As we dive into our next 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 Goldcast, a Boston software company worthy of your time and attention.
Goldcast
Founders: Kishore Kothandaraman, Palash Soni & Aashish Srinivas
Founding: 2020
Mission: Empowering B2B marketers to use events as a key go-to-market activity by helping them host incredible experiences
Employees: 100+ & ~25% Local
Workplace: Remote (co-working space in Boston)
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $40M
Investors: Westbridge Capital, Unusual Ventures, Afore Capital, Hubspot Ventures, Underscore VC and a group of assorted angels here
Key Customers: Amplitude, GitHub, Salesloft, Lever, Drift, Toast, Zuora & more here
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $125M – $300M (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in the $28M Series A)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Goldcast is a “digital events platform for B2B marketers”. Founded by Harvard Business School students Kishore Kothandaraman, Palash Soni & Aashish Srinivas they host digital event experiences that get prospects and customers excited about your brand. Goldcast was born out of the pandemic amidst the rapidly accelerating shift from physical to digital and the unmet needs of a very specific, important audience: B2B marketers.
Let’s go back in time to the spring, summer, or fall of 2020. Which was basically all the same. Because we were sheltered in our homes. For so long. We clicked from work zooms to family zooms to happy hour zooms with friends. Or happy hours with work friends. More zooms. All the time. There might have even been a different platform mixed in there but Zoom became Kleenex by year's end. That is the effect the product had on us at this very unique moment in history. There’s crossing the chasm and then there’s onboarding millions of people stuck in their homes to video conferencing due to a global pandemic. Digital decorum was lost. Lawyers became cats. A CNN contributor may or may not have exposed themselves “thinking they were on mute”. It was a time.
And then imagine the event marketers. They were sitting there like “ok, we can’t host an event but…what about a zoom webinar?” And their colleagues screamed in unison “NO!!!”
Kishore, Palash & Aashish were paying attention over at HBS. They came to the U.S. to learn at one of the most elite business schools in the world and were presented with one of the most unique market shifts in the history of mankind. There was a clear need for a richer, more native digital events product that would feel like you were stepping outside of a zoom type environment and going to an event from the comfort of your own home. There was an opportunity to create a “gold standard” for this epochal business shift.
A great opportunity and impeccable timing. Goldcast was born.
The Goldcast platform enables marketers to host all kinds of events, from small webinars to large summits across a variety of Hybrid & Virtual experiences. They have pre built templates their customers can leverage with their own branding & typeface to customize the experiences for their own needs with a focus on two key pillars:
Create an incredible attendee experience
Providing the right engagement insights to build relationships with prospects and customers
The attendee experience and customization tools are top notch, for sure. They aspire to deliver a “Netflix like experience” for their event organizers and attendees. But that’s not what makes Goldcast so valuable to its customers. The underlying analytics and integrations really drive the value. This product was built to measure revenue outcomes. Goldcast has built seamless integrations with tools like Salesforce, Slack, Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua. They help qualify leads by measuring a number of “in event” touchpoints like attendance rate, time spent in the event, qualified leads and demo requests, pipeline requests, and other activities that help score prospects and later track conversion ROI.
They are compliant with SOC2, GDPR, and CCPA certifications. They offer translation services to make digital events global. Their video feeds can be toggled to allow for buffer time on slower connections. All the little details that help deliver a more secure, better viewing experience. Packages start with a 2 year commitment because, well, they’re resource strapped due to surging demand! There’s an upfront implementation and customer support needs to be staffed to provide a truly white glove live-event solution that is unique in the market. As they scale, they hope to offer more self-serve options and lower priced starter packages too!
One really smart thing the team did from the early days was instituting a panel of advisors they could leverage for feedback. Many of these advisors became customers as they grew. Other early startups take note! This surely helped inform their approach on what to build and who to build for and, unsurprisingly, is closely representative of the logos proudly displayed on their website. Creating customer loyalty early! And often!
Business is booming. I caught up with their Head of Operations, Stephanie Roulic, and she relayed to me that the company’s employee base has more than doubled in size over the past year. They’ve grown their team in Boston and presence in India too. How cool is that for the Founders to bring jobs back to their home country? Virtual events are here to stay and so is Goldcast.
