unique brand of authenticity to every conversation from casual intro calls to helping startups scale, monetize, or lend his deep industry experience from the many miles he’s traveled.
He’s deeply guided by his Christian faith, in a complicated world where Sunday can feel very far from Monday for some, and aspires to mirror Satya Nadella’s work-life harmony. He would love to one day explore serving as an Operating Partner (or a Venture Partner) at a venture capital firm helping their portfolio companies succeed and have an impact on the community. Currently, he enjoys operating as a Core Partner with Underscore VC in his spare time for the last few years. He treats them like family.
Leaders who are all very different but have influenced him through direct lessons and osmosis include Mike Novasio at Microsoft who taught him attention to detail, Karin Moore at Microsoft who taught him empathy, Sid Malhotra at Grammarly who taught him pragmatism, Angela Whiteford at Berkshire Grey who taught him about servant leadership, and Lily Lyman at Underscore VC whose humility and approachability as a class-act leader inspires him in how he nurtures relationships.
If you want to learn more about Bryan, you can find him in Boston with his wife and two young kids after recently returning from paternity leave, serving in his local church community at New Life Community Church, advising startups at Underscore VC, Y Combinator, Madrona Venture Group etc., building GTM and customer strategies at Aptiv, experimenting with producing music on Logic Pro X, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing your story and what drives you, Bryan. We’re excited to see all the people, teams, trends & technologies you continue to influence 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