Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 875+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
airSlate - a no-code workflow automation, electronic signature, and document management SaaS platform with 100+ million users and 900k+ customers
Thanks to local media for making me aware of airSlate
Noah Massucci, Director, Sales Engineering & Implementation @ Robin - a curious leader, brought up by educators, who's all about diving in and figuring things out alongside his team at hybrid workplace experience platform Robin
Thanks to Danielle P. for the intro to Noah
🔥 Upcoming Q2 Event: MGMT Boston Sports, Gaming & Wellness Breakfast - 5/30 @ 9am, co-hosted by Fidelity for Startups 🔥
Inviting Boston-area venture backed operating leaders, founders & investors to join for a Sports, Gaming & Wellness 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
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 easier way to capture this holistic view (ex-biotech), reach out!
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q2 Startups Highlighted: Starburst, Neurable, Software Defined Automation
Q2 Operators Highlighted: Adam Fisk / Tech Superpowers, Bryan Dsouza / Aptiv
Would you like to sponsor MGMT Boston in Q2? Reach out by replying to this e-mail!
airSlate
Founders: Borya Shakhnovich & Vadim Yasinovsky
Founding: 2008
Mission: Empowering anyone to digitally transform document workflows
Employees: 990 & <10% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series B & $185.3M
Investors: General Catalyst, G Squared, HighSage, Morgan Stanley, UiPath Ventures
Key Customers: BillingTree, Colliers International, Nationwide Roofing, Rocket Lawyer
Glassdoor Rating: 4.1
Valuation (estimated): $1.25B
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
airSlate is building a no-code workflow automation, electronic signature, and document management SaaS platform. This team has developed products that serve over 100 million users across a product suite that includes signNow, pdfFiller, DocHub, Workflow, Instapage, and US Legal Forms to empower teams to transform how their organizations operate.
They’ve been building digital rails for over a decade so legacy businesses in the education, healthcare, legal, and construction fields can run their trains paperless, efficient, and on time.
Vadim Yasinovsky founded the startup in 2008 under the name PDFfiller to solve the problem of editing PDFs online. In 2012 he was joined by Borya Shakhnovich, airSlate’s current CEO, to help expand their offering as the company scaled to their first 10,000 customers.
Under Borya’s leadership they expanded their platform and went international. By 2018 they became airSlate to capture the enhanced range of products they offered, unified under a single brand name.
The Business Process Management (BPM) market is more than $15B and growing 20% per year (src). There’s a lot of admin out there that needs to be automated. With rising rates, remote work, regulation and businesses eager to capture efficiencies workflow automation is a critical area of continued investment for enterprises. airSlates’s massive install base uniquely positions them to leverage best in class AI tools across their product suite in order to continue driving innovation too.
airSlate aims to be a one stop shop for businesses in the education, healthcare, legal, and construction industries (and beyond) looking to improve efficiency and automate tasks related to documents and workflows.
For example, they help educational institutions automate processes like student admissions, enrollment verification, schedule planning, and more with ready to use templates from their expansive template library.
In addition to workflow automation they offer e-signature capabilities, document management, and API integration with various cloud partners so their customers don’t need to set up their own complex integrations.
Most importantly, airSlate has the customer base and data to build some really interesting AI applications to further their mission of transforming workflows. Their AI evolution bot can be installed and configured in minutes. They compete with leaders like Adobe, DocuSign, and are building a deep strategic partnership with UiPath. They acquired Instapage in 2023, which offers scalable solutions for marketers to create personalized landing pages - reducing costs, increasing conversion rates, and further engendering customer loyalty.
airSlate has continued scaling through some serious headwinds, with more than 50% of its workforce located in Ukraine. Less than 6 months after Russia’s Feb ‘22 invasion they announced a $51M June ‘22 fundraising round led by G Squared with participation from UiPath’s venture arm at a $1.25B valuation. airSlate has 900k+ customers and over $100M ARR with employees in Boston (and across the U.S.), Poland, and the Philippines.
In 2022 they were named No. 2,799 on the Inc 5000 with 198% (trailing 3 year) revenue growth and were named to the Inc. 2022 Best in Business list in the General Excellence category. Inc.’s Best in Business Awards honor companies that have made an extraordinary impact in their fields and on society.
Operators to Know (Locally):
Paul Bukhovko, Senior Director, Affiliate Marketing
Kurt Daher, Partner Account Manager
Kyle Kelleher, VP of Strategy & PLG
Eugene Gorelik, Head of Engineering
Lars Guldborg, Business Process Automation Manager
Marc Moretti, Director of FP&A
Evangelia Stefanakos, Senior Outbound Marketing Manager
Harry Rhatigan, Solution Architect
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the airSlate 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:
What are the key growth goals & levers for 2024?
As the team continues to scale domestically and abroad, what are the key cross functional challenges?
What is the long term vision for the company?
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 airSlate you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more businesses into the digital (and AI) age. All automation experts applaud your efforts. See you around town and with digital templates everywhere!
Noah Massucci, Director, Sales Engineering & Implementation @ Robin
Noah Massucci is a curious leader, brought up by educators, who's all about diving in and figuring things out alongside his team. Today he serves as the Director of Sales Engineering & Implementation at hybrid workplace experience platform Robin.
Noah grew up in Vermont alongside an older brother and sister. His mom was an elementary school teacher and his dad was a guidance counselor. When not competing on the local soccer fields, Noah learned from the best.
Noah attended Southern Vermont College. While in school he worked part time for a local semi pro team, the Vermont Voltage. He sold advertising and even worked the booth announcing their games. It was here he faced his fear of public speaking head-on, especially after his infamous slip-up pronouncing Canada as "Canadia" in his debut. By overcoming fears and putting in the effort, he turned those nerves into skills and came out wiser
After graduation, he took a role as an Athletic Director at a high school. He didn’t have much idea yet of what he wanted his career to look like but knew he enjoyed building & being around teams. The experience taught him how to handle the occasional crisis when issues arose.
Next, he took a sales role at local office supply company Crystal Rock. He would head out in their delivery truck each morning with a stack of 100 pamphlets to knock on doors all day until his 5:30pm pick up. It was pretty challenging. But nothing in his career would have happened without it. Outside sales taught him to find ways to break through, establish personal connections, and take chances. It takes a lot of guts to walk into a random office and try to sell.
But Noah was ready to venture outside of Vermont. He moved to Boston to join Wayfair. Starting as a Business Account Manager, he developed and grew a book of business in their Sales org. Joining Wayfair on the eve of their IPO, he realized there were so many other roles outside of sales within rapidly growing technology organizations.
He transitioned to their Storefront engineering team as a Project Manager. Wayfair veteran Anthony “Enzo” Enzor-DeMeo took Noah under his wing as he ramped into his first semi-technical role, climbing a steep learning curve and learning the world of Revenue Operations.
Next, Noah joined HubSpot as a Senior Product Specialist on the HubSpot Sidekick team. He supported sales reps, implementation engineers & customer success. Working on a small startup team within HubSpot was an invaluable experience and, once the team born out of HubSpot Labs graduated into the core HubSpot CRM org, he knew he was destined for a startup.
He learned about Yesware through a conversation with an energetic leader and their Head of Sales, Paul Hlatky. Paul was looking for someone with the background & domain knowledge to help Yesware scale their revenue operations. Noah was looking to find an opportunity on the ground floor of a startup building a function. He gets excited about building something from scratch. At Yesware he helped the team scale out their Professional Services model. His contributions included the development of Salesforce reports utilizing data sourced from Yesware, as well as the seamless integration of Yesware with the Microsoft suite.
After helping to build out their revenue operations engine, luck & opportunity brought him to Robin. Founder Zach Dunn and Director of CX Lauren Squier were seasoned leaders who trusted Noah with the autonomy to build their initial Sales Engineering function while providing him guidance along the way.
Robin was looking for someone to come in and refine the pre-sales to position them for future success. Noah spent much of his career studying top performers, picking up bits and pieces of their leadership styles to refine his own approach to leading and mentoring. His CRO, Carl Oliveri, instilled in him the value of continuously learning and borrowing from leaders who can elevate your skills.
Noah has been at Robin for the last five years, helping the startup grow from a single sales engineering resource to leading their entire sales engineering & onboarding team. They have four Sales Engineers, a team of three Onboarding Specialists, and a Sales Enablement resource that report to him.
Noah leads with curiosity, gaining perspective through his own experiences and the insights of his team each day. He and his family live outside of the city now but he makes it up to Robin’s Seaport office often to spend time with his team and the great people of Boston tech.
Key Elements of a 90 Day Plan
After onboarding as a “first of” at a couple early stage startups, Noah has a lived approach to building a 90 day plan.
What’s worked best for him is holding himself back from thinking something needs to happen immediately. Instead, his initial goal is to learn as much as possible and figure out how to help by understanding the customer, product, and approach to everything as humbly as he can.
He makes it his mission to understand the team, the customer & the product in his first 90 days. He also assumes they have tried some of the initial ideas he might come up with. He aims to be generally curious and learn through listening.
Taking a player coach approach, he then sits in the role alongside his team. Noah wants to understand and participate in the role before asking anyone to do anything. He wants to be able to do anything he would ask his team to do. It’s also the easiest way to earn respect!
When Robin’s onboarding team was handed over to him, he had to walk into a situation where there was an existing team with existing ways of operating. He needed to see what they saw and what they needed before trying to change anything.
Curiosity has been his guiding principle. Like when Ted Lasso was playing darts - Noah aims to be curious, not judgmental. He’s watched a lot of people try to come in and implement things out of the gates, often committing the error of rushing into the final stages of a repeatable process without laying the necessary groundwork.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Solve The Problems Everyone Avoids- “ When I was starting out in my career, I honed a bunch of my technical skills by tackling the annoying problems nobody else wanted to touch. My advice? Seek out those pesky problems everyone avoids and get really good at fixing them. Suddenly, you will find yourself as the go-to person everyone relies on in the organization.”
Leading My Way - “I had an idea of what a leader looked like and thought I didn’t fit that criteria. Someone encouraged me to take this class on ‘using your own story to lead’ and that was one really helpful turning point that helped shape my leadership style and how I could continuously get better and more comfortable as a leader”
Don’t Be Afraid to Ask For Help - “There are so many people in my career that have helped me along the way and played a role in my success. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, there is always someone there to give advice or share their perspective.”
Noah doesn’t want to just continue building his role(s), he wants to continue building early stage startups and teams. Starting early and building something from the ground up continues to get him excited. When he joined Wayfair right before their IPO and heard stories about the “early days”, he knew that’s where he belonged. And he loves being a part of the team at Robin.
In the future he’ll continue to chase early stage opportunities building teams and companies to lay the foundation for later success. That way he’ll be able to say “I helped build this” and feel like he continues to build on his accomplishments.
If you want to learn more about Noah you can find him leading pre-sales at Robin, playing with his family to the south of Boston, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We look forward to seeing the early stage startups you continue to impact around Boston in the coming decades!
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