TLDR:
Mirakl - SaaS solution chosen by leading enterprises worldwide to manage their third-party marketplace and dropship business
Kelly Cheng, Head of Marketing & Growth @ Goldcast - a creative problem solver, marketer, and pitch person for most of her life managing an international team at Boston based hybrid events platform Goldcast
Other Resources:
Boston Tech Big Board - building out data on every Boston area venture backed software company I can find
Q2 Startups Highlighted: Wonderment, EKOS, CloudZero & Basys
Q2 Operators Highlighted: Dana Wensberg, Paperless Parts, Jasmine Pogue, Skilltype, Mark Hardy, Black Kite & Tony Iuliano, Recorded Future
Mirakl
Founders: Philippe Corrot & Adrien Nussenbaum
Founding: 2012
Mission: We help businesses scale through the platform economy
Employees: 750 & 25% Local
Workplace: Flexible
Stage & Capital Raised: Series E & $948M raised
Investors: Silver Lake Partners, Permira, Bain Capital, 83North, Elaia Partners, Felix Capital
Key Customers: ABB, Accor, Airbus, Carrefour, Express, J.Crew, Leroy Merlin, Macy’s, The Kroger Co and Toyota Material Handling
Glassdoor Rating: 4.2
Valuation (estimated): Last reported valuation “exceeds $3.5 billion"
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Mirakl is the “SaaS solution chosen by leading enterprises worldwide to manage their third-party marketplace and dropship business”. A late stage startup, Mirakl is dually headquartered between Paris and Somerville. This company generates some serious scale so buckle up as we take you on a journey from Paris to Boston to the Internet.
Mirakl was founded in 2012 by current Co-CEOs Philippe Corrot & Adrien Nussenbaum. Philippe & Adrien were eCommerce entrepreneurs who sold their video game marketplace SplitGames to Fnac, the French book and electronics retailer, a couple years after raising a Series A. There, they incubated the marketplace platform they had begun building at SplitGames. This thing worked. “It was a miracle”, Adrien told Philippe at a cafe. With the insight to build an industry-agnostic marketplace platform, the entrepreneurs eventually concluded their work at Fnac and set off on a much larger journey with proven learnings.
In the simplest of explanations, Mirakl is an “out of the box” 3rd party SaaS marketplace platform. They solve the scale issue that businesses face when competing with vertically integrated giants like Amazon or Walmart. In a world of scarce resources, these companies are faced with the classic decision when scoping out their own third-party marketplaces: build or buy?
For the partners that choose to build they often find that this marketplace thing is pretty hard. It takes certain specialties, experience, and attention to get it right. So why not hire experts? Mirakl is finely tuned to spin up 3rd party marketplaces for consumer and B2B businesses that can become huge revenue drivers on top of their core direct businesses. Today, over 350+ organizations use Mirakl-powered marketplaces, including leading retailers Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Kroger, J.Crew and Madewell.
And they didn’t stop at retail. Today they run B2B marketplaces for industrial giants like Airbus, Toyota Material Handling, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and others in order to help serve the second largest sector of our economy: manufacturing.
Mirakl expanded to the U.S. after raising its Series B in 2015, setting up a dual HQ in Cambridge to pair with Paris. The cheese to its wine, if you will. The Mirakl Founders specifically picked Boston as their U.S. HQ for a few reasons. They wanted a location with an east coast time zone, a great quality of life with reasonable operating costs & quiet neighborhoods, and they wanted to be in a global innovation center or “hub”. So why not The Hub?
The flagship Mirakl Platform is ready to be rolled out quickly. They help handle product listings, seller onboarding, billing & invoicing, quality control, specialized workflows, and various pricing & quoting tools.
But while they started in marketplaces, in the quarters ahead they’re working tirelessly to ramp up a suite of frontier products that go much further, enhancing the value of the overall platform.
Connect onboards sellers onto the Mirakl platform so that they can sell through multiple marketplaces, and links marketplace operators with partners to help accelerate growth. Payout attracts top sellers to your marketplace with simple onboarding and secure payouts. Target2Sell ensures new products are discoverable and curated to end customers across first-party and third-party offers, driven by AI personalization. Catalog Manager helps retailers and B2B businesses reduce the manual effort of dealing with supplier catalogs, doing the integration on their behalf. Mirakl Ads helps monetize your premium eCommerce audience by creating a retail media solution to help drive a new, profitable revenue stream. All to help produce a more seamless onboarding, ramp, and profitable experience for their eCommerce clients.
Mirakl is still growing rapidly after a banner 2022 year. They notched $135M in ARR off of $6B in GMV through the platform across 400+ clients and were named one of Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech. Their co-founders even published a book that landed on Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list. *I do not receive any compensation for shilling this parchment!*
Operators to Know (Locally):
Eric Lessard, Sr Director of Partner Enablement
Gina Guarracino, Director of People
Justin Ito-Adler, Manager, Business Development
Sara Matasci, Director, Corporate Marketing
Abby Murdoch, Director of Field Marketing
Katie Petroskey, Team Lead Marketplace Business Developer
Lauren Smith, Director, Marketing Operations
Eric Yale, Director, Business Consulting
Amelia Van Camp, Chief of Staff
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Mirakl team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
Could you share some details about the onboarding process & training? What is the day to day relationship between the Somerville and Paris HQ?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team to 1,000 employees?
