MGMT Boston - W4, Q1 24 - Boswell // Joe Kiernan, Perch // 186 Ventures 2024 Kickoff
Boswell // Joe Kiernan, Perch // 186 Ventures 2024 Kickoff
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 755+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Boswell - building software at the intersection of healthcare & social services to drive better outcomes for the healthcare system and our most at-risk patient population
Thanks to Ron G. for the intro to Boswell
Joe Kiernan, VP Product @ Perch - a mindfully trained consultant turned strategic product thinker building a career around re-envisioning how great consumer products operate
Thanks to Michele C. for the intro to Joe
(Operators Club Corner) 186 Ventures 2024 Kickoff - assembled 60+ operators for some great discussion on 2024 trends - capital efficiency / oppty in unsexy tech / generational transfers / investor & founder alignment
Thanks to Sophie, Giuseppe & Julian for co-hosting!
🔥 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
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
Q1 Operators Highlighted: Parker Lawrence / Herald, Aaron Whittemore / Humatics, Lauren Viscariello / Candex
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.
Boswell
Founders: Cait Larson & Bryan Wang
Founding: 2022
Mission: Taking care of underserved communities by mobilizing healthcare and social service organizations
Employees: 15 & 33% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $750k raised
Investors: Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Richard King Mellon Foundation & strategic angel investors
Key Customers: Rhode Island Medicaid
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the last fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Boswell is building software at the intersection of healthcare & social services to drive better outcomes for the healthcare system and our most at-risk patient population. This is a story about a relay race and flipping the script to get to the heart of some of America’s biggest systemic inefficiencies.
When Co-Founder & CEO Bryan Wang’s family first moved from China to the U.S., they depended on social services like food stamps to find their footing. These programs made a big difference in his upbringing. Wouldn’t it be great to give back one day?
Bryan started his career at Bain Consulting after graduating from Duke and experimented with startup life launching a retail property rental company too. Next he worked as a Product Manager for Intermountain Health, helping to increase rural healthcare access in Utah. He experienced our great big complicated American healthcare system up close before heading to Boston to study at MIT Sloan.
Originally incorporated in 2015 by Aristotle Mannan, Ari bootstrapped the company by trading biotech stocks and the two met through the customer discovery process when Bryan began working on a similar concept. Bryan grabbed the baton as he was finishing his MBA. Startups are a relay race, after all. Cait Larson, a healthcare veteran & registered nurse, joined him as the clinical co-founder to build out Boswell’s infrastructure in 2022.
Boswell is built on the premise that social services disproportionately drive healthcare outcomes. Boswell’s reason for being is that our healthcare system is limited in how much ground it can cover. We know healthcare spending is big - 17%+ of GDP (src). And we know that the spending isn’t all being done efficiently. For example, we can’t really solve patient outcomes before first addressing basic needs like food, water, clothing, sleep and shelter.
Boswell has data that 34% of Medicaid members have not seen a PCP in over a year, have a higher annual healthcare cost per member, and are at 2.2x higher risk of chronic conditions than the general patient population. Food and housing stability, by some estimates, end up driving 80% of clinical outcomes (src).
The clinically focused healthcare system needs to travel upstream in order to mitigate frequent emergency room visitors who are there because they don’t have anywhere to sleep. Especially for the Medicaid population, of which 70% have one or more social needs. Healthcare organizations are making an effort but they are still waiting for patients to show up in a clinic before taking action.
When people go hungry, they’re not calling up their health plan. They're going to a food pantry.
Boswell is flipping the model by turning social service organizations into hubs to better understand and support at-risk individuals before they get to a clinical setting. Through software and a network of community health workers within social services organizations (like food pantries), they are working to better understand patients so they can take action to help them.
Let’s use the food pantry example. When someone steps out of the cold into a building for a warm meal, they’re not just struggling with food. Two Boswell Advocates will ask them “do you need help with anything else?” like their housing or their heating bill. If they’re interested, they can share a phone number and give consent to be reached the following day to take an assessment on different categories of assistance.
From there, Boswell can service them virtually like a telehealth provider, documenting and alleviating life’s most pressing challenges. Their Advocates help people with warm referrals to social services and handle healthcare coordination. The support they offer ranges from creating Medicaid benefits awareness to completing applications to scheduling & coordinating doctors appointments.
