MGMT Boston - W3, Q3 23 - FeatureByte // Kieran O'Driscoll, AtScale
FeatureByte // Kieran O'Driscoll, AtScale
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help (500+) of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
FeatureByte - on a mission to scale enterprise AI by building a SaaS solution that helps simplify the creation, serving, management and monitoring of machine learning features
Thanks to Chris M. for the intro to FeatureByte
Kieran O’Driscoll, Director of Business Development @ AtScale - Hailing from Cork, the Rebel County of Ireland, Kieran brings a creative partnership approach to AtScale’s Enterprise Partnerships
Thanks to Cort J. for the intro to Kieran
Other Resources:
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
MGMT Boston Operators Club - I’m launching a thing, check it out or e-mail me directly to learn more!
Q3 Startups Highlighted: Snyk
Q3 Operators Highlighted: Alexa Murray, WHOOP
Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q2 Startups & Operators Highlighted
FeatureByte
Founders: Xavier Conort & Razi Raziuddin
Founding: 2022
Mission: Scale enterprise AI, by radically simplifying and industrializing AI data
Employees: 15 & 25% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $5.7M raised
Investors: Glasswing Ventures & Tola Capital
Key Customers: TBD
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
FeatureByte is a “modern AI data platform for data scientists”. They are on a mission to scale enterprise AI by building a SaaS solution that helps simplify the creation, serving, management and monitoring of machine learning features. Founded in 2022 by Xavier Conort & Razi Raziuddin, the FeatureByte team knows data science and machine learning.
Razi, Xavier & much of the early FeatureByte team met at Boston based unicorn DataRobot. Razi was DataRobot’s first business hire and helped scale the company from 10 to 1,000 employees in under 6 years. He departed as their SVP of AI Services. Previously, Razi worked at Netezza before it was acquired by IBM, managing Product Marketing. Xavier was most recently DataRobot’s Chief Data Scientist. FeatureByte Customer 0, perhaps? Perhaps we should reiterate, this team knows data science and machine learning.
They understand intimately that BI is for humans and the AI wave will be for machines. Razi adds “the best way to think about AI versus BI is in terms of the ultimate consumer of data. BI metrics are primarily designed for human consumption and are descriptive in nature. Whereas AI features are intended for consumption by machines and algorithms. They are at least an order of magnitude larger in number and more computationally complex. Hence the complexity of managing the data pipelines and infrastructure associated with AI versus BI”.
In the last decade, a lot has changed in the way that machine learning tools (ahem, AI) are developed. The modern data and analytics stack is built to mostly serve BI workflows. AI data management is different. For one, it’s more complex. You need faster tools that can handle rapid experimentation, complex computations, historical accuracy, and help with segmentation to prevent machine learning’s time travel problem (blocking future signals from informing historical training data). The global AutoML and MLOps market is expected to grow to more than $25 billion by 2028.
The FeatureByte team is building a Feature Engineering & Management platform to empower data scientists to create and share state-of-the-art features and production-ready data pipelines in minutes - instead of weeks or months. Their solution is meant to handle the entire end to end lifecycle of machine learning feature development that is happening across every industry, including help with managing cost & complexity after deployment. Heading into 2024, their focus will be on automating product capabilities by incorporating Generative AI capabilities. From a business perspective, it'll be all about expanding the user base and use cases they can help with.
Most recently, FeatureByte released their open source SDK in May so that any data scientist can get started for free. Using Python, any user can create state of the art features and deploy feature pipelines in minutes with just a few lines of code. The SDK automatically generates complex, time-aware SQL to perform feature transformations at scale in cloud data platforms such as Databricks and Snowflake. This self-service data environment for data scientists allows organizations to realize iterations on live data, cleaner data to make better business decisions, and productivity gains to deliver compute efficiency.
Operators to Know (Locally):
Hanna McLean, Marketing Manager
Stephen Millet, Principal Software Engineer
Razi Raziuddin, Co-Founder & CEO
Sergey Yurgenson, Head of Semantec Data Science
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the FeatureByte team I’m sure I missed some up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
More roles coming soon in the months ahead!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key milestones FeatureByte is looking to achieve in 2023?
How does the explosion in LLM (large language model) development change the GTM approach for the company?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale out the initial team and functions?
What is the long term vision for the company?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about FeatureByte you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more data scientists into the machine learning age. All technical storytellers applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Kieran O’Driscoll, Director of Business Development @ AtScale
Career Summary / GTM Creativity - Leveraging Partnership Networks / Career Insights
Hailing from Cork, the Rebel County of Ireland, Kieran O’Driscoll was born to go west. Growing up he learned to listen to his parents, work hard in school, and was interested in technology as far back as he can remember.
In primary school, as they say over in Ireland, he was the student who would help his teachers fix the one desktop in the school. Once he got exposure to computers he dove into resources like Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, going down a rabbit hole of books & videos on YouTube to better understand the technology industry and the businesses behind it.
Kieran went off to the University College Cork and majored in Computer Science. His studies took him to Boston, where he completed a 6 month internship at State Street, as part of his graduation studies. After completing his Masters in Business Information and Analytical Systems he returned to Boston on a J1visa to break into the technology industry.