What are the most important product lines beyond the core marketplace product?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023 // teams that will be seeing the most significant investments?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Mirakl you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more enterprise marketplaces to the Internet. All consumers applaud your efforts. See you around Somerville!
Kelly Cheng, Head of Marketing & Growth @ Goldcast
Kelly Cheng has been a creative problem solver, marketer, and pitch person for most of her life. She’s circled the globe from Hong Kong to Boston to San Francisco and back, managing an international team today as the Head of Marketing & Growth at Boston based hybrid events platform Goldcast.
Kelly grew up in Hong Kong, the second of four children to her father who was a Boston College Eagle and manufacturing executive. Kelly’s mother hailed from the Bay Area. She has two sisters and one brother who all work in tech. The Cheng kids were trained how to advocate for themselves and each other from an early age. When the siblings wanted a dog, they had to put together a powerpoint presentation to showcase their plan for taking care of it. Who would be responsible for what? How would they delineate the duties? If you wanted something in their family, you had to make a good business case for it! Kelly is a high performer who’s no stranger to giving a good pitch.
But she’s gone through her share of challenges too. As a child she was initially enrolled in a local Chinese school while growing up in Hong Kong. Classes were taught in Chinese but English was Kelly’s first language. She made a name for herself with all the creative ways she would try to get out of going to school. One time she even pretended to lose her vision. Kids do funny stuff! But Kelly certainly had vision, in spades.
She made the move to the international schooling system and really began to excel, unlocking her creativity and talents. She returned to the U.S. for high school and attended a prep school in Connecticut. She loved the high touch academic environment and became determined to get good grades. Kelly tells me she’s always been very independent and this immersive environment felt like summer camp. All of her peers came in together for the 9th grade and some of her best friends to this day are all from high school. Aren’t we all trying to find that summer camp feeling?
Kelly always admired her dad and wanted to go to Boston College just like him. She loved the campus and high caliber academic environment. It’s a foregone conclusion that she got in! At BC she majored in Communications with a specialty in Marketing. She sort of always knew she wanted to be in advertising and…had the vision to know she was more the working type than the academic type. Sorry, I had to do it! While at BC she had full time internships at advertising agencies beginning her sophomore year all the way through graduation.
Coming out of school, she began her career at an advertising agency in Cambridge focused on B2B Marketing called PJA Advertising + Marketing. Still a relatively new field, most of their clients were focused on print ads and trade publications. It wasn’t super sophisticated stuff but the world was changing. Kelly learned about “account based marketing” and leaned into this new digital marketing transformation.
How did she find her PJA role without a large Boston community of connections to rely on? She called on them. Graduating in the summer of 2012, with our economy still slowly recovering from the recession and her parents back in Hong Kong, Kelly was determined to find a job to stay in the U.S. She remembers she probably sent 100s of cold emails with her resume.
Kelly figured out templatized emails only got her so far. She needed to personalize her messages. She learned that finding people on LinkedIn and sending them a message there as an additional touchpoint really helped response rates. It wasn’t easy, but persistence was key.
At PJA she covered media buying, creative and account management fully focused on B2B for clients on the East & West coasts. It was long hours and she eventually went over to another agency, AMP Agency, where she focused on luxury & CPG clients across some 7 customers broadening her exposure to different industries.
She transitioned from an Assistant Media Planner to a Media Planner to a Supervisor, putting in the time to move up as rapidly as she could! Her next role took her to Havas. There, she was focused on a smaller number of clients and got the chance to build her first team and implement a strategy. She worked closely with Fidelity across their different lines of business with various marketing challenges across retail, institutional, and some of their corporate non-profit efforts focused on supporting a sophisticated attribution model.
At Havas, Kelly transitioned to marketing liquor brands including Macallan and Remy Martin where she realized she was ready for a bigger and different type of challenge. She decided to pivot her career and leave her position without another role lined up. It was scary but ultimately the right thing to do. She headed to San Francisco with the hope of landing an “in house” startup marketing role.
Luckily her sister and grandmother were out in the Bay Area so she had a small launchpad for her fresh start. Of course she referred back to her tried and true methodology of cold calling, interviewing, and of course..handling some rejection. Kelly learned to tell her story and properly position herself for the agency > “in house” transition.
Through a cold call and then LinkedIn message she landed at rapidly growing PagerDuty as a Senior Marketing Specialist. She leveraged all the skills she’d gained over the years from her agency experience and applied it with enthusiasm. Kelly created a larger position for herself by learning marketing software tools like Salesforce, Marketo, and scaling up on how a startup GTM machine really works, the world of MQLs, and everything in between.
PagerDuty is where she believes she learned the most of all her previous professional experiences. She was a sponge! She went in humble and eager to prove that she had the analytical chops, could contribute to team quarterly business reviews & more. It also helped that PagerDuty was growing extremely fast. She entered the company right as it announced its Series C and grew with the company through its IPO.
