MGMT Boston - W4, Q2 24 - Software Defined Automation // AllRaise: Connecting the Dots
Software Defined Automation // AllRaise: Connecting the Dots
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 870+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Software Defined Automation - building an industrial DevOps platform so that manufacturers and capitalism can move faster. They might even help save industrial engineering
Thanks to Matt T. for the intro to SDA
AllRaise Agents of Change: Connecting the Dots - AllRaise is doing important work to push for gender equity in the startup ecosystem. Telling your story is hard. Here is my blueprint from 50+ operator profiles and 60k+ words
Thanks to Jenni G. for surfacing this event
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
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 - 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 Operators Highlighted: Adam Fisk / Tech Superpowers, Bryan Dsouza / Aptiv
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Software Defined Automation
Founders: Axel Scheurer & Josef Waltl
Founding: 2021
Mission: Empowering automation engineers to turn factories into software systems
Employees: 20+ & 10% Local
Workplace: Flexible
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $10M Raised
Investors: Insight Partners, Baukunst, Fly Ventures, First Momentum
Key Customers: Henkel, Wuerth Group
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $40M+ (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the x last fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Software Defined Automation is building an industrial DevOps platform, bringing manufacturing floors and their PLC (programmable logic controllers) further online, better connecting them to the control systems and cloud environments above so that manufacturers and capitalism can move faster. They might even help save industrial engineering.
Founder Josef Waltl started Software Defined Automation alongside Axel Scheurer in 2021 after building his career in industrial technology at Siemens & AWS. His technical fascination began at the age of fourteen, programming microcontrollers for industrial applications and later studying computer science & business. At Siemens he has led product management initiatives for Factory Automation Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) for Asia, as well as helped build-up their strongly US based Industrial Software Business, Soon after starting at Amazon he hired himself into a global role out of Munich building their industrial software partner ecosystem after authoring one of their infamous 6 page memos.
While at AWS, Josef watched how industrial automation partners struggled to bring cloud application-like flexibility to the manufacturing shop floor. PLCs are effectively mini computers on machines that can receive data and execute instructions, using some internal logic they have been programmed to perform. Programming is still done mostly on site with hefty Windows-based Engineering systems. Flying Automation Engineers around the world for minor changes in automation logic is still a common practice.
If you were to visualize the problem, imagine a manufacturing center that produces adhesives, like SDA’s customer Henkel. At one of Henkel’s manufacturing plants they have a fully connected second floor overlooking machines. Those machines are run by PLCs that speak a different language and must be serviced by external machine builderswhen updates or servicing is needed. That can take weeks! Leading to lost productivity and revenue.
PLCs have not historically had their own DevOps platform to help manage updates, share insights, or even handle user access. Wouldn’t that be nice to bring online?
Josef is committed to help solve a major challenge of our society. We need to produce more, especially domestically as the onshoring of manufacturing continues for cost, defense, and conveniency reasons. We lack 80M manufacturing workers globally (src) and the average age of an automation engineer is 43 (src). Less than 10% of these workers are in their 20s. This slower moving, lower paying engineering tech stack isn’t appealing to up & coming developers.
But we need the best & brightest to build the future of industrial technology. And those workers will only be able to earn as much as software developers if their tools make them as productive. Software Defined Automation, a modern DevOps platform for manufacturing engineers, is helping grease the wheels.
Businesses like Henkel implement SDA’s IT-like Backup ,Version Control for transparent code change management and Browser-based Engineering. This allows even the night shift operator to handle the 4 W's of project management: what changed, when it changed, who changed it, and why it changed so any issues that arise can be identified, troubleshooted, and solved quickly.
SDA is built on AWS with more than 20 services, including Amazon Cognito for authentication, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3 for storage, versioning, and traceability, Amazon EC2 to stream specialized engineering IDEs as well as AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge, and Amazon Simple Queue Service for implementing its serverless event-driven capabilities.
The ability to run PLC programming environments in a browser allows customers to maximize the utilization of licenses, access on any device, and manage user control access so that controllers in the factory can be automated & secured like the cloud did to computers in data centers.
SDA spends most of their engineering resources on cloud security. They store sensitive customer information that must be fully encrypted and lead with simplicity so that industrial & automation engineers can onboard, understand, and use their platform quickly.
Software Defined Automation has grown to a team of more than 20 employees and is focused on expanding in the U.S. in 2024 with Marketing & Sales based in Boston. The company grew revenue more than 200% in 2023 and works with a growing number of Enterprise customers.
The U.S. is their focus market for the year and they chose Boston to complement their Munich beginnings, the home of PTC, Aspen Technology, and other top industrial technology companies & educational institutions. They’re out to get the best people..and believe they are in Boston.
Operators to Know:
Hilary Ives, Marketing
Leo Kilfoy, VP Product
Jason Silva, Principal Sales Manager
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Software Defined Automation team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key milestone for 2024 as you expand into the U.S.?