Boswell controls the whole process through their network of community health advocates. They give out their software to existing social service organizations and document records in a way that healthcare insurance plans are willing to pay for. This infrastructure has allowed Boswell to create a network where insurance plans can get access to “on the ground” community health advocates and (soon) send funding to underfunded organizations. Like an OpenTable for social services, they’ll be able to enable new funding streams for social service organizations.
In the fall of 2023 they launched their community outreach initiative in Rhode Island, partly due to a new Medicaid program the state launched. Boswell has served over 400 Medicaid members in Rhode Island, achieving six figures of revenue in 2023. They are starting to work directly with health insurance companies (payers) in 2024 to generate revenue from outcomes achieved instead of hours invested to better stabilize patient social situations.
Boswell’s grand vision is to become the infrastructure that pairs healthcare payers with existing social service organizations for the benefit of health plan members themselves. There are incredible non-profits out there and Boswell aims to help them on a larger, more sustainable scale that amplifies their work.
In 2023 their team grew from 3 to 15 people and they expect to grow to 30 by the end of this year. 20 of those team members will be in the community and the rest will be building in Product, Engineering, and GTM.
Operators to Know:
Steffany Alvarez, Advocates Supervisor
Sam Ennis, Software Engineering Lead
Bryan Wang, Co-Founder & CEO
Cait Larson, Co-Founder & COO
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Boswell team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
Reach out to bryan@boswell.io if you're interested in roles across Clinical Operations, Product, Engineering, and Business Development
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key milestones Boswell is aiming to achieve in 2024?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the offering and team?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Boswell you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team achieve better outcomes for the segment of our population that needs it most. All citizens applaud your efforts. See you around Rhode Island and many other communities to come!
Joe Kiernan, VP Product @ Perch
Joe Kiernan is a mindfully trained consultant turned strategic product thinker. He’s building a career around re-envisioning how great consumer products operate, serving as the first VP of Product at growth stage e-commerce startup Perch.
Joe grew up in D.C. but spent part of his early childhood in New Hampshire. When it was time to think about college, returning to New England was top of mind. He ended up in the northwest corner of Massachusetts at Williams, where I hear purple cows roam the streets. He loved it, studying Computer Science and Economics and experimenting with the things he could build and problems he could solve.
Following your passion and leading with kindness & trust were pillars in the Kiernan household. Joe’s mom was a 4th grade Math teacher and his dad was the CEO of a series of environmental non-profits. Both have been passionate about teaching and the environment respectively throughout their careers and taught Joe from an early age to find something he was passionate about that he could work on for a long period of time.
After Williams, he started at Bain Consulting in Boston. At Bain he developed his core professional problem solving skills, learning how to identify problems in the business world and then go out and solve them. Bain preaches the concept of “answer first”: identifying the key problems and quickly developing a first hypothesis about what the answer might be. This is followed by the lion’s share of the work required to validate or disprove “what must be true for this hypothesis to be true”. An Occam’s Razor flavor to problem solving, if you will.
For an ambitious early career up & comer, the mechanics & muscle movements of breaking down problems and solving them became second nature as Joe worked with more teams on more projects in more environments. Feeling pretty confident about his skills, he signed up for a 6 month externship with an early stage consumer startup preparing for their initial launch.
Andy Katz-Mayfield & Jeff Raider, the founders of Harry’s, were looking for some help getting their startup off the ground. Both had previously worked at Bain and they needed a resource who knew their way around spreadsheets to help with some data scrubbing, investor presentations, etc.
Initially working out of a corner conference room in Google's NYC offices, Joe jumped all the way in and raised his hand to help build out their initial supply chain. Alongside COO Will Freund, Joe traveled to Germany to see their factory, traveled to China to witness the final assembly, and set up initial forecasting, purchase orders, and freight forwarding relationships. While the initial work looked a lot like his familiar spreadsheet & analytics motions from Bain, he learned a ton about the “elbow grease” actually needed to translate those spreadsheets into tangible consumer products out into the market.
