MGMT Boston - W6, Q1 24 - Vizit // Craig Minoff, Kasa
Vizit // Craig Minoff, Kasa
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 765+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Vizit - the world’s leading content effectiveness platform, enabling digital leaders, designers, and marketers around the world to view and optimize their digital content through their audience’s eyes in real time
Thanks to Nick A. for the intro to Vizit
Craig Minoff, VP Product Management & Company Operations @ Kasa - an adventurer, startup leader, and strategic consultant turned product thinker who has paired a high horsepower intellect with mentorship to shape his thinking around the future of on-demand living
Thanks to Michele C. for the intro to Craig
🔥 Upcoming Q1 Event: MGMT Boston B2B SaaS Breakfast - 2/27 @ 9am, co-hosted by Fidelity for Startups 🔥
Inviting Boston-area venture backed B2B SaaS operating leaders, founders & investors to join for a B2B SaaS breakfast on Tues, 2/27 to engage with the MGMT Boston Operators Club, co-hosted by Kristen Craft @ Fidelity for Startups
Save the Dates: April 26-28, 2024 @ Harvard Innovation Labs > Exciting News for Boston's Startup Community! I’m partnering up with Techstars Startup Weekend Boston 2024. Join us for an immersive three-day program, shining a spotlight on the vibrant local startup scene and the talented leaders driving growth
Registration is open here (love to see this event powered by Markit too!). For being a MGMT Boston subscriber, you can attend with a 25% discount - use code MGMTBOSTON at checkout.
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
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
186 Ventures 2024 Kickoff - assembled 60+ operators for some great discussion on 2024 trends
2024 Boston Tech Big Board - updated 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
Q1 Startups Highlighted: Merlin, BlueTrace, Osmo, Boswell, Tomorrow.io
Q1 Operators Highlighted: Parker Lawrence / Herald, Aaron Whittemore / Humatics, Lauren Viscariello / Candex, Joe Kiernan / Perch, Micah Lanier / Jump
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Tech Superpowers. They have operated in Boston as an IT provider on behalf of startups for the past 30 years for rapidly growing companies & premier clients like the Celtics, Accel, Matrix Partners, etc.
Vizit
Founder: Jehan Hamedi
Founding: 2020
Mission: Transform the way content is created and consumed in every industry across the globe.
Employees: 50 & 70% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $10M+ raised
Investors: Infinity Ventures, Brand Foundry Ventures, eGateway Capital, Lakefront Partners, Lubar & Co and several prominent CPG, retail, and technology executives
Key Customers: L’Oreal, Mars, Unilever, Colgate Palmolive
Glassdoor Rating: 5.0
Vizit is the world’s leading content effectiveness platform, enabling digital leaders, designers, and marketers around the world to view and optimize their digital content through their audience’s eyes in real time. Powered by patented intuitive AI technology, Vizit provides an easy to use software platform that helps teams deliver breakthrough digital content that stands out, delights customers, and sells more products, delivering the essential infrastructure to achieve content excellence at scale. Vizit is relied upon by the world’s most iconic brands, retailers, and agencies in over 15 countries, including Mars, L’Oreal, Unilever, Colgate Palmolive, and Harley-Davidson.
Jehan Hamedi founded Vizit in 2020 after working with F100 brands at a market research & AI consultancy he founded called Adhark. There, the team developed novel AI-based technologies to model and predict consumer perception to make more informed, data driven marketing and product development decisions. The technology they invented ultimately led to the formation of Vizit.
Before Adhark, Jehan was an operator at Crimson Hexagon - an AI powered consumer intelligence company that was named one of Fast Company’s 10 Most Innovative Companies in Tech. He led their Growth team, scaling the company’s revenue from $2.5M to $15M+ in 24 months propelling the company to become a leader in the fast-growing and highly competitive social media analytics industry, which was ultimately acquired for $450 million.
I tell you all this so that you know Jehan has been in Enterprise AI for the last 10+ years working with the world’s most innovative brands and technology companies, understanding trends & content that resonate with consumers, and is a named inventor on 25+ patents. For over a decade he has been inventing & building teams to help large enterprises use AI to predict consumer opinion and better connect with their customers. This ain't no ChatGPT wrapper, alright??