Could you share some details about the competitive landscape?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team into the growth stage?
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 Software Defined Automation you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more PLC environments into the digital age. The consumer & industrial world applauds your efforts. See you around town!
AllRaise: Connecting the Dots
A couple weeks ago I attended the All Raise Boston: Agents of Change event. Did you know only 14% of decision makers at U.S. venture capital firms are women (src)? We can do better. I was proud to attend and learn more about the work AllRaise is doing to push for gender equity in the startup ecosystem. Hey AllRaise, I’m here for ya!
During the breakout sessions, I had to attend “Reframing Your Career” as someone who’s been through a little reframing myself on a winding path from finance to startups over the years. Kudos to Sarah Fay, Christian Williams, and Abigail Risse for leading our discussion.
One of the challenges the group surfaced was “How do you tell your story”?
I’m no expert, but after writing profiles on 50+ operators encompassing more than 60,000 words, I’m here today to help by sharing my blueprint.
If you were an operator who attended the event or a venture backed female (Team Lead > Director+) operator here in Boston, reach out and I will be happy to help you tell your story. All you have to do is raise your hand!
Alright, you ready?
Every single operator profile discussion follows the same format. Structure helps me capture the right information, keep the conversation flowing, and pull out relevant details to craft an interesting, linear story of your career. I’m not saying this is *the* way, but it’s enough to get you started!
What I’m doing when I ask the below questions is taking notes and listening for patterns:
Who is this person?
What do they care about?
What events or influences shaped their career & informed their path to the present day?
Why should other people care?
It only takes an hour to go through the exercise and then maybe 2-4 hours to write & clean up. You could do the same for yourself or a friend. It’s a fun puzzle to put together. And you don’t even need to polish it up for the whole world to see!
Personal & Professional Background + Highlights
What was influential personally to who you became professionally?
"If you don't take the time to think about and analyze your life, you'll never realize all the dots that are all connected." -Beyonce
Here I’m looking to understand some of those early influences, implicitly or explicitly, that informed a career in startups. Was it your parents? A grade school or high school teacher? Athletics? Another hobby or passion? A formative job or experience in high school? How about college - what did you major in? What did you think you wanted to do with your career? Where did you end up starting? What then? There’s always some interesting tidbits here, however small, that are going to show up to help you connect the dots later.
Professional highlights to show your best stuff
“Do what you love, and success will follow. Passion is the fuel behind a successful career.” -Meg Whitman
This is where we walk through your career bio and progression. No, it’s never clean. Sometimes you’ll need to leave a job because your boss sucked or the company laid you off or you just weren’t learning anything. That’s totally fine! I’ve heard it all! You can smooth this out by explaining it and polishing the explanation or cruising over that blip in the road like a pothole on the highway. Wabump and gone in the rearview like a distant memory. No one cares about that one job you had 4 years ago for 11 months (I really don’t think).
Also, if you think you’re going to leave a job soon, try to write down your accomplishments when you have the data in front of you. It could help later!
What is something you’ve learned you could teach your peers?
“They aren’t the best at what they do, they are the only ones that do what they do” - Bill Graham
This is my favorite section and the most misunderstood. I’m telling you people do not really know what they are good at! They know they’re a Product leader or a Sales leader and where they worked and what they worked on but few have sat back and thought about what makes them professionally unique. What is their unique set of skills or professional talents that makes them a “N of 1”?
This also makes perfect sense. Unless you’ve been talking to someone about your career at length, which people normally do not do, how would you even know what it is?
Spend some time on this one, perhaps with a friend. Or me! It’s worth it.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
“You have to pay attention to your life, because it’s speaking to you all the time. And the bumps in the road and the failures that pointed me in a new direction and led me to a path made clear. That is what I’m wishing for you today: Your own path made clear.” -Oprah Winfrey
Don’t we all want to be worthy of sharing priceless pearls of wisdom with future generations who will avoid our stumbles due to the hard fought knowledge we are able to bestow? Guffaw. But you’ve seen some shit, so what would you share with the rest of us? What would you do again? What would you do differently? If you were sitting down for coffee with a new graduate or someone who wanted to learn about your career, what three things would you tell them?
Where do you want to end up in your career?
“Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed.” -Maya Angelou
This is a place to put humility aside. Yes I know you want to make your team successful and be happy working with people you like learning from and building alongside. But are you brave enough, at least when writing for yourself, to say what you really want to be when you grow up? Maybe the head of the department? CEO? Or absolutely none of those things? It’s ok, you can go ahead and put it down. We need more people taking big swings, running at big problems, and up leveling their ambition to chase the careers they really want to find professional fulfillment.
You owe it to yourself to connect the dots and tell your story to make your career the best it can be. Otherwise, who else will?
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
The AllRaise event was up there as one of the top Boston events of 2024!