While working nights at a bar in Charlestown, through a cross continental connection, he met Chris Lynch (AtScale’s CEO). Chris also has Irish roots. He started as a Business Development Representative with a Computer Science background and dove right in. Pulling from a unique background, he leveraged his technical knowledge to have targeted technical conversations with his prospects.
AtScale, an Enterprise software company focused on the Global 2000, is a tool agnostic semantic layer. They sit on top of large cloud data platforms like Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Snowflake, or Databricks. Their platform helps user groups manage governed access to cloud platforms and let analyst or operations teams access cloud data in a structured way (i.e. excel users) without leaving the cloud environment.
After his visa ran out amid the Covid crunch, Kieran returned to Ireland to work remotely for AtScale from Cork. Prospecting became more difficult and he looked for creative ways to generate pipeline for his team. Kieran reached out to AtScale’s partnership network to create joint go to market opportunities, figuring out ways to grow together and win more dual use cases.
He started telling the AtScale dual use case story to cloud partnership teams across EMEA and it began to catch on. The U.S. team took notice and they implemented the strategy company wide. A career in partnerships was born. Kieran moved over to the Business Development team and built out a pitch deck & talk track to help build out the collective partnership knowledge as a core pillar of their go to market strategy.
The culmination of Kieran’s work was Databricks announcing AtScale as their “Emerging Partner of the Year” at their Data + AI Summit conference this year. Kieran has also helped build partnerships with Snowflake & Google, written blogs with partners, and was recently invited to present at a conference in Toronto and helped host the inaugural Databricks Boston User Group. He’s continuing to grow his career in the cloud and to the world beyond!
GTM Creativity - Leveraging Partnership Networks
Kieran’s computer science background leads him to think in terms of systems and creative problem solving. Yes, you need to exert will. But having a program work for you is much better. He realized pretty early on that he wasn’t going to be the best on the phones. Slightly more reserved than the classic BDR, with a territory separated by borders and oceans, he needed to find a different way to hit his numbers.
First, Understand the Landscape
Kieran’s initial goal was to deeply understand his role, his team, and AtScale. He had to figure out how different lines of business worked cross functionally and how the company’s KPIs weaved together. He was a big picture thinker who needed to understand the nuts & bolts before he could implement a strategy.
Diagram Competition & Partnership Opportunities
Through this process he came to intimately understand AtScale’s partners & competitors. Kieran learned how companies deployed their strategies. He built a deck of AtScale’s partners, their relationships, and their different use cases. He diagramed their strengths and weaknesses so he could better see how partners complemented one another and what made each unique.
Establish Relationships & Execute on a Joint Strategy
He came to learn that people do business with people and extra effort is fundamentally critical to driving a business forward. How did Kieran build a partnership go to market strategy?
For each partner, their use cases & languages are slightly different. He would constantly update his competitive deck, get feedback from his partners, and check in with them monthly to receive feedback and make sure his information was accurate.
Once he did all the work to understand the joint value, his next tactic was to make sure it resonated with anyone that worked at partner companies. “You should be able to approach anyone on their sales team and the message should resonate right away. AtScale can do a,b,c to help you increase revenue with your accounts because of x,yz.”
Getting mindshare begins to generate pipeline organically. Kieran & his team use Crossbeam to share prospects with their partnership network and, when they encounter hurdles or bottlenecks, they know who to call as a trusted partner.
Most recently, there was a Fortune 50 company using one of their partner's cloud data platforms. All of their data was integrated in the cloud, but their decision-makers were front-line business analysts who were not able to write SQL code or get access to their data without relying on IT. Enabling decision-makers to have self-service access to the data without it leaving the cloud using AtScale opens up entirely new use cases for that cloud partner. Now, non-technical users can access data in the cloud while generating significant consumption for the partner.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone - “whether it’s moving to the U.S. without a job or taking on a new role or responsibility, you’re better off taking that leap and figuring it out on the go because, while you might be uncomfortable, it can allow you to do your best work. Take every opportunity as it comes”
Finding Your Strengths & Weaknesses - “Be self aware of where your strengths are and where your weaknesses are. Double down on your strengths, play that. Work on your weaknesses too, but prioritize making use of your strengths”
There Are Many Ways to Skin a Cat - “When I joined AtScale, everyone was cold calling and hammering the phones. I wasn’t good at that but I was good at having technical conversations when I could get someone on a scheduled call. So I spent most of my day sending e-mails and doing research, sending a few thoughtful personally crafted e-mails to key people at key accounts to hit my KPIs”
Kieran is loving the network he’s building in Boston. He admits it does help open an additional door or two having an Irish accent in this emerald isle East Coast city. Kieran likes to say it’s “big data, small world”. Everyone in the big data world is all interconnected and he likes that it’s easy to get together with folks professionally, cheer for local sports teams, and explore life in Boston.
In the years ahead he’s focused on continuing to learn how all the Cloud Enterprise Software cogs in the wheel work together, learn more about product & marketing strategies, and take things as they come, living life and growing his career stateside.
If you want to learn more about Kieran, you can check him out on LinkedIn under “mr-hadoop”, frequenting some Boston watering holes or leading Enterprise cloud partnerships for AtScale. Thanks for sharing Kieran. Excited to see all of the partnerships & ecosystem development you accomplish in Boston and beyond these coming years!
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