When there was a manufacturing issue bottlenecking their immovable product launch date, Joe traveled from NYC to a chrome painter an hour and a half outside of the city. Driving to Pennsylvania after hours with Harry’s co-founder Andy behind the wheel, they tried to convince a bewildered chrome painter to take a 10,000 razor handle order on short notice and work long hours over the weekend in order to meet their launch deadline. What closed that particular deal was not the terms of the contract, but how Andy connected with the owner personally and brought along a nice bottle of whiskey as an extra “thank you”. The rest, as they say, is history.
It was only 6 months but it was a formative experience to be on the ground floor of a consumer product company launch and his first real operating experience, grabbing a paddle and rowing alongside a small dedicated team.
Joe spent almost 10 years at Bain, working largely with large Consumer Products companies, taking a break to attend Harvard Business School, before returning to the consulting leader as a Team Leader. At HBS he spent the majority of his time intentionally thinking about leading teams and developing his own authentic leadership style - drawing on his passion and positivity
He led teams at Bain for a couple years after grad school before he reconnected with Bain alum Chris Bell, one of his colleague’s previous managers, where they discussed a new startup he was working on. Chris’s startup, Perch, would give him the unique opportunity to build an e-commerce company from scratch after working with Fortune 500 brands for much of the last decade.
At this point, Joe had spent a ton of time crafting his mindset in stressful, deadline driven environments. There were plenty of moments of near burnout. Part of joining Perch was a decision to prioritize the type of work that would give him energy and a culmination of the personal work he had invested to evolve his mindset around embracing change.
In November 2020, the early Perch team was 20 people setting out to build a technology driven consumer products company that would slowly acquire more brands as it grew. They grew…a lot faster than that, raising a $775M Series A, led by Softbank in the spring of 2021. It became a wild year where the team completed almost 50 acquisitions, more or less acquiring and integrating a new brand every single week. An interesting time, to say the least.
Joe was originally brought on to lead the Growth team, doing familiar work across brand management, pricing, advertising, affiliate marketing, etc. When the team doubled down on building out a technology platform, Joe moved to lead the Product team. In the years since, he has led the build out of a platform that manages the supply chain and marketing of their expansive brand portfolio.
What that really means is Joe thinks deeply about the strategic direction of their product roadmap. Where do they want to be investing as a company? How do their technology investments align to the company’s overall direction?
In the year ahead, Joe & his team are focused on new product innovation, product launches, and operational tools that will help them create successful new products. This touches everything from the creative work involved to Generative AI tooling that will help streamline workflows.
Perspective on what’s important - Identifying the Right KPIs
When any business reaches a certain threshold of scale, there’s an overwhelming amount of data. One of the most important lessons Joe had to learn at Perch as they went through hypergrowth was to take a step back from the day to day fire fighting and understand what truly will move the needle for the business as a whole.
“It needs to start with connecting with your colleagues - talking with operational leaders and folks on the front line, understanding their own challenges, and building a mental, data supported, framework for what the real, important, underlying problems facing the organization as a whole are.”
From there, Joe identified the top level KPIs tied to those core issues, and then built process for the team to go “the whole chain down” against that initial KPI set to get to the root of the problems. One of the most successful tech projects they completed was led by former Lead PM Wyatt Bramhall around increasing their supply chain speed to reduce working capital.
They outlined the distinct steps of their entire supply chain against a bunch of metrics. One gap that stood out was the number of days it took from a purchase order being placed to a product actually getting shipped on a container ship. In short, it was taking way too long. Once they identified the time lag and the key intermediate steps that needed to be expedited, they could build tools and set milestones to increase the speed of their supply chain through the specific chokepoint.
The project culminated in Perch’s Product team shipping a more automated communication system with suppliers to expedite orders based on the logic chain they had originally laid out.
Career Insights / Learnings
Taking Ownership - “When you see an important issue out there or a business critical problem that should be solved by somebody, just dive in. Make it your issue. Until someone tells you that you shouldn’t be doing it, especially in an operating role, jump up and say ‘I got this!’”
Presume Trust, Build Relationships - “I’ve tried hard to always presume trust with everyone I work with. Especially when problem solving - It certainly leads to more collaborative relationships but it’s also an important mindset to have generally. So much of getting things done comes down to working directly with people, not focusing on blame for problems, but building personal relationships where they see you as part of their extended team.”