Eventually, Kelly was ready to move back to Boston. She had an unbelievable experience in San Francisco but was in a long distance relationship at the time (to her now husband) and missed that dirty water. Kelly had spent some time in Boston for undergrad but she really fell in love with the city over the years that followed. She lived in a bunch of different neighborhoods all over the city and found Boston to be manageable & charming with a lot of character. She had a lot of friends in the area from high school and BC so it had always felt like a second home. From a Boston startup community standpoint, she loves that she’s been able to cross paths with people repeatedly over the years. Kelly & her husband also have two Australian shepherds that they like to get outside as much as they can in the New England area. The North Shore beaches and Kennebunkport are two tried and true favorites.
When Kelly returned to Boston she joined Dynatrace, a large enterprise business & partner of PagerDuty. This experience helped her see that she thrived in growth company environments where she can work on a bunch of different things and soon joined Cambridge based Wistia.
Wistia was a memorable experience and gave Kelly her first opportunity to market to marketers. Wistia had a similar product led growth GTM motion to PagerDuty and Kelly dove in to apply her previous learnings. But it’s never that simple. Two weeks into her new role, the pandemic hit. For a company building video marketing tools, they hit their yearly growth goals within a month! It was a blessing in disguise and an unbelievable training ground to figure out how to monetize all those freemium users by experimenting with pricing strategies and user experiences across various parts of their funnel.
Kelly worked on a team of 2 growth marketers when she first saw the Goldcast product and was serendipitously approached by a recruiter. Goldcast was looking for a Head of Growth and Marketing. We now know Kelly is no stranger at jumping on big opportunities when they arise. It was a perfect fit and culmination of all her skill building over the years.
It was time to build her first in-house team. From scratch. Kelly’s first priority when she joined was to build out Goldcast’s Marketing team. She started from first principles about what this hybrid events platform, marketing to B2B marketers, would need. It was her sweet spot so she knew that Goldcast needed to have the best events. They also needed to be able to produce stellar content. Some of Kelly’s mentors like Rebecca Kline from PagerDuty helped her hone that strategy over those first days.
Kelly hired a Head of Events and a Senior Content Marketer to support her initial vision which has really paid off. Goldcast is no stranger to the current difficulties across tech and they’re not immune either. In order to support their growth plan, Kelly is focused on finding the right pipeline and revenue opportunities with appropriate budgets to drive continued growth. The biggest challenges are increasing activity but also lowering CAC while thoughtfully scaling the team. Expectations are always on the rise!
In the months ahead, Kelly & her team are focused on gathering continuous feedback, leveraging freelancers, and working efficiently across time zones. More than half of Goldcast’s team is based in India and this is her first time managing an international team. She’s amazed by her team’s work ethic and resilience. Still, managing across time zones is a challenge. Their India team works EST hours and they’ve had to climb the learning curve together to figure out how to best communicate and work collaboratively. It’s a constant learning process.
Here are four learnings Kelly shared with me on her path across the world from agency life to “in house” B2B technology marketing:
Experiment Relentlessly - “At PagerDuty I ran a lot of experiments hiding golden nuggets in internal sales emails like ‘first person that responds gets a $200 gift card’. If you can’t get the outcome you want, experiment thoughtfully and creatively until you begin to see progress.”
Ask For Help - “I was always afraid to ask for help in my agency days because sometimes there wasn’t a lot of help around. I learned to get over that as I progressed in my career because it takes a village to get a project off the ground and putting all the pressure on myself wasn’t healthy or generated a good work product.” It’s something she’s still learning but in a growth stage company cross functional support is essential
No Regrets - “When I left the agency side it was a high risk decision where I didn't know what was going to happen but I don’t regret that move. Even when I went to a big company for a short period of time I don’t regret that either because I learned I like smaller company environments better. There’s a lot of pressure to make the right decision but regardless of the decisions you make you’ll gather essential learnings”
Building Trust Through Relationships - “Communication and building trust has been super key so that our team feels comfortable sharing feedback. There's something to be said for getting to know the human being behind the work and investing in those relationships in order to build trust.”
Kelly loves growth stage startup environments. She thrives in the chaos..even if it can sometimes drive her crazy. Her wheels spin fastest when there are problems to be solved. Eventually, she would love to be a CMO at a startup and help a company grow from the mid stage through a successful exit. The chance to continue to build out talented teams accomplishing lofty goals is “what it’s all about”. Basically, exactly what she’s doing at Goldcast! Their team has a lot to accomplish and she’s enjoyed the company building process of becoming a strong people manager who helps motivate her team to accomplish big things. Problem solving keeps her going.
If you’d like to get in touch with Kelly, you can find her on LinkedIn, at a New England dog park somewhere with those Aussie shepherds, or hosting a kick ass hybrid event across the startup ecosystem. Thanks for sharing Kelly. Excited to see the heights you bring the Goldcast team and the events you power across the tech industry 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