MGMT Boston - W5, Q3 23 - Notable Systems // Ries McQuillan, Vested
Notable Systems // Ries McQuillan, Vested
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 510+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Notable Systems - applying AI to a universal data extraction platform on a mission to liberate human potential with automated document processing
Thanks to Ron G for the intro to Notable Systems
Ries McQuillan, Director of Business Development & Growth Operations @ Vested - a professorial revenue leader who delivers value through thoughtful conversation and impressive recall, one meeting at a time
Thanks to Underscore Core Community for the intro to Ries
Other Resources:
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
MGMT Boston Operators Club - e-mail me directly to learn more!
Q3 Startups Highlighted: Snyk, FeatureByte & Neural Magic
Q3 Operators Highlighted: Alexa Murray / WHOOP, Kieran O’Driscoll / AtScale & Max Milhan / Rhino
Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q2 Startups & Operators Highlighted
Collecting some feedback around how you’re enjoying the newsletter so far. If you’ve got a minute or two to spare, please check out this Merlin powered survey!
Notable Systems
Founders: John Huggins, Steve Johnson, & David Lippke
Founding: 2017
Mission: Liberating human potential with AI-assisted data entry
Employees: 20 & <10% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & <$10M raised
Investors: Founder funded & Grotech Ventures
Key Customers: Apria, Enovis, Crestone Capital
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$100M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Notable Systems is applying AI to a universal data extraction platform on a mission to liberate human potential with automated document processing. Created by industry veterans Steve Johnson (CEO), John Huggins (President), and David Lippke (CTO) this is a story about getting the band back together.
Steve & John built a company that AOL bought in the early 90s, then Steve & David worked together at AOL. You know, the company that put America online? Yeah, that team. David was the SVP of Systems Infrastructure and Steve was the VP of Technology. David was the person responsible for designing the system that put 1,000 people on the internet simultaneously and then scaled that up to millions of people. Steve joined AOL after inventing an image compression algorithm that took digital image uploading from 45 minutes to 6 seconds. He also led AOL’s Netscape acquisition. The company where Jim Barksdale, Jim Clark, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz all once worked. That team!
Notable is a remote startup but Founder & CEO Steve Johnson sits right here among us in Cambridge. Steve has been inventing and investing in technology companies for the last 30+ years. He attended Harvard’s Kennedy School and has gotten more involved in the local technology community recently as a Senior Fellow & Advisor at Northeastern’s Institute for Experiential AI.
Ok, back to Notable. It’s 2017. A friend had formed Hoag Orthopedic Institute in Orange County, CA, a joint venture to bring together a community hospital and two ambulatory service centers. The new management team asked Steve & friends to come in and look around to see if they had any ideas for automation. Their first (unofficial) professional services engagement.
They discovered archaic IT systems and were quickly drowning in paper. In healthcare (and many other industries) there is still a TON of paper. It turns out the majority of clinics prefer writing physical notes. It’s easier to keep eye contact with patients and you can fit more information on a single page, among other logical use cases.
Steve’s team developed a system that allowed the clinic to digitally scan paper patient records at the end of each day. Then they wrote software to find all the relevant information on those pages and extract it into a structured digital form. Into that first prototype they built a very efficient turk system where they would flag uncertain fields and pass those fields to human puzzle solvers, similar to Amazon’s mechanical turk concept. It was a classic garage operation but it became clear that they were onto something.
Steve & the band took their prototype to DJO Global, the maker of DonJoy braces, to see if there was interest in developing their software further within the durable medical equipment field. DJO shared the same problems as the clinics with a sprawling data collection operation and inherent quality control issues. Their thousands of sales reps were still collecting paperwork at points of sale. Medical documents of every description were shipped abroad to hundreds of hourly workers to digitize. The company was losing 10s of millions of dollars on insurance reimbursement delays and expirations.