Joe believes all three pillars: developing a perspective on what’s important, taking ownership, and building relationships create a leadership “flywheel” that can accelerate your overall impact in an organization of any size.
This can be an exhausting flywheel, which is why he wants to be working in a space like Consumer Products that gives him energy, and he can continue crafting the future of what next generation consumer product companies can become. So much has changed in the past few years and Joe is excited to keep leading innovation from the frontlines. He looks forward to chatting with more Product folks in Boston too. A lot of his Product approach comes from consulting & business and he’d love to chat with Product venture backed startup leaders to round out his perspective.
If you’d like to learn more about Joe you can find him navigating change, building products for dozens of brands and millions of consumers at Perch, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see you continue to shape the future of next generation consumer products in the years ahead!
Operators Club Corner
In 2024 you’ll be hearing more from members and events held with the MGMT Boston Operators Club. These are startup leaders building & launching products, serving customers, leading teams, and making a dent in the Boston startup ecosystem
186 Ventures - 2024 Kickoff
Founders: Julian Fialkow & Giuseppe Stuto
Head of Platform: Sophie Panarese
Founding: 2021
Mission: Back founders & companies who have the potential to grow really fast
Team: 3 & 100% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
LPs: Funds, Endowments & Strategic Investors
Stage: Pre-Seed & Seed
Focus Area(s): Fintech, SaaS, Developer Tooling, Blockchain, Healthtech, Property Tech, AI
Key Portfolio Companies (Locally): Causal Labs, Swivvel, Solon, Centaur Labs, & Monitaur
Fund Size: $37M, currently deploying capital out of Fund I
186 Ventures, named after the constant speed of light (186,000 MPH), is an emerging seed stage venture capital firm here in Boston investing thematically across software sectors. The team brings full operational and strategic support and an unparalleled network to founders when they need it most – at the beginning. They focus primarily on the Northeast of the US, although they have demonstrated an ability to deploy into high growth startups in San Francisco, LA, and other select US cities.
We assembled an awesome group of 60+ operators & founders last Wed evening to kick off 2024, make connections, and share learnings. The MGMT Boston Operators Club’s mission is to help operators grow outside of their day to day and there’s no better accelerant to that mission than partnering with an up & coming Seed firm like 186 Ventures to bring such a great mix of Boston based builders together.
We started our mini-content session late because the conversation was so strong BUT wanted to give a shout out to Giuseppe Stuto for sharing some thoughts on what he’s seeing in the early stage ecosystem entering 2024 following his published Open VC article:
Capital Efficiency
Venture is a game of comparison and a company that raised $1.5m to achieve $1m in ARR looks a lot better than a company that burned $4m to achieve $1.5m in ARR. The latter is going to look less favorable against more efficient startups & business models that can scale faster with lower cost structures. VCs are looking for sustainable business models and revenue traction that are going to stand out against their peers in this market. And remember, that capital needs to be paid back!
Previously deemed unsexy technology will create massive opportunities
We are all very familiar with software and subscription models from the past 20 years of venture backed technology success. The next cycle of startups will likely take on a different flavor. Less information asymmetry and lower technical barriers will allow previously difficult industries like healthcare, defense, biotech, mining, etc. to become more accessible.
A new category of business owners will create standards
There is $70T of baby boomer generational wealth set to change hands in the coming years, $10T of which is tied up in small businesses. Yes, private equity is rolling some of that up. But there will also be changes in behaviors and needs for these “new owners” who will have different tastes than their forebears. This trend is going to take many different shapes and will be well worth watching.
Investor / Founder Alignment will drive decision making
Coming out of the ZIRP environment of 2021 and 2022, some founders have been paired with the wrong types of investors and some have even been stranded as the tide has gone out. In the years ahead founders and teams will be looking to partner with capital providers who can add value around tough experiences they’ve had themselves or those who have worked with founders through good and bad economic cycles. Experience will be at a premium. Same as it always was!
Thank you to Giuseppe, Julian & Sophie for hosting us. It was great to learn more about the work you do for Boston companies, operators, and the ecosystem at large. Excited to partner up on future events & ecosystem building!
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
Loving the addition of the Operators Club Corner, Matt! Happy 2024!