Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 530+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Posh AI - a conversational AI software company focused on financial services companies, bringing better digital banking experiences to every financial institution
Thanks to Greg M. for the intro to Posh
Sam Richard, Head of Growth @ ngrok - working to help the formerly bootstrapped, now venture-backed company and their team think through how to build a platform while serving all of their various constituents along the way
Thanks to Max M. for the intro to Sam
INVITE - I’m co-hosting a breakfast for venture backed startup operating leaders with Kristen Craft @ Fidelity for Startups in downtown Boston next Wed, 8/23, 9am - 10:30am. If that’s you, please join us!!
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - e-mail me directly to learn more!
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q3 Startups Highlighted: Snyk, FeatureByte, Neural Magic, Notable Systems & Akooda
Q3 Operators Highlighted: Alexa Murray / WHOOP, Kieran O’Driscoll / AtScale, Max Milhan / Rhino, Ries McQuillan / Vested & Dave Barron / HubSpot
Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q2 Startups & Operators Highlighted
Posh AI
Founders: Karan Kashyap & Matt McEachern
Founding: 2018
Mission: Posh’s mission is to accelerate the responsible adoption of AI for financial institutions, empowering them to best serve their communities. Posh’s AI solutions span digital and voice channels. They are purpose-built to address challenges unique to the financial services industry, such as: alleviating long wait times in favor of warm, conversational customer self-service, enabling 24/7 access to banking services, creating lead-generation opportunities without compromising VIP customer service, and streamlining knowledge management
Employees: 100 & 45% Local
Workplace: Remote first
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $35M raised
Investors: Canapi, JAM FINTOP, Curql, and TruStage
Key Customers: DCU, MassMutual Credit Union, Florida Credit Union, SalemFive
Glassdoor Rating: 5.0
Valuation (estimated): $100M - $300M (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in the Q3 ‘21 $31M 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!
Posh AI is a “conversational AI software company” focused on financial services companies, bringing better digital banking experiences to every financial institution. Founded in 2018 by Karan Kashyap & Matt McEachern out of MIT’s AI lab, Posh is transforming how financial services companies connect with their customers and automate contact center workflow.
Founders Karan & Matt met at MIT. As classmates, fraternity brothers, and friends I imagine they were sitting together after class in the Barker Library and got to chatting. It probably went a little something like this: “On the count of three, I want you to name your favorite technology. One, two, three… ‘natural language processing and conversational AI!’ WHAT? Did we just become best friends?!? YUP!”
Regional and local banking has undergone a sea change over the last decade. There have been no shortage of headlines in 2023, either.. Smaller institutions don’t have the same budgets or technical teams on staff to invest in customized digital technology solutions. While Bank of America or JP Morgan might have their own conversational AI & digital chatbot workflows, the smaller players need help!
With a little more schooling, research, and $1M in earned consulting fees Karan & Matt set out to build a digital platform focused on small & mid size financial institutions. Give the power to the people, you know? They enmeshed themselves in the Boston financial services startup ecosystem, enrolling in Digital Credit Union’s accelerator program at the DCU Fintech Innovation Center and also winning MassChallenge’s $40k Fintech program Gold Prize.
What is Posh building? They provide 24/7 customer service with bank-savvy AI, building a vertical platform for credit unions and other mid & small size financial institutions. Their Digital Concierge handles frontline contact almost like a person, empowering Customer Service teams with simple language everyone can understand. Customers want quick answers and their software can provide instant, accurate info via a chatbot. And for more complicated inquiries, they can help route to an agent. All the while, their software is learning and capturing data on customer trends, usage, and transcripts to help improve performance.
Posh’s Voice Concierge receives calls and answers routine questions, resolving large workloads for customer service agents. By replacing touch-tone menus with natural conversations, they can provide a modern (and less frustrating) experience to keep conversations moving forward. And, like Digital Concierge, their voice solution can route to agents and share context when higher touch is needed. Voice 360 & Banking Teller uses conversational AI to complete transactions and is customizable to reflect the values, voice, and capabilities of individual institutions.
Working with their client, the Associated Credit Union of Texas (where everything is bigger of course because it’s Texas), Posh handled more than 51% of incoming calls, 60% of chat conversations, and decreased their call abandon rate by 93%.
Posh has most recently launched a Knowledge Assistant to help their customers’ employees get faster, easier access to internal information, using the latest generative AI technologies. So, instead of looking at spreadsheets or searching databases, they can more easily query the information on demand.
In November 2021, the team closed a $31M Series A venture round that will allow them to continue investing in their platform & team. Conversational AI is still in its nascent stage and Posh is laser focused on growing its Go To Market capabilities, R&D team, and continue to help level the playing field of the financial services industry. They work with 50+ institutions with their client base growing 40% and their headcount has growing by 45% in North America (U.S. & Canada), both over the past 12 months.