The DJO contract was signed and Notable Systems was incorporated with a small team and founder funding. They brought DJO’s processing time from days to minutes and overall submission turnaround to insurance companies from 8 days to 2 days, dramatically increased the conversion rate for claim reimbursement. After 6 months their AI system got to 90% accuracy extracting dozens of fields from the haystack of paperwork. For the most important field extraction, they can often get to 99% all with software, dramatically reducing labor requirements.
This particularly helps relieve pressure on companies like DJO that need to over-staff for peak workloads. Using what's known in AI as a “markup language,” they provide hints to the machine learning to teach their system what type of page it’s looking at and how to find the fields. Within 3 months training on a client’s workflow they can outperform the majority of manual digitization teams, saving time and money.
Notable Systems is on a mission to build a universal data extraction platform that can handle any page or document no matter what specialty or field. They’re defining a new AI category that identifies meaning with the super-accuracy that industry areas like law, financial services, and healthcare absolutely need. Notable Systems has built a platform that is meant to be “human assisted AI.” They’ve developed a patent pending invention called Snippets too which highlights when the AI brain is less confident and shows where in a document its guess came from to provide guidance around any areas that need double checking. The company’s founders recognize that no single AI approach such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT can be flawless, but using many techniques in tandem can create a nearly failsafe system that delivers commercial quality performance. From the very beginning, they’ve been on a mission to help their customers apply emerging advances in complex areas — like medical data extraction — to allow precious human time and judgment to move on to more productive things.
In the same way that FedEx invented overnight delivery 50 years ago by building a cross city courier service, leading to a worldwide express mail service that has never been surpassed, Notable aspires to a similar lofty ambition. FedEx stayed ahead by incorporating technology and subsuming every new breakthrough into their operations to make their product & service faster. They built their company on rapid technology adoption and Notable is already solving customer problems by doing the same.
The Notable team has spent the last 5+ years validating and up leveling their technology, through careful customer selection, to handle enterprise grade use cases. Today they are building out two vertical markets in durable medical equipment and wealth management but there are many horizontal applications for their technology across industries like insurance, law & more when the timing is right.
They have quadrupled revenue this year versus last year and expect to do the same next year. This company is positioned to swing for the fences and they anticipate they’ll talk with investors about raising a substantial amount of growth capital in the not too distant future, building a new application for AI that no one else has yet ventured to do.
Operators to Know:
Jonathan Allen, Principal Site Reliability Engineer
Dalbert Brandon, Software Engineer
Kevin Brandon, Senior Director of Engineering
Sarah Denton, Senior Software Engineer and Customer Success Manager
Katherine Hackett, Manager of Operations
John Huggins, President / Co-Founder
Ruben Johnson, Director of Business Development
Steve Johnson, Founder & CEO
David Lippke, CTO
Patrick Rose, Senior Software Engineer
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Notable Systems team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
Notable is always looking for standout Software Engineers!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are Notable’s go to market expansion plans for the next 12 months?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team to the growth stage?
What is the long term vision for the company? Will you continue to pursue durable medical equipment and wealth management companies or expand to other use cases?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023 // teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Notable Systems you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team liberate more human potential by automating document processing in the decades ahead as a continuation of this age of digital transformation. All finger punchers applaud your efforts. See you around the Internet!
Ries McQuillan, Director of Business Development & Growth Operations @ Vested
Career Summary / Compound Networking / Career Insights
Ries McQuillan is a professorial revenue leader who delivers value through thoughtful conversation and impressive recall, one meeting at a time. Today he serves as the Director of Business Development & Growth Operations at Vested, a platform that helps employees afford their stock options exercises.
Ries grew up locally in the Boston area for the majority of his life and describes himself as a “Bostonian through and through”. Growing up playing sports and captaining his high school’s varsity soccer, basketball and lacrosse teams, he and his brother were raised by teachers. His parents inspired him to have a love of learning as well as problem solving that he has carried with him into his professional career.. The McQuillan curriculum definitely rubbed off.