In fact, Hamedi is credited with creating the predictive content analytics industry and pioneering the use of AI to create synthetic audiences that can predict the effectiveness of digital content for any consumer population in real time. And all this work has turned out to be absolutely essential to business success in ecommerce.
Ecommerce continues to grow and grow. This massive global market is due to surpass $3.6 trillion in 2024 (src) and Vizit sees their own TAM, every commercial image on the internet, at well over $100 billion.
When you think about anything you’ve ever purchased, thought about purchasing, or shared with a friend you had to *see* it first. And then it had to look appealing. I hate to share this but people don’t really read as much anymore. Apparently 54% of Americans read…one book last year (src). We’re a visual species!
Wouldn’t it be reckless to send an email without spell check? Using the same logic, why would you publish a commercial image before checking it first or “Vizit-ing” it against the audience you’re serving? Vizit is building “spell and grammar check” for visuals. Helping billions of content creators present their best image online.
Jehan and his team envision a world where enterprise brands and retailers use Vizit as the essential quality check, measuring the power of an image to “see through their customer’s eyes”. Their AI system simulates consumer populations that customers can view through “audience lenses” so they can better understand how effective and successful their content will convert in just a few seconds.
For example, they’ll generate proprietary Vizit Scores which reveal how effective a visual is (0-100) and then via an AI “heatmap” in their software platform show customers which areas of a visual are driving a performance score up or down - like reorienting a cup, swapping out a model, or changing the color of a background. They’re giving brands cheat codes to understand the most appealing images & content assets being used across the market.
The Vizit team has built state of the art computer vision-based AI technology to generate consumer and content intelligence. Brands save time & capture cost efficiencies, avoiding expensive “in market” AB testing, using their predictive analytics system. Vizit leverages thousands of traits in their algorithms across geography, demographics, psychographics & purchase history. They analyze e-commerce data, social media data & other market research sources as well as their own proprietary datasets.
For large retailers, they are also helping score and manage the effectiveness of their product catalog against competitors. Customers use Vizit to understand whether they’re competing effectively against other products in their space to win clicks and purchases. They’ve even open sourced some of their data to create a content effectiveness index for consumer brands around the world.
Vizit raised a $10M Series A in Q4 of 2022, has grown extremely fast to 40+ employees, and have already added dozens of top tier enterprise customers like Mars, L’Oreal, Unilever, Harley Davidson & more. They have customers in 15 countries across their customer base and will add integration partners across their expanding partner ecosystem. The team will continue to invest in their GTM resources too, adding to the sales, marketing, and customer success teams in 2024.
Vizit was named one of the 15 Most Promising Tech Startups by Business Insider ranked by VCs, BostInno’s Top 22 Startups to Watch in 2022, named to CB Insights’ 2023 Retail Tech 100 List, and Jehan was honored by Boston Business Journal as one of their 2022 40 under 40 honorees and by the Path to Purchase Institute as one of the top 40 under 40 leaders in the Ecommerce industry.
Operators to Know (Locally):
Ryan Bowen, Operations Manager
Katie Chaput, Director of Customer Success
Paul Carpinella, Senior Director, Growth Marketing
Adam Colasanto, Head of Client Services
Vanessa Denice, Senior Content Marketing Manager
Zack Halloran, VP of Engineering
Chris Ingolia, Head of Business Development
Jaclyn Lariviere, Senior Product Manager
Nikki Nutter, Head of Accounting
Eli Orkin, Vice President of Marketing
Elham Saraee, Director of AI Research
Gabe Schervish, Director of Product Design
Wayne St. Amand, Chief Operating Officer
Thomas Stearns, Principal Data Scientist
Kyle Stratis, Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Anthony Vitale, Senior Product Designer
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Vizit 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 biggest milestones the team is looking to achieve in 2024?
Who are the key competitors Vizit sees in the image analytics space most often?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team to 50+ employees?
What is the long term vision for the company?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Vizit you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more brands into the digital, visual age. All consumers and brands alike applaud your efforts. See you around town & the internet!
Craig Minoff, VP Product Management & Company Operations @ Kasa
Craig Minoff is an adventurer, startup leader, and strategic consultant turned product thinker who has paired a high horsepower intellect with mentorship to shape his thinking around the future of on-demand living. Today, he serves as the VP Product Management & Company Operations at flexible living accommodations growth stage startup Kasa.
He grew up in the Chicago area in a family that loved to travel. His dad was a consultant and Sears executive while his Mom was in the first class of women at Dartmouth, an old-school Product Manager who designed real-life physical products (!). When Mom came to school for show and tell, she brought toothbrush bracelets she’d designed for the kids.
Craig was a smart, talented student and set off to Yale for his undergraduate studies where he studied Economics and served as the President of the Yale Economic Review. Comfortable with travel from growing up, he set off for a semester abroad in Salamanca, Spain.
After graduation, he worked for Boston Consulting Group out of their Chicago office. He entered into a supportive partnership group in that office with a cohort of 25 or so fresh graduates, getting to start his professional career with a built-in, ambitious friend group.
At BCG he learned the power of setting boundaries around his work. The most senior and successfully tenured team members he admired who seemed to thrive were able to draw professional lines and carve out time for their own personal hobbies, friendships, communities, etc. to deliver more value for the company as better coworkers & leaders.
While Craig was at BCG, a college friend, Michael Waxman, started a company called Grouper that focused on helping groups of friends meet each other. During the meteoric rise of social media, more people were spending time online and less time meeting in person. Online dating was not quite yet mainstream. So Grouper became a fast-growing, low-stress way to meet new people with your friends.
Craig was drawn by the opportunity to apply his BCG skills in an early-stage startup setting and moved to New York to join a scrappy team of about 10 people as the Director of Growth & Business Intelligence. He experienced rapid growth and helped the company raise Series A funding. Grouper grew to about 40 or 50 people and Craig worked alongside engineers and designers for the first time, facilitating product roadmaps, completing A/B tests, and more. Learning through applied environments is a theme from Craig’s career and, instead of going to grad school, Grouper became a transformative career learning experience that drove him to optimize for rapid learning environments.
When free dating apps like Tinder & Hinge became more popular, Grouper’s growth stalled. Craig had been Airbnb’ing his apartment to make a couple extra bucks by marketing “views of the Empire State Building” if you squinted. Hopefully his landlord isn’t reading this... Coincidentally, Airbnb’s Co-Founder & CTO Nate Blecharczyk was on the Grouper board.
When Grouper went through a reduction in force through their growing pains, Craig’s parting gift was a warm referral to a recruiter at Airbnb. He landed a role at the company in 2014 in their internal consulting group to help with strategic product planning & analysis.
Airbnb was a great fit for obvious reasons. Initially, Craig got to work on classic consulting projects like running business segment analysis around entering business travel vs. bed & breakfasts vs. long-term stays or luxury travel. Of course, over the next 5 years, all of those segments became a reality! Airbnb combined the best of his startup experience with Grouper and his BCG consulting skills.
Working alongside 5-10 product leaders across Airbnb’s business, Craig led an effort to help prioritize, estimate, and track the product roadmap planning to drive better decision-making. His experience from consulting was that you can never get an estimate perfectly right, but spending the time quantifying the upside & cost is still valuable to building a more informed “business case” instead of just deferring to the H.P.P.I.O. (highest paid person in the office).
One of his closest product counterparts at Airbnb was Lenny Rachitsky, who encouraged him to consider becoming a PM. Together they wrote specs, Craig took on features within Lenny’s team, and the company eventually created an internal mobility path to product management loosely based on their work together.
Craig worked on important multi-quarter projects like making cancellation policies friendlier to guests. He got exposure to senior leadership audiences with Brian Chesky, Nate Blecharczyk & Ellie Mertz to help them compete with Booking.com and better align with broader e-commerce policies. Craig & Lenny partnered to convert the Airbnb platform from Request to Book to Instant Book.
At the time, booking requests had a 60% conversion rate. Imagine only being able to purchase 60% of the groceries in your cart when you go to checkout? It was the era in which marketplace behavior was defined and a lot of it came down to building trust through new products on the platform. Airbnb has continued to incentivize more flexible policies over time.
While he was at Airbnb, Craig had purchased a small building in Chicago with his friend Roman Pedan and a few others to run as a short-term rental business and see if they could do it at scale. Roman was interested in pursuing the idea as a startup full-time coming out of Stanford Business School.
When Roman’s company Kasa landed their seed funding, Craig joined as their Head of Product in a dozen-person company soon after. It was time to get back to the early stage with the benefit of some serious prior experience & mentorship.
In the 5 years since, Kasa has scaled to almost 250 team members and raised Series A, B & C rounds of funding. Craig is enjoying the challenging company-building aspects of startup growth aiming to develop “best in class” teams, people management, org design, and culture to instill best practices from “Day 1”.
Craig oversees Product, Design & Engineering in a traditional Head of Product role. He also oversees BizOps & Business Intelligence and rounds things out with time in company operations. There, he’s implemented processes like 360º reviews, career growth pathing & ladders for employees, and is responsible for growing Kasa’s business by helping to structure their product roadmap efforts. He works closely with Kasa’s leadership team and Chief of Staff to plan leadership summits and handle other strategic planning efforts.
Craig relocated to Boston during the pandemic with his partner. Another product leader, the two of them drove around the U.S. for a year and built a spreadsheet to find a city that fit both of their personalities. Boston won! It’s close to the ocean, the mountains, and Cambridge is always a hub of activity. We’re glad to have you here Craig!
Planning & Prioritization to Drive … Time & Attention Spend
The hardest question in work and life is, “where do I spend my time and attention?” Craig believes effective prioritization ultimately comes down to leading a strong process.
Craig is proud of the system they’ve built at Kasa for their product roadmap efforts. Like a sine curve, they spend one part planning for every three parts of execution (1:3) to make sure there is a proper ongoing ratio.
Yes, in earlier-stage startups that is harder and it’s tough to plan out 2-3 quarters. But thematically some amount of “business case” math is better than nothing. Spending 5-10 minutes on a project to determine the rough upside against the potential cost is invaluable time spent.
Craig leads his team through an exercise to build a business case against a reasonable amount of variables (10-30) each translated into a revenue figure. Then, each business segment will use assumptions around their historical conversion rates. Last, they’ll approximate the length of a “lever arm” to best estimate the impact of an initiative.
This is particularly important when weighing revenue against the cost of committing the resources. Since resources are limited in a product & engineering org, measuring commitments in “people weeks” or months as a universal form of cost helps you determine roughly sufficient ROI. It won’t be perfectly stack-ranked, but you can use the data to create a starting point and supplement that with a voting session so more perspectives can contribute to the final order.
Kasa’s process, crafted at Airbnb, is rigorous because each hour of product planning could mean 3x more design time or 5x more engineering time for a product. Investing a few more minutes, hours, or days of extra planning spec’ing and choosing deliberately upfront pays dividends down the road.
Career Insights / Learnings
Alternating Learnings - “There’s value in learning both from firsthand trial & error and through mentorship. While the mentorship lessons won’t always sink in as deeply, it’s a faster process where you can learn from the best. If you pair strong mentorship with choosing a career path based on maximum learning, I’ve found that’s a pretty good combination for success”
Tours of Duty - “One of my first managers at Airbnb taught me the concept of ‘tours of duty.’ Think about each ‘tour’ as an 18 to 30-month learning opportunity. Afterward, it could mean changing companies, functions, getting promoted, or shifting business units -- but the key is to mix it up! It’s healthy and valuable from a personal energy standpoint to maintain a rapid sense of learning & growth every couple of years and I try to optimize each tour of duty to see where I can learn the most & fastest.”
Work on your Interests - “Choose an industry to work in that you spend your free time reading about. If you’re going to be reading those books anyway, might as well make it a 2-for-1 special! I thought the dating industry was fascinating, and I love to travel. Now I get to work in travel, read about travel, and travel more!”
Products Don’t Sell Themselves - “The best product still needs to be marketed. Many people take for granted that and think that just because they're working on it, everyone else cares. The reality is that most people don’t care and it is your responsibility to remind them, regularly, why they should care. You shouldn’t assume they’re excited to read every word of your e-mail. Reduce your assumptions around user commitment. It takes part product AND part product marketing to capture people’s imagination.”
Eventually, Craig has a pipedream of starting a travel company to help bring people together through adventure & outdoors. He’d love to continue having a vocation that aligns with his interests, and if he could build a product that was a peak memory for people’s lives, how great would that be?
If you’d like to learn more about Craig you might find him traveling the world, charting the future of flexible living at Kasa, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the teams, startups, and leaders you impact 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
Always look forward to these updates! Vizit’s approach to predictive content analytics is seriously impressive. And on the B2B SaaS breakfast,any chance there will be a recap or key takeaways shared after? Would love to see insights from that discussion.