Operators to Know (Locally):
David Bergstein, VP of Product
Adam Ceresia, Software Engineering Manager
Tyler Creighton, Conversational AI Design Lead
Michelle Fullwood, Principal Research Scientist
Jay Glickman, Software Engineering Manager, Client Solutions
Kelton (KJ) Hardrict Jr, Senior Software Engineer, Client Solutions
Ryan Hibbard, Client Success Team Lead
Ben Kermisch, Chief of Staff
Andrew Leaf, Senior Software Engineer, Core Banking
Yuyu Li, Software Engineer II
Ethan Liu, Staff Software Engineer
Vincent Liu, Engineering Manager
Melisa McGregor, Senior Field Marketing Manager
Matthew Miller, Senior Software Engineering Manager
Greg Montemurro, Client Operations Manager
Alexey Shablygin, Software Engineer II
Rishi Sharma, Senior Director of AI
Rohan Shirali, Director of Data Analytics
Markus Sinnhuber, Director of Business Development
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Posh team I know I missed many up & coming local operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the biggest areas of focus for Posh over the next 2-4 quarters and the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 100 employees?
Who are the biggest competitors? How has the rollout of LLMs (large language models) changed the course of the roadmap this year?
What is the long term vision for the company?
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 Posh you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more financial institutions into the digital age. All credit unions, small & mid size financial institutions applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Sam Richard, Head of Growth @ ngrok
Career Summary / Products with Large Surface Area / Career Insights
Sam Richard is always pushing herself to think outside of the box, solve puzzles, and find complicated problems with large surface areas where her unique talents are best utilized. As the Head of Growth at unified ingress company ngrok, she is working to help the formerly bootstrapped, now venture-backed company and their team think through how to build a platform while serving all of their various constituents along the way.
Sam very well may have been Boston bound from an early age. Growing up in Indiana, her father was a mechanic and her mom ran the family business. She loved Mona Lisa Smile and Hilary Clinton’s career was ascending during her adolescence. Either way, as the eldest daughter, Sam dreamed of attending Wellesley College.
She was on her way. At Wellesley, she majored in Political Science and graduated Cum Laude. Madam Secretary would have been proud. Sam was the first in her family to attend college, soon followed by her younger sister who attended Mount Holyoke.
One month after graduation, she met her future husband who was a Tufts graduate. A big influence on Sam, he has always pushed her to swing for the fences and stand out. Everyone who left Wellesley was on a tracked job like consulting, banking, or non profits and Sam just wanted to excel and move up the ladder quickly. She’s really appreciative that he has pushed her to do that.
Her Wellesley education has always opened doors, at least in Boston. She interned at the Department of Defense and spent a couple years after college doing consulting work in public policy around social security experimentation. A lot of her colleagues were gearing up for PhD studies. The thought of spending more time in school, potentially away from Boston didn’t thrill Sam either.
She wanted to enter the “for profit” sector and thought, why not try her hand in technology. Looking on one of the best job websites of the 2010s, Craigslist, she found Ve Interactive. An advertising agency, focused on commerce and cart abandonment, she was thrown into websites and pixels and the tidal wave of the internet’s digital growth. They were measured on performance and she learned a ton from their in-house experts about how growth on the internet worked during these nascent years.
She met Dan Slagen who had just started at Hourly Nerd (now Catalant Technologies) as their CMO, while also interviewing at Uber for a Customer Success role. Dan convinced her to join his marketing team at Hourly Nerd. Dan was looking for someone who could help set up all their operations around marketing and demand generation. Sam dove right in.
After Dan departed the business he recommended Sam for a role at Dispatch.me, a company where he was an advisor, to have Sam join as their Head of Marketing. As their 6th employee, Dispatch was building APIs for large industrial makers like GE, Sears or Siemens to communicate with SMBs who repaired their products like electricians, plumbers, and other home services.
Dispatch’s goal wasn’t to acquire hundreds of customers. They only needed a handful of large customers to work with local networks of millions of local service providers. It wasn’t just about acquiring new customers but also about driving adoption of their product throughout these large companies for their mobile apps and tailored messaging. Sam worked on hard problems like “how do we make the companies that pay us, work for us?”
She loved the team she worked with at Dispatch. Reflecting back, it was some of the best years of her professional life. They had a creative, hard working team who led with speed. She got to manage and work with engineers directly before the company was acquired by Vista Equity Partners. Sam established self serve motions, established a Product Analytics function, and built Product Led Sales. Now all common “soundbites” that didn’t yet exist in startup lexicon.
