MGMT Boston - W5, Q4 23 - LogRocket // Andrew Dickson, SevenRooms
LogRocket // Andrew Dickson, SevenRooms
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 650+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
LogRocket - helping developers and product managers build better digital experiences by giving complete visibility into their user experience through pixel-perfect replays of user sessions and clear insights into logs, errors, and network activity
Thanks to Chris M. for the intro to LogRocket
Andrew Dickson, Senior Director of FP&A @ SevenRooms - a long term thinker, Finance leader, and occasional world traveler on a journey from Ohio to Houston and now Boston across the Energy & startup world
Thanks to Johnny S. for the intro to Andrew
Thank you to Don Jennings @ HYCU for referring 3 new readers to MGMT Boston
🔥 Upcoming November Event: Boston Tech Breakfast Club - 11/7 @ 9am - co-hosted by Fidelity for Startups & Citizens Bank🔥
Inviting Boston-area venture backed software operating leaders, founders & investors to join for a Breakfast Club series I’m co-hosting alongside Morgan Barrett, Tech Breakfast Club / Kylie Bourjaily, InnoCrew / Jay Parekh, Fifth Down Capital / Kristen Craft, Fidelity for Startups / Robert Hughes III, Citizens
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q4 Startups Highlighted: Procurement Sciences AI, HYCU, Givzey
Q4 Operators Highlighted: Danielle Pedra // Delegate, Natalie Cantave // Estateably, Luciana Marzilli Lord // Repsly
Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q2 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q3 Startups & Operators Highlighted
LogRocket
Founders: Matthew Arbesfeld & Ben Edelstein
Founding: 2016
Mission: LogRocket gives engineering and product teams unbridled access to see how users interact with their product and insight into how to improve each and every user experience
Employees: 100 & 80% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series C & $55M raised
Investors: Battery Ventures, Matrix Partners, Delta-v Capital
Key Customers: Over 2,800 customers including ClassPass, Capital One, Cisco, and Rippling
Glassdoor Rating: 4.2
Valuation (estimated): $200M - $600M (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the Q2 ‘22 $25M Series C fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
LogRocket's goal is to make every experience on the web as perfect as possible. They help developers and product managers build better digital experiences by giving complete visibility into their user experience through pixel-perfect replays of user sessions and clear insights into logs, errors, and network activity.
Founded in 2016 by Matthew Arbesfeld & Ben Edelstein, friends who grew up in Lexington just a few cannonball launches away from Cambridge, witnessed the huge acceleration in application development during separate internships at Google. What was a cottage startup industry was becoming mainstream. Applications were becoming mission critical and needed to perform at enterprise performance levels. Designers, PMs, and front end developers were (and are) in critically high demand. They needed better tools to do their jobs.
Internet usage has been around for a while, and heightened during the pandemic. In turn, customer expectations have risen for the type of experience they expect from the websites they visit and applications they use. There are approximately 30,000 SaaS companies out there and end user spending crossed $100B in 2019 (src). With software eating a much bigger chunk of the world, it’s crucial for businesses to have high performing software applications.
LogRocket serves two key constituents - developers and front end (product, design & marketing) stakeholders. Session replay is obviously a core offering for both. Their platform helps teams understand where bugs or customer issues are happening by replaying the issue and sharing technical data to help teams understand the problem(s) more clearly in real time. Think of LogRocket like a diagnostics platform for the front end that visualizes an issue and also lets you look under the hood to figure out what’s causing it. Like your local car mechanic..but for SaaS.
LogRocket solves two major problems, fixing known issues faster and surfacing & prioritizing previously unknown issues. LogRocket's machine learning layer, Galileo, proactively scans the customer's application to surface the most critical issues affecting their users. Legacy monitoring tools send thousands of alerts and errors daily, making it easy to miss the most important ones.
Galileo also assigns severity scores - the higher the score the greater the user experience impact. With severity scores for every issue in session replay, software teams can determine if a user-reported issue needs to be fixed immediately or if it can be addressed later on. Galileo cuts through the noise and saves time searching for what matters the most, allowing teams to quickly understand what to prioritize next.
They are a classic SaaS startup with multi-tiered pricing based upon usage. Publicly, they have shared 2,800+ paying customers using the platform to monitor 3.5+ billion app sessions & 300 billion user interactions a year. Their customers received increased conversation rates, improved onboarding & retention, and better data on user experience from their platform.
Operators to Know:
Alek Jobst Shannon, SDR Manager
Anne Piccolo, Manager, Customer Success
Brooke Pettengill, Manager, Customer Success
Chris Botaish, Sr. Engineering Manager
Chris Carvalho, Controller
Diou Shi, Director, Design
Elise Eagan, Lead Data Analyst
Evan Sauve, Manager, Customer Solutions
Greg Allen, Sr. Commercial Sales Manager
Kate Trahan, Senior Content Marketing Manager
Matt Angelosanto, Director, Content Marketing
Mike Flanagan, Senior Manager, Content Marketing
Mike Pritchard, Sr. Commercial Sales Manager
Noel Minchow, Engineering Manager
Renzo Lucioni, Sr. Engineering Manager
Wyler McAninch-Ruenzi, Engineering Manager
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the LogRocket team I’m sure 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 company priorities as LogRocket approaches 2024?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 100 employees?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are the biggest macro & industry factors that affect LogRocket’s future growth?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about LogRocket you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more super fast and dependable applications into the Enterprise. All SaaS users applaud your efforts. See you around town and the Internet!
Andrew Dickson, Senior Director of FP&A @ SevenRooms
Andrew Dickson is a long term thinker, Finance leader, and occasional world traveler on a journey from Ohio to Houston and now Boston across the Energy & startup world. At SevenRooms, he serves as the Senior Director of FP&A leading a small but mighty team working to bring better strategic planning practices to a growing hospitality software business.
Andrew grew up in Ohio, the youngest of three with two older (and influential) sisters. His spectator seat helped him learn how to avoid some potholes and fly under the family radar. He learned how to see the nuance in problems from his dad, a CPG marketer at companies like Procter & Gamble and Kroger. His mom was a nurse, caring and compassionate with multiple spreadsheet tabs worth of patience.
Andrew was always looking for “the answer” as an analytically minded youth so a career in numbers always made sense. In high school, after winning a coveted slot during a weekend competition for a full academic scholarship, he headed off to Ohio State as a pre-med major. Not bad, Andrew. Organic Chemistry helped him realize that Finance was his real calling instead though.
When he graduated from Ohio State, the economy was emerging from the great financial crisis and he sought out a big company where he could learn and grow. Shell recruited from the university and happened to have a great rotational program out of Houston. It checked all the boxes and Energy happens to be a fascinating industry.
At Shell, Andrew worked in FP&A before rotating to Import / Export Compliance. Next, he was chosen to go East for a year. Like, really East. At the age of 24 he applied to Shell’s STIA (short term international assignment) program and was chosen to go to Chennai, India. 8,500 miles from home, he learned about an entirely new culture & environment while adjusting to a new role. But it was one of the best years of his life. He got to travel all over Asia and stretch himself in ways he never had before.
While in Chennai he completed financial planning work for the Shell tax organization, developing KPIs to evaluate how efficiently & accurately they filed their tax returns across 90 different countries. After his year was up and he moved back to Houston, he had the opportunity to choose his next role in the exploration or “upstream” part of Shell’s business.
Shell has mature “downstream” business units but these “upstream” segments are the ones where teams are tasked with going out to find new natural resources & energy sources. Andrew was effectively a portfolio manager, analyzing their mix of exploration assets across maturities and probabilities of success. He was given the opportunity to think long term, a pretty rare chance so early in a Finance career. They were running 50 year plans to see how the business might look over the coming decades. Then they would roll it up into an operating plan.
While at Shell, he met his future wife who is from the Boston area. You know where this is headed. She was moving back to her hometown after a cancer research rotation in the Houston area at M.D. Anderson soon after they met. Andrew moved to Boston a few months after. He definitely made the right choice.
After another Energy role at National Grid that helped him bridge the transition, he wanted to try working in technology. HubSpot happened to be hiring for their growing FP&A team and Andrew landed a role doing revenue and P&L forecasting, bringing his multi-decade operational approach to their planning process. Andrew learned a ton about SaaS, a different industry & pace, working alongside HubSpot’s Investor Relations team and their CFO.
He learned everything he knows about SaaS from some awesome leaders & mentors about software economics and managing Wall Street expectations. The HubSpot team never missed a single quarter’s projection as a public company. He even got to lead a small team of his own, developing a unit economics analysis & annual planning process under Lauren O’Gorman, the leader of HubSpot’s FP&A team, and VP of FP&A at the time Pam Martinez.
After 3+ years in a Corporate FP&A role, Andrew got an opportunity to lead a team supporting the Sales organization. He helped support HubSpot’s Chief Sales Officer and their leadership team with everything from P&L expense forecasting, working on analyses with the Sales Ops team, and booking forecasting & commissions forecasting. When the software boom was slowing after COVID, he helped execute quota changes and learned a ton about GTM finance supporting a large scale sales organization.
Andrew leveraged all of that collective experience when he moved over to SevenRooms to lead the buildout of their financial planning & analysis function. SevenRooms is a hospitality and guest experience platform like OpenTable or Resy that helps restaurants manage tables, take reservations, do online ordering, etc.
He is working to institute best in class GTM practices and other financial controls so the team can go out and execute at a high level during their 2024 annual planning process and in the year to come.
Understanding Unit Economics
At HubSpot, Andrew learned a ton about how to measure the performance of a SaaS company by understanding its unit economics under the leadership of an industry leading FP&A team. He learned how to understand the collective inputs to help make better strategic planning decisions.
When breaking down unit economics, he stresses that you can’t just look at the LTV / CAC ratio. That’s often misunderstood in SaaS. In order to have a consistent analysis that captures the collective effort of what you’re putting in and the efficiency of the output you’re receiving back in one number, you need to go further.
On the input front, it takes a team effort to gather all of the necessary data. On the LTV side of the equation, you’ll need to understand the number of units sold, revenue per unit, and the effort it takes to service customers from the product & customer success departments.
From a cost perspective, it’s imperative to understand how easy it is to sell the product, efficiency of the sales department, and how costs like marketing expenses are deployed. Is there an account based marketing approach? Is it demand generation across various channels? Does PLG factor into the costs?
The main thing that Andrew believes is overlooked in a unit economic analysis is churn rate. If a startup can focus its activities on getting more customers to stick around for longer, everything gets a little bit easier. It sounds pretty straightforward, but measuring the allocation of your collective efforts gives you a clearer view into what is driving your success..or causing the problems.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Take Risks - “I would have told myself to take more early on, honestly. It’s easier to do early on when you have less personal responsibility. The risk I took was letting an organization tell me where to go, whether it was Texas or South India, and I was willing to do what I needed to do to speed up my career and learnings”
Make Yourself Useful - “Whether you’re new or have been at a company for 5 years, especially in smaller organizations, look to be a jack of all trades. When I joined HubSpot I knew nothing about SaaS, so to hit the ground running I learned all their FP&A system and became the subject matter expert so I could contribute to the team while I was climbing the learning curve everywhere else”
Be Human - “Over the last few years the world has been turned upside down. A lot of us have gone into remote settings where we’re not seeing everyone’s lives as much as we used to. Over Zoom, Slack, Doc, etc. you don’t see as much and it can feel robotic. It’s really important to remind ourselves that we’re coworkers and humans that need to be there for each other”
Andrew wants to keep working on opportunities where he can add value and build growing startups. Whether that is through FP&A, RevOps, or Operations he’s game as long as he can have an impact. Organizations like SevenRooms that are determined to grow efficiently is a place where he knows he can add a lot of value.
If you want to learn more about Andrew, you can find him running FP&A and fine tuning unit economics at SevenRooms, spending time with his wife in and around Boston, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing Andrew. Excited to see all the operational designs and long term planning you implement 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