Operators to Know:
Katie Morrissey, Head of Business Development
Stephanie Roulic, Head of Operations
Kelly Cheng, Head of Marketing & Growth
Ilyas Khawaja, Director of Product Management
Michael Goldenberg, Head of Sales
Dan Perrera, Head of Product Design
Abhimanyu Sesodia, Solutions Engineer
Kyle Ruth, Director of Implementation
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Goldcast team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired (U.S.):
If I was interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 100 employees? This is growing pain territory for any startup. Will need new tools, processes, and team members to support this growth
What are the next major growth areas for Goldcast? Will the team push further into the enterprise or are they prioritizing self-serve “PLG” tools to help serve SMBs & mid-market clients? Product roadmap insight is essential to better understanding a team you might join
Where will the company scale over the next 12-24 months? Will you continue to prioritize hiring in Boston, remotely in the U.S., or internationally? To help better understand the team’s growth plans
What is the long term vision for the company? As they’ve seen rapid success, it would be good to understand how the vision is broadening over the coming years
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Goldcast you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring digital & hybrid experiences to happier, more engaged global audiences in the years ahead. See you on the interwebs!
Jack McDermott, Senior Manager, Growth @ Chegg
Jack McDermott is an athlete. Or at least that’s how he saw himself earlier in life. It was a lot easier to self identify that way on the football or lacrosse field where he confidently performed instead of the classroom. You see, Jack had a stutter. Growing up, he kept getting pulled out of class to go to his speech therapy sessions. And from an early age he noticed that classrooms and our education system weren't always designed for a kid like him. He had a problem he needed to solve.
Jack grew up locally in Medfield before heading to Tufts to play lacrosse. But not before he started mentoring other younger students who had the same speech challenges. Over his years of practice he felt like he understood what it took to practice effectively and began to help teach others the same insights and exercises he’d learned.
He entered undergrad as an offensive Attackman and graduated as a defensive Midfielder. There was a need, so Jack filled it. Did I mention he helped Tufts win the 2014 national championship his senior year? This is a decorated athlete! He happens to be running his first Boston Marathon this spring too. Here is his donation page benefitting the American Red Cross (my plug, not his).
While at Tufts, Jack saw the emergence of Apple’s app store as a perfect way to help other students with their speech. A bigger megaphone, if I may. He founded a company before he even knew what startups were called Balbus Speech. They had two apps - Speech4Good and Fluently. Speech4Good was an app with an audio graph that visually tracked people’s speech patterns with a delayed audio feedback tool. Fluently was a more technical product that detected moments of stuttering and provided real-time speech analysis. His apps generated >25k users and thousands in revenue highlighted here in an article by Inc magazine from 2013. The company even raised some venture capital from General Catalyst’s student run fund, Rough Draft Ventures.
Balbus Speech ultimately didn’t turn into a full time thing for a variety of reasons - changing app store guidelines, shifting monetization strategies, and not to mention Jack was only 21 years old juggling a startup, his studies and NCAA athletics. Long story short, he knew he had a lot more to learn to build an enduring tech platform. But let’s not gloss over the accomplishments. From Jack’s own words, Balbus Speech “was an incredible experience to see an idea I had transformed into a product for people I’d never met. It was so impactful to know I could build learning experiences and products of my own that other people would use.”
Jack had the startup itch.
The 2010-2014 timeframe was a special time for Boston startups and a formative experience for Jack. The Greenhorn Connect newsletter. The UnConference. Hubspot was still a smaller growth stage company! SCVNGR was funded and became Level Up. There was disruption in higher education from companies like Boundless Learning. Investors serving students like Peter Boyce and Zach Hamed from Rough Draft Ventures. Other fellow local university students like Delian Asparahouv, Emma Tangoren, and Jack’s good friends John Brennan & John Capecelatro from this time have gone on to do interesting things in tech & investing over the years across the U.S. Maybe come back to Boston friends?
So Jack left Tufts and wound down Balbus Speech, trophy in hand. He knew that he wanted to work in tech and get deeper experience in the education space. Jack relayed to me that for the entirety of his career he’s been working on the same problem: “how can you make education work better for students?”
He put feelers out in the Bay Area but settled locally. Sam & Zack Dunn @ Robin were nice enough to grant him some office space to work on his speech apps where he met the Panorama Education team through a co-worker, fresh off their graduation from Y Combinator.
Panorama Education built a data platform to improve outcomes for K-12 schools & their students. He was drawn to their mission “to radically improve education for every student” and joined the company as one of the first 10 employees. They had a marketing need, so Jack filled it as their first marketing hire. The company & role were a bullseye for what Jack was looking to accomplish.