Ries was also influenced by his uncle, who worked at private schools across New England and revamped their technology programs. His uncle was the first person Ries knew who had an iPod and it stoked an early interest in technology.
He went off to Boston College, attending their undergraduate business school with a concentration in Information Systems and interest in getting into coding. Over the summer following his sophomore year, he heard about selling Cutco knives from a friend. I know you know someone who sold those!
Much to his surprise, Ries loved it! It was his first collision with sales and he learned how to listen, ask the right questions, and find product fit. Ries learned that “sales is way more about problem solving than it is about selling something”. That problem solving approach led him to end the summer as a Top 10 regional rep.
For the summer following his Junior year and during his final year at BC, Ries completed additional internships at EMC, Promoboxx, and Reebok with Senior year being a bit of a blur as both of his parents battled cancer that year. They’re both doing ok now!
After college, Ries leaned into his love of sales and startups to support various businesses in and around Boston. He was able to continue supporting the early-stage ecosystem by taking an SDR role with Zerto, a disaster recovery software for IT systems where he applied his education to become one of their most acclaimed and awarded sales people. The West Coast Field Sales Rep he supported, who had already gone through 2 SDRs that weren’t a fit, called him “robot” because of how quickly he was able to book meetings with his Top 20 target account list. He got half of that list in the first month! His hard work paid off in a promotion to Inside Sales Representative where, within his first 12 months, he hit 125%+ of his goal. He was Zerto’s first ISR to close a six-figure deal and became the Team Lead the following year. He helped interview, onboard & upskill other reps as they grew from 8 to 14 people all while supporting his own book of business.
He was then promoted to a Cloud Account Executive role where he was traveling to meet with clients and prospects. Life on the road gets exhausting though. Even with all Ries had accomplished, it paled in comparison to his younger brother’s scary Leukemia diagnosis. After a terrifying episode where his brother had to be placed in a coma for a few weeks and relocate back to Boston, Ries reflected on his work. Healthy people want a thousand things but sick people only want one, right?
This experience gave Ries a lot of perspective. He really liked the energy of startups and wanted to remain in Boston supporting the early stage ecosystem. Wanting to get closer to more start ups, he accepted a position for WeWork as the “go-to” connection with startups in Boston. It was exciting, fast-paced work alongside a fantastic team of high performers that ultimately spring boarded him to HubSpot where he continued working with startups and connecting a great product to users in need of a more comprehensive solution. His HubSpot experience was everything he had been told it would be. The culture was amazing and the product was top notch. He’s still a proud shareholder!
While at HubSpot, he got more ingrained into the Boston startup community by volunteering as a judge and mentor for early-stage companies with the likes of TechStars, Founder Institute and MassChallenge. He also became a member of some angel investing groups and began taking on some part-time consulting work. He got reconnected with Vested through one of these part time projects. They were looking for someone to do market research and Ries brought insightful learnings back to the Vested team. After seeing how uniquely positioned the Vested offering was, Ries asked “are you hiring?”
Ries had also had personal experience with the problem that Vested solves. When he left Zerto a few years prior he had thought he could just take his options with him. He didn’t realize he’d have to pay for the exercise within 90 days of leaving and it wasn’t exactly nothing. There’s still a gap in equity compensation knowledge, and an even bigger gap when it comes to the capital required to exercise and pay the related taxes! He had reached out to Vested to see if he could get funding for his options. This time, Vested carved out a Business Development Manager role and he began walking startup employees in need of funding to exercise their options through how Vested can help.
More recently, after returning from paternity leave following the birth of his first child, he moved over to the other side of the business to help Vested raise the fund whose capital would help fund all these startup employee option exercises. He helped close $2M of LP capital for their most recent fund and his day-to-day now is focused on helping expand Vested’s awareness and influence.
On top of his “day job” at Vested, Ries is also actively involved in Startup Boston, serving as a volunteer for their Marketing Partnerships team. Startup Boston Week is a free conference that brings together everybody from the New England innovation ecosystem. His role is focused on expanding awareness across startup founders, incubators, accelerators and VC firms in New England.
Compound Networking - Turning Meetings into a Motion
As the son of teachers and a revenue leader, Ries has thought a lot about building an intentional outreach and connection system. He starts with cold outreach using social signals. He’ll find the right people he wants to connect with, why, and relevant criteria to surface.
Outreach
He’ll send a succinct tailored email based on the subject’s internet presence. He does not expect a response. Next, every 2-3 weeks he’ll diligently follow up with a consistent structure & process, making sure to block time off for his outreach.
When he first starts building an outbound motion, he does everything manually. Once he builds the muscle, he begins to systematize what his 2nd & 3rd e-mails will look like. He doesn't jump into a pre-built sequence until he has a better feel for what will resonate.
Naturally, he uses HubSpot for e-mail and their tasking tool to track follow ups as he goes through his process, increasing the velocity of follow ups. He’ll send a note every 3 weeks, then 2 weeks, 1 week, and then every few days until he closes the opportunity out. He’s found that people typically respond to the 2nd or 3rd email.
It’s important not to be super pushy but remember to follow up with personalization. We know how people feel about pushy sales people!
Meetings
Ok, that’s all just to get to a meeting. For a first call or in-person meeting, Ries puts an emphasis on having a conversation without the crutch of slides or a presentation: “It’s a sales meeting without trying to sell anything”. He’ll focus on better understanding the client’s priorities and evangelizing Vested and gauging the prospect’s interest from multiple angles.
He approaches by listening, picking up on something they’ve said to come back to at the end of the conversation, and closing by asking for warm introductions.
Follow Up
The compound networking comes from this listening part. By building rapport and helping identify and begin to solve someone’s problem through a conversation, it will usually open an opportunity for additional introductions. That is where a single meeting can turn into 3 more meetings through warm introductions. It’s the final step, culminating in all the hard work that’s come before it, where Ries shines!
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Relationships Matter Most - “There’s a lot of hype and excitement around AI. And it is very impressive. When the internet came out we thought it would replace everything too. But I don’t see AI replacing people, it can’t create relationships for us or say that we have a 10 year history. There’s no way to replace that. People matter and relationships matter”
Virtual Branding - “Personal branding is just the 21st century way to say ‘reputation’. If you ask anyone with 10-15 years of experience, they would say your reputation matters. Branding and online presence is just an extension of that and a way to scale that. Who you are, what you think, what you care about most definitely is very important.”
Say Yes to the Meeting - “You don’t have to say yes to every meeting. But if you get something personalized, I have 15 minutes to take a meeting for someone who’s taken the time to reach out to me. I’ve been on the other end of that. As long as you can keep it brief, be polite & courteous. Vendors have reached out cold. One person let me know about Chelsea football transfers that day, which was super helpful! That goes back to relationships, you never know who you’re going to meet”
Ries loves living and working in and around Boston. From a professional perspective, he thinks it’s one of the most underrated innovation ecosystems in the world, always punching above its weight. In the years ahead it will be important to maintain the energy & enthusiasm, with our new hybrid culture, so that builders will stay here and Ries wants to be part of the innovation economy support effort.
Whether that’s advising startup founders on GTM strategies or “dot connecting”, he enjoys helping people. He especially looks up to people like Jesse Bardo from Hunt Club, Lily Lyman at Underscore, and Allison Byers at Scroobious. They’ve all demonstrated that you can do well by doing good as consistently kind and courteous community builders.
If you want to learn more about Ries, you can check him out on LinkedIn, cheering on the innovation ecosystem at a Boston area startup event, hanging out with his family and toddler, or watching a Chelsea FC match! Thanks for sharing Ries. Excited to see the companies, founders & employees you continue to help 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