As Sam and the rest of the team were onboarding onto the Vista platform, a friend reached out to see if she would be interested in joining Boston based venture capital firm OpenView Partners to help build out their product platform practice. On the eve of giving birth to her first child, Sam jumped at the challenge!
The opportunity to join an investment firm gave Sam the “polish” she was looking for professionally. She gained a wider lens into the startup world from the investor perspective. Investors are talented at packaging people and products, so naturally she learned a lot about personal branding. She felt like she got an MBA in GTM analysis and segmentation, able to see her work in new ways through frameworks, and operate at different depths.
While at OpenView, she became the point person for how developers bought software and helped seek out investments for the firm too. She authored some of their most popular content like sourcing product led growth benchmarks. At the time, there were plenty of financial metric benchmarks, but less common product benchmarks. She authored some other posts like The New User Journey: Follow Your Users to Understand how to Excel at Go-to-Market, I Asked 50+ Developers How They Buy Software. Here’s What I Learned., and Forget Everything You Know About Selling to Developers.
In summary, Sam learned a LOT about how developers buy products. ngrok came across her desk because she was helping to research startups that fit this research area. ngrok was about to raise a round of funding and she was hoping OpenView would participate. Lightspeed ended up raising the round but Sam had never seen growth numbers like ngrok.
ngrok is simplified, API-first ingress-as-a-service trusted by over 6M developers to get their apps online faster and keep security happy. With one line of code, developers can get instant ingress to services with authentication, observability, and other critical controls. ngrok’s simplicity has made it a de-facto standard tool among developers, and the world’s top brands - including GitHub, Okta, Shopify, and Twilio.
Just like she did at Dispatch, Sam made a role for herself. She asked to be responsible for their self service motion for the thousands of users signing up each day. Now Sam has two children owning Growth for a rapidly scaling Bay Area based startup. Moms, right??
Products with Large Surface Area
When Sam looks at trying to make maximum professional impact, as a Product leader, she searches for complicated products with a lot of surface area.
At Dispatch she had to balance the end user (plumbers, electricians, etc.), the executive buyers (GE, Siemens, etc.), the support team teaching people how to use the product, and even homeowners who were receiving the support. That creates so much space, or surface area, to drive behavior across screens and various points of integration. It takes talent, grit, and creativity to make it all work like a machine.
When she looks at various companies (or opportunities), Sam gets most excited about products where there are multiple buyer personas and many different, extraordinarily complicated ways to use the product. It’s a puzzle to play with!
Recently, when Sam reflects back on some companies who have let their PLG / growth teams go, it’s because the product isn’t that complicated to use and behavior is relatively straightforward to design.
Furthermore, when she looks at the type of companies she aspires to help build - HashiCorp or Microsoft, for example - those companies have large, complex offerings. Sam believes that SaaS success can be found either in highly verticalized niches (Toast) or platforms where you can do a lot horizontally with a specific technology. ngrok being one of those latter examples!
Last, from a career perspective, she thinks these types of companies helps her learn the most. The challenges of making that system run necessitate her communication to be the strongest in order to force her to tailor her audience and declare who she’s going to talk to. It doesn’t hurt that developer products (and developer adoption) are often more profitable too.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
No Linear Path to Success - “I have invented roles for myself at two of the three most impactful roles that I’ve had. I’m not sure what I’d like to do next, and some of the coolest people I know feel the same. There isn’t a linear path. It’s hard to be a mastermind about your career in your 20s and 30s because things change so quickly. Sometimes your value comes by seeing something quickly.”
People Want to Be Told What to Do - “People want to be told what to do, and that is a great way to get people to follow you. There isn’t some grander leadership out there telling you exactly what to do. In startups, everyone is basically winging it so it helps if you can take the reins and lead people forward with the “why” rather than the “how”.”
Enjoy the Ride to Go Far - “If you’re not having fun or feeling confident, you’re probably not going to perform as highly. If I’m making work personally or not having fun, sometimes that’s a sign it’s time to leave. I do my best work when I’m happy and I’m having fun with a great team”
Sam, originally a startup marketer, used to want to be a CMO. But she has since fallen in love with Product. If she stays in the early stage world, she definitely wants to stay in Product. She’s fascinated with vertical software and currently developer tools, an important tech niche she feels lucky to have found such a great group of people.
If you want to learn more about Sam, you can find her on LinkedIn, hanging out with her family just outside of Boston, or working on complicated, puzzling, awesome challenges as the Head of Growth at ngrok. Thanks for sharing Sam. Excited to see the developer growth machine you build, enabling the next generation of the internet, over the coming years!
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