Jack got to learn from a great founding team - Aaron Feuer & Xan Tanner - backed by top investors with a team of former teachers and a Harvard Ed School professor. A truly fantastic environment to launch a career in EdTech. Jack got to work on surveys for school districts helping them measure student outcomes beyond standardized test scores. The company grew from 10 > 140 employees over his 5 years there. He even moved to San Francisco in 2017 to help them build out their west coast office. His role transitioned from a marketing generalist to demand generation building their inbound motion and refining the product story. He helped launch new products and eventually moved over to Product Marketing, specializing on honing their messaging to break into larger school districts and serve those school systems.
Jack kept inching toward his goal of learning how to be a great Founder / Operator who can bring things to scale. He learned a ton at Panorama and then it was time to sharpen his cross functional skills in Finance, Operations, Management, Strategy and up level his credentials so off he went to The University of Virginia Darden School of Business.
While at Darden he completed an internship at Thinkful via a Darden alum. Thinkful was a skills based learning platform which had been acquired by learning giant Chegg. Is it a coincidence that both of their logos are orange? Can’t be sure. Upon graduation, Jack moved back to Boston to start his post MBA career with Chegg.
Jack loves to run on the Esplanade as he gears up for the Boston Marathon. He loves Curio coffee in East Cambridge. Another fun factoid is that Jack’s great grandfather was Mayor John Hynes. A member of the Lost Generation, John Hynes was anything but. He was responsible for opening The Freedom Trail and brought Prudential Insurance to town, helping lay the groundwork figuratively and literally for Boston’s new era of “The Hub”.
Today, great grandson Jack blazes his own path developing a new digital education system upskilling American youth. How about that symmetry?? Chegg strives to improve the overall return on investment in education by helping students learn more in less time and at a lower cost.
Jack is responsible for Chegg’s growth initiatives centered around reskilling and upskilling. A broader mandate but one still very much focused on improving educational outcomes for those slightly displaced outside of the core system. Or more directly give them the skills needed to succeed in the modern, high tech workplace.
Here are three insights he shared with me that has informed his work and trends from his career:
Emergence of the Growth Field: Growth has taken on a whole new meaning these past few years. Jack has seen up close at Chegg the value of carving out a custom role built to deliver on a specific growth goal. His insight is that teams “don’t always maximize growth opportunities by having functional teams in sales, marketing, product, etc. Building toward top line growth with a specific role that owns the north star business objective has been hugely exciting for me and impactful for the business”. Or said another way, when teams keep things siloed at the functional level, the overall experience (and growth) is likely to suffer. Missed synergies and communication across functions are going to eventually be felt by the consumer. Brian Balfour, former Head of Growth at Hubspot currently building Reforge, has been a huge driver in this space Jack made sure to add!
Shift to Skills Based Hiring: Jack has started to recruit his own remote team based upon hiring criteria derived from the Chegg skills platform. He’s been able to recruit teammates from NYC, Grand Rapids, Bloomington, and beyond. Witnessing the interplay between platform work his team is executing on then actually hiring based on those qualified skills is “walking the talk”. Building teams outside of the core tech hubs and proving that people can be re-skilled and upskilled to do jobs from basically...anywhere. Tip of the cap to Chegg in supporting recruiting talent from anywhere based on the requisite skills.
Having a Personal Mission: Jack feels fortunate that he’s gone into roles & industries that are traditionally hard to solve for. Building products in K-12 education is not easy and falls much closer to the “hard tech” side of the scale when you think about the red tape, need to prove efficacy, and institutional rigidity. Jack shared a great ancient quote with me - “Fear not work that has no end” - that has driven him for a long time. He followed that up with sharing how much he’s learned from being in roles and at companies for multiple years in this era of job hopping. He’s been fortunate enough to witness the arc of how things get built and scaled amidst industry shifts: “you get an intimate understanding of problems that can be solved & approaches for how to solve them. There’s nuance involved and solving for education is hard to do. It takes detail & depth of understanding”. In an era where we overestimate the work we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in 10, Jack keeps plugging away at the same problem set: “how can we make education work better for students?”
And then he hit me with it: “You need to ask yourself what you’re passionate about - what big change in the world do you want to play a part in? I felt it as a kid growing up that school could be better. I’ve been trying to solve that same problem in a variety of ways in a variety of roles through different strategies. That’s been the core driver for me.”
That hit me like a ton of bricks. Isn’t that what it’s all about?? For more of Jack’s career & project work and for getting in touch with him directly you can check out his personal website here. Thanks for sharing Jack. See you at the top!
Any feedback for me? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt