MGMT Boston - W7, Q1 24 - Centaur Labs // Dean Walsh, TiE Boston // Underscore Q1 Core Coffee Shop
Centaur Labs // Dean Walsh, TiE Boston // Underscore Q1 Core Coffee
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 770+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Centaur Labs - the leading healthcare data annotation platform - helping AI developers build, monitor, and validate their models at scale
Thanks to John C. for the intro to Centaur Labs
Dean Walsh, Senior Program Manager @ TiE ScaleUp, TiE Boston - traveled across ecosystems and hierarchies as a bridge between eras, one of the last paperboys, who rode his bike and mind on a path from neighborhood streets into the world of high growth startups
Thanks to Rachel M. for the intro to Dean
Operators Club Corner Underscore Q1 Core Coffee Shop - Underscore focuses on investing in early stage (Pre-Seed & Seed) B2B Enterprise Software. Thank you to Brian, Lily, Claire, Devin, Jenni, Jimmy, Richard, and the rest of the Underscore team for hosting 100+ Core & MGMT Boston leaders
🔥 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
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, Vizit
Q1 Operators Highlighted: Parker Lawrence / Herald, Aaron Whittemore / Humatics, Lauren Viscariello / Candex, Joe Kiernan / Perch, Micah Lanier / Jump, Craig Minoff / Kasa
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.
Centaur Labs
Founders: Erik Duhaime, Tom Gellatly, Zach Rausnitz
Founding: 2017
Mission: Accelerate AI breakthroughs in science and healthcare
Employees: 30 & 50% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $15.9M Raised
Investors: Accel, Matrix Partners, Omega Venture Partners, Susa Ventures, Y Combinator
Key Customers: Medtronic, Eko, Massachusetts General Hospital, Volastra
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $25M – $100M (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in the $15M Q3 2021 Series A fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Centaur Labs is the leading healthcare data annotation platform — helping AI developers build, monitor, and validate their models at scale. Centaur leverages a community of 58K+ healthcare experts and performance-based incentives, to drive fast and accurate annotations across multiple data types (text, 2D/3D imaging, video, audio, waveform, etc.).
Centaur works with prestigious institutions like Memorial Sloan Kettering, Mass General Brigham, Paige.AI, Eko Health, and Consensus. Founded by Erik Duhaime, Tom Gellatly & Zach Rausnitz in 2017, this team is powering scientific breakthroughs by annotating biomedical datasets at unprecedented scale and quality, with a unique collective-intelligence based approach.
What does that even mean?
Well, Erik got his PhD at MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence where he studied how groups of people, enhanced by AI and other technology, can collectively be more than the sum of their parts. Simultaneously, his wife was in medical school studying to be a surgeon, and was regularly using flashcards and online quizzes to study for her exams. Erik thought there may be a way (via collective intelligence) to make her studying useful to more than just her, maybe even..profitable? He teamed up with his Brown college friends Zach and Tom, each accomplished in their own right, to set about making a dent in the healthcare universe and figure out if you could get a group of distributed medical workers to analyze biomedical information as well as a fellowship trained expert doctor.
Did you know 30% of the world’s data volume comes from the healthcare industry (RBC)? And no, that is not expected to slow down. AI developers that want to leverage biomedical data to build AI have a difficult time getting their data cleaned, structured and ML-ready. You need substantial datasets and scalable high quality data labeling pipelines to build and manage effective models. There’s a real problem to be solved in helping AI developers structure their datasets quickly, at a high quality, and an affordable price.
Centaur Labs has built a collective intelligence-powered platform (i.e. network) of 58,000+ qualified labelers who help annotate biomedical data of all types - from text to 3D images - for their clients across the healthcare ecosystem, from medical device leaders like Medtronic, to pharma and household names in big tech. The crowd can often outperform individual experts because assessing a lesion is just one highly-specialized learnable skill, while being a dermatologist represents a wide variety of thousands of skills. This intelligent medical crowd (think medical students in Ghana, radiologists in Vietnam, nurses in Nebraska) competes in labeling contests for prizes on Centaur’s iOS app in the app store. They’ve turned what is typically pay per hour work into free (and fun!) “work”, labeling millions of pieces of data any given week.
Anyone can download the app and sign up, so they are able to collect millions of opinions weekly. The platform has quality control mechanisms built in - they’re continually measuring user performance on hidden ground truth to determine what labelers do a good job, and only top annotators get cash prizes. Think of it as an intelligent audit process to determine which opinions to trust.
The intelligent crowd platform is their bread and butter. However, being experts in the art of labeling, Centaur Labs also helps facilitate a “bring your own labelers” model where customers can then use their quality control software technology for their own teams. For customers who are submitting their AI models to regulatory agencies, they also offer a custom consulting solution. Centaur will recruit, train and manage labelers who have the unique and rare qualifications needed to label validation datasets. For example, FDA approvals may mandate that labeling is done by a US board certified and fellowship trained neuroradiologist with 10 years of experience. No shortcuts!
Today Centaur Labs has almost 30 employees, top tier funding from Y Combinator, Matrix Partners, Accel, Susa Ventures and is processing 2M labels per week. They’ve processed over 175M labels in total since founding.
2023 was a big year - the company published 7 papers with academic research partners to prove out the methodology, closed their biggest deals to date, and are better differentiated and positioned than ever to capitalize on AI tailwinds in 2024. They released new APIs, a desktop labeling experience powered by Meta’s Segment Anything model (SAM), cleared SOC2 Type 2 and HIPAA audits, and released their new Validation dataset solution. This coming year they’re excited to deepen partnerships in the ecosystem, grow the sales and CS team, and further penetrate healthcare segments where AI investment is growing rapidly.
Operators to Know (Locally):
John Calcio, Director of Sales
Remi Cura, Principal Data Scientist
Ali Devaney, Head of Marketing
Jon Fortes, Senior DevOps Engineer
Max Gillett, Software Engineer
Mike Jin, Senior Research Scientist
Srishti Kapur, Senior Engagement Manager
Laura Kier, VP of Growth
Alex McFerran, Director Partnerships
Chetan Shenoy, Senior Software Engineer
Gordon Wade, Data Engineer
Fima Furman, Chief Architect
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
Which of the various business lines are the most strategic to Centaur Labs’ success?
What are the biggest challenges to growing the marketplace and adding various customer use cases in the quarters ahead?
What is the long term vision for the company? How does the recent LLM explosion change that approach?
What are the most important roles the team will be looking to add in 2024 // teams that are positioned for the most growth?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Centaur Labs you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team help bring more medical breakthroughs to humanity. The future is looking downright thrilling. See you around town!
Dean Walsh, Senior Program Manager @ TiE ScaleUp, TiE Boston
Dean Walsh has traveled across ecosystems and hierarchies as a bridge between eras, one of the last paperboys, who rode his bike and mind on a path from neighborhood streets into the world of high growth startups. Today, he serves as the Senior Program Manager for TiE ScaleUp, an equity free accelerator program for Boston-based seed startups.
Dean started working at seven years old, delivering newspapers around the North Shore. The daily route was an influential part of his childhood, a type of mini-entrepreneurship that required him to sign new subscribers, manage billings, and practice customer service.
At home, Dean was surrounded by electronics (he received a volt meter for his fifth birthday). His dad was an electrical engineer, working for GE for more than 40 years, and was on the road for months at a time. When he was home, they built RC cars, instruments, models, and classic analog electronics. His mother, a special needs teacher, supported his inquisitive nature and encouraged him to try his best in school. Through a series of twists and turns, his paper route helped earn him a scholarship to Phillips Exeter, where he lived and learned with brilliant peers, students from all sorts of different backgrounds & cultures across the world.
After high school, Dean attended NYU but later transferred to the University of Rochester. In between, he went to woodworking school and considered a career in the trades. But the scholarship Rochester offered him was too good of an opportunity to pass up.
Dean spent his undergrad years preparing for law school, and jumped into a firm right after graduation. But after just a month chained to a desk filling and filing documents, he knew. The legal profession wasn't for Dean.
So he took a walk. Like, a really long walk. Dean moved back home to work at a local apple orchard to save a few bucks before he set off to hike the Appalachian Trail for the summer. 2,200 miles of thinking will help a person find clarity. From April to September, he walked.
Dean reflects back on that summer fondly. Having the opportunity to walk and think about what he wanted to do with his life allowed him plenty of time and space for reflection in between conversations on front porches with locals from Georgia to Maine.
When he returned home, he moved to Boston to join Justice Resource Institute, a local social justice nonprofit. They had a Public Health division with a mandate to help Americans live healthier lives. The organization helped combat injection drug use and homelessness, support local LGBTQ youth, and much more. In an Operations & Project Management role, Dean worked cross functionally across a team of 100 people, with various projects & initiatives.
He had been in the role only 6 months when the pandemic struck. With his apartment right down the street from their offices, Dean sprang into action. He helped keep a dozen programs operating, delivered laptops by bicycle (with prior experience in the role) to students in need, and distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct aid to members of the community. It was a poignant time and role with so many housing and food insecure people looking for help. With the needs and mission of the organization evolving, priorities and budgets shifted so Dean set out to find a new home.
He had also been applying to PhD programs but, when that path didn’t quite pan out, Dean started looking for a new adventure. While networking he met Laura Teicher, the President & Executive Director at Forge, the sister non-profit to Greentown Labs focused on sustainable manufacturing. Laura had previously been the Executive Director of TiE Boston and helped make him aware they were looking for a new Program Manager.
TiE Boston is a membership organization of entrepreneurs, executives, and senior professionals of Indian origin focused on fostering future innovation. They were looking for someone to manage their TiE ScaleUp Accelerator program in Boston and, for Dean, it was a really cool opportunity to jump into tech while seeing a bunch of different aspects of building startups.
Boston is one of TiE’s largest worldwide chapters and Dean was excited to ramp up with mentorship from Neeraj Chandra, an accomplished executive, board member, investor, and leader who had previously worked in worldwide strategy for IBM. Neeraj tragically passed away in his mid 60’s just a week into Dean’s tenure while on a trip to visit his son.
Not only was Dean new to startups and the technology industry but the leader who he was due to learn from was no longer there. It was a difficult situation for everyone. Dean had to jump into the fray and get up to speed by talking to dozens of entrepreneurs and investors, and reading everything he could - “4 Steps to the Epiphany”, “The Lean Startup”, “Mastering the VC Game”, “The Power Law”, and many more. The context was helpful but so was learning the vernacular.
He set out to recruit startups for their upcoming accelerator program, talking to dozens of founders and learning to ask the right questions to become an informed, conscientious evaluator. Dean quickly figured out how to zero in on what early stage startups were building and how they were doing it to help find the perfect candidates whose businesses they could help accelerate.
Second, he had to go run and execute the actual program. After recruiting a 15 company cohort during the peak of the market (Nov ‘21), he has continued to support those companies and teams through the program as conditions have tightened.
Leaning on the curriculum TiE had already built and bringing in additional speakers & mentors, attending the program himself helped Dean continue to get up to speed. He learned about GTM, R&D, and everything else he needed to learn to jump in and help their various companies.
TiE ScaleUp is in the midst of its 10th cohort and Dean has now run the program three times. He’s iterating on the program design and continuing to build relationships and grow the alumni resources too. Dean continues to support seed stage companies through TiE and aspires to work with more TiE chapters across the world, especially in India bridging learnings from both cultures from his seat in Boston at one of the oldest & biggest chapters. He’s continuing to meet with talented founders and connect them to TiE’s amazing resources of accomplished entrepreneurs & executives.
Dean has also been working to evolve his mindset over the past 12-18 months. After the loss of his boss just a week on the job, he experienced the loss of his father a year later. TiE was very supportive, and these personal & professional experiences have prompted him to reflect on his life, career, and his overall priorities in life. With all that he has experienced, he tries to live in the moment and take advantage of what comes across his path. Opportunities arise and you have to be ready to grab onto them when they come with a focus on adaptability and resilience. Dean continues to seek balance to go the distance over the long term, checking in on himself along the journey.
Getting at the Heart of the Company
Dean meets with a lot of startups regularly. Hearing from all sorts of different founders & teams at different phases of their journey has helped him work with founders to get to the heart of what entrepreneurs are trying to accomplish.
One of the things he has worked hard at, in partnership with TiE companies, is to pursue a line of questioning that helps both parties reword their positioning in order to get clear on their mission.
Dean often works with founders who have decades of specialized knowledge who are steeped in opaque, technical language. He does his best to help them put their roadmap in plain terms so a wider audience can understand the messaging. By broadening the description, analogs, or analogies both parties can work to develop “non industry” language that helps clear up pitch points, marketing, and positioning to use in day to day parlance.
Maybe it’s part of his Boston identity to encourage others to speak in plain language, but Dean has found it helps startups and audiences alike make messages travel further.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Trust to Teach Yourself - “Don’t underestimate how much you can learn in 3-6 months. It’s easy to get intimidated by raw technical expertise or someone who’s been working on something for a long time. But you can get up to speed quickly by trusting your ability. Read a lot, do your research, and get to the point where you can speak the language and start learning from & understanding the experts.”
You Can’t Predict Your Path - “You can’t predict all the opportunities that will come your way. Most of us go through life constantly surprised by the decision points that arise. You can do your best to aim toward certain goals, but when an unexpected chance or challenge comes along, you have to be ready to dive in or address it head-on.”
Having A Macro View - “Constantly learn about big picture trends – geopolitical, local, and technological – and look at the whole market. Don’t just focus narrowly on what you’re doing. Keep your head on a swivel, look at everything around you, and always be contextualizing!”
Working at TiE has given Dean an immense respect for early stage entrepreneurs and he really enjoys getting to learn in a bunch of different areas, continuing to look for great people that he can build his career with. He loves the fact that he can’t predict what he’ll be doing in his 50’s.
You can find Dean putting in work all over Boston, recruiting startups for TiE’s accelerator program, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. Look forward to seeing all the teams, industries, and trends you impact in the coming years!
Operators Club Corner
In 2024 you’ll be hearing more from members of the MGMT Boston Operators Club. These are startup leaders building & launching products, serving customers, leading teams, and making a dent in the Boston startup ecosystem
Underscore Q1 Core Coffee Shop
General Partners: Richard Dulude, Chris Gardner, Lily Lyman, James Orsillo
Head of Community: Jenni Goodman
Founding: 2015
Mission: It takes a community
Team: 10 & 100% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
LPs: Funds, Endowments & Strategic Investors
Stage: Pre-Seed & Seed
Focus Area(s): B2B Enterprise Software
Key Portfolio Companies (Locally): CloudZero, Goldcast, Hi Marley, Salsify, Tetrascience, Wonderment
Fund Size: $250M+ AUM
Underscore, an early-stage stage venture capital firm based here in Boston, believes it takes a community to build an enduring company. Those aren’t just words. I believe they do the most community building at scale of any early stage venture firm in Boston to connect entrepreneurs, operators, builders, and community partners with each other on behalf of the Boston startup ecosystem.
Underscore focuses on investing in early stage (Pre-Seed & Seed) B2B Enterprise Software startups across the U.S. Last Wednesday, they hosted a Q1 Core Coffee Shop gathering for their Core Community and members of the MGMT Boston Operators Club were lucky enough to join in!
More than 100 leaders from the Boston ecosystem came to make connections, share learnings, and discuss the current landscape. Jenni Goodman & Richard Dulude shared a few words about the work Underscore is doing to help their portfolio companies and community members endure the chilly February (and market) air to make the event.
There’s plenty of operational caution and some talented folks looking for new roles out there but I also heard a lot of optimism for this coming (super?)cycle. There are SaaS companies still steadily growing, early stage AI companies leveraging text, video & audio technology to help drive enterprise efficiencies, and some startups even gearing up for major headcount growth in 2024.
There’s a lot to love about what’s being built in Boston and I *know* some of the community’s best days are ahead. Thank you to Brian, Lily, Claire, Devin, Jenni, Jimmy, Richard, and the rest of the Underscore team for hosting us. It was great to learn more about the work you do for Boston startups, operators, and the ecosystem at large. Excited for more Core Coffees in the future!
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