MGMT Boston - W7, Q4 23 - Mandrel // Gina Guarracino, Mirakl // Operators Club Corner
Mandrel // Gina Guarracino, Mirakl // Operators Club Corner
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 685+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Mandrel - an operations software platform for consumer brands and physical goods businesses to allow them to view fulfillment performance and costs in real time in order to help them scale faster and more profitably
Thanks to Michele S for the intro to Mandrel
Gina Guarracino, Director, People @ Mirakl - a capable, empathetic People leader who’s traveled from staffing to unions to media and now excels in high growth technology scale ups at late stage commerce startup Mirakl
Thanks to Amelia for the intro to Gina
(NEW) Operators Club Corner - Dillon McDermott, Head of Sales @ Zowie - this one’s for the job hunters out there. A report from the front
🔥 Upcoming December Event: MGMT Boston Consumer Breakfast - 12/13 @ 9am - co-hosted by Fidelity for Startups 🔥
Inviting Boston-area venture backed software operating leaders, founders & investors to join for a Consumer breakfast on Wed, 12/13 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
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q4 Startups Highlighted: Procurement Sciences AI, HYCU, Givzey, LogRocket, Stockpress
Q4 Operators Highlighted: Danielle Pedra // Delegate, Natalie Cantave // Estateably, Luciana Marzilli Lord // Repsly, Andrew Dickson // SevenRooms, Lucy Driscoll // 10Beauty
Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q2 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q3 Startups & Operators Highlighted
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.
Mandrel
Founders: Arjun Aggarwal
Founding: 2023
Mission: The operations data platform for consumer brands
Employees: 3 & 60% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Pre-Seed & <$5M raised
Investors: Asymmetric Capital, Construct, LUX Capital
Key Customers: Coming Soon!
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Mandrel is building “operations data software” for consumer brands and physical goods businesses. This Seed stage team is racing to build a platform that will allow commerce businesses to view fulfillment performance and costs in real time in order to help them scale faster and more profitably. Like Klaviyo or Segment, but for operations. Or DataDog for operations infrastructure.
Mandrel was founded in 2023 by Arjun Aggarwal, an experienced operator from Desktop Metal (DM). He spent 5+ years at the company leading Product through some of their key initial launches while also managing key supply chain & manufacturing relationships. He also oversaw investor relations and corporate development when they went public on the NYSE. Desktop Metal is an original equipment manufacturer who designs, manufactures, and sells 3D printers across a variety of industrial use cases. In short, they build physical products and have to manage their product & operations processes closely as a hardware company
Arjun & his team worked really closely with Desktop Metal’s operations team on inventory planning and purchasing decisions as the company grew. From a product perspective, he had to understand the interplay between shipping new products versus selling through the inventory already on hand for pricing decisions and margin forecasting. All of this data and the decision making decisions required rigorous analysis across the company.
Desktop Metal worked with a third party fulfillment provider and every quarter it was interesting to see the delta in costs. They weren’t shipping 100ks of products per year, but there was always a variance between the output and their initial forecast. Getting accurate data and integrating it into their ERP system was a consistent challenge.
Working for a hardware company helped Arjun understand what put the “hard” in hardware - inventory, fulfillment, and supply chain visibility. He wanted to build something that could help Desktop Metal and other commerce businesses run better.
Looking out over the past decade of software for physical goods businesses, most of the products and investment dollars have been focused on the demand side of the P&L - advertising or marketing tech that leverages data to drive demand. One could argue much of that problem area has been tackled.
You know this too but it’s worth reiterating how much global e-commerce has grown over the past decade. $1.3T in 2014 global e-commerce sales is approaching $6T+ in 2024 (src). Not to mention all the supply chain disruption that Covid brought us. Arjun wrote a helpful blog post here that helps highlight the post pandemic shift.
Mandrel believes that the next decade will be focused on “doing more with less” and helping close the gap between top line growth and bottom line efficiency, with a renewed focus on sustainable growth. And the truth is that a lot of companies don’t really know where to start operationally. $100M consumer brands are historically founded by product, design, or customer experts and can be lighter on operational expertise.
There is a big opportunity to help companies optimize their operations and provide tools to help them understand how to make better decisions. Physical goods businesses and consumer brands with high velocity around shipping and fulfillment serve as the best initial use case. Larger brands may have the resources to build out a data team, set up a data warehouse, and develop integrations into data sources and pipelines into tools like Tableau. But it’s expensive, takes time, and can’t always be done at a smaller scale. Mandrel is building the platform that productizes this whole effort, an operations data platform for consumer brands “out of the box”.
Mandrel’s initial roadmap is focused on building out integrations and standardizing data across many different schema into a single, clean data model to make this operations platform a reality. Mandrel will leverage partners in fulfillment, followed by the rest of the supply chain - design, manufacturing, quality, logistics, support, and returns. Examples include warehouse management tools like ShipHero, Extensiv, Deposco & Logiwa and order source data from Shopify and Amazon. Second, they’ll help customers make use of their data in a way that an experienced COO might by building data applications on top of the data platform and eventually developing an external API for 3rd parties and brands to develop their own custom analyses, applications, and workflows.
Target customers will be mid market brands with eight figures to nine figures in revenue with a roadmap to eventually capture enterprise scale use cases with the operational scale & complexity to match.
Earlier this year, Mandrel closed a pre-seed round with meaningful institutional support from Boston based Asymmetric Ventures, Lux Capital, and Construct Capital. The team is currently remote & building in the Boston area with the hopes of bringing on a couple more foundational team members in the next couple quarters. In addition to the core team, they’re building a group of advisors from commerce software companies (e.g. Klaviyo), consumer brands (e.g. Caraway), and fulfillment businesses (e.g. Outerspace).
Operators to Know:
Arjun Aggarwal, Founder & CEO
Henry Chan, Founding Engineer
Rem Stone, Founding Engineer
David Henriquez, Advisor
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key milestones over the next 6 months?
Who are the key buyers for Mandrel’s product?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Mandrel you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more discipline to the operational layer of commerce. All responsible growth practitioners applaud your efforts. See you around!
Gina Guarracino, Director, People @ Mirakl
Gina Guarracino is a capable, empathetic People leader who’s traveled from staffing to unions to media and now excels in high growth technology scale ups. She is a Director of People at late stage commerce startup Mirakl, helping the team expand their U.S. operations including a recent office move from Somerville to Boston’s Financial District.
Gina grew up just to the south of Boston, the third of four siblings. Her dad built his career in operations at the local electricians union, a consummate professional who taught Gina that whatever you do you need to go try and be the best. Gina’s mom managed a busy household as a kind, empathetic listener who was always ready to help her family.
Gina has always been an activist at heart, fighting for the underdog and treating people fairly. Her first work experience was naturally in customer service, waitressing at restaurants. She would probably still be working in the hospitality industry if she didn’t treasure her own nights and weekends so much.
At a restaurant she learned that every table is a little bit different. Because people are..people. You learn to tailor your approach. She loved the ever changing environment and thinks this initially drew her to a career in Human Resources.
Gina went off to study Business Management at Suffolk University before working at a recruiting firm after graduation. After a year post graduation, on nights and weekends, she went back to Suffolk for her MBA. During her graduate studies she took a particular interest in organizational behavior, focusing on org designs and how people operate within companies.
At Daley & Associates, the boutique staffing firm she went to by day, she supported the teams that placed temporary needs and permanent Director to C level execs across IT, Life Sciences, Accounting & Finance, and more. The work gave her invaluable insights into the TA (talent acquisition) space. She had to develop her outbound skills and learn how companies staff and operate. She even helped place her mom for a role doing medical billing! Moms always deliver.
The Electricians Union, I.B.E.W. Local 103, had an opening in human resources and Gina jumped at the opportunity to go “in house”. She helped the union modernize digitally and her responsibilities included running health insurance, retirement, and disbursements for life changing events. She learned the ins and outs of managing an employee base and the project management skills needed to support the function.
Eventually, Gina was ready to make a jump into media. She landed a role at advertising agency Hill Holliday as an HR Analyst, working with each function of their Human Resources operation across talent management, culture, and workplace experience and seeing how it all worked together. Traditional advertising was going through a digital shift and she had a front row seat to those headwinds.
Following a reduction in force, Gina was given the opportunity to step up and prove she was capable with a promotion to Senior HR Business Partner. She managed young, creative talent and the etiquette challenges that come with their assimilation to the workplace alongside senior executives and their cultural expectations for how business is done. Through the various corporate undulations she learned to celebrate onboarding new team members as well as celebrating when sending them out of the company just as warmly and seamlessly.
Through good times and bad, Gina made sure to emphasize that “a strong people function is crucial”. When the pandemic hit, she had to seek out external expertise. She leveraged peers at leading companies like Google to figure out how to craft their approach. The pandemic was a crash course in seeing the cultural push & pull between who wanted to go back to the office, when, and how.
Gina navigated this trying time the best she could. She even supported Hill Holliday during a pandemic office move from the Financial District to the Seaport and, after some time growing in her role, was drawn to startups.
When she met the Mirakl team, including her first manager Amelia Van Camp, she was impressed by the caliber of the product and team. They were working with some big name consumer clients driving big impact in the e-commerce vertical. In Gina’s view, the move to startups was “same mechanics, new bike”. Finding a startup going through hypergrowth and experiencing the HR challenges of moving at high speed was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
After Amelia was promoted, Gina became the Director of the Americas and APAC on the People Team which includes the U.S., Brazil, Australia & Singapore. She’s responsible for all talent in those two regions across attraction & onboarding, development, and offboarding. She helps the company manage benefits, talent management & how they think about growth, career pathing, and promotions in each market.
Gina takes a lot of pride in her career, through the celebratory and challenging times, balancing them both as an even keeled partner. Most recently, she’s proud of her leadership in helping Mirakl execute an office move from Somerville to the Financial District.
Golden Onboarding & Offboarding
Common sense is really important in growing businesses. Especially in the world of startups, there is a tendency and desire to over engineer the problems (and solutions). Gina coaches us that most of the time, if we just slow down a little bit, we can create simple but elegant solutions to drive us forward.
Gina readily admits the hardest part of HR is involuntary offboarding. When someone is exited from a business, regardless of how long or successful their experience was, they’ll remember when something goes wrong at the end. Because it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish!
Gina understands the responsibility and takes pride in making sure this critical piece of the workplace experience is handled professionally. For anyone out there designing an offboarding experience, Gina stresses that you need to continue to treat any departing employee as a human. During exit interviews, she collects data so managers and the organization can better understand the “why” and improve. She takes great care to uncover learnings to better understand overarching themes for more intelligent backfilling.
Most importantly? Gina abides by the golden rule. Treat others as you would want to be treated when exiting a business. She puts empathy into the offboarding experience and makes sure it’s not “one size fits all”. Common sense, indeed.
Departing employees usually go through 3-5 emotions when they’re hit with this career (and life) altering news. Shock, problem solving, sadness, anger, or sympathy. When you recognize those emotions from a departing colleague, be prepared to address them specifically while still maintaining the integrity of the information you need to relay. Gina prepares structured talking points to ensure each employee receives the information they need but also comes ready to pivot. Responding to their body language and off the cuff responses is critical to providing a great experience in a difficult time.
Gina admits that she gets through these difficult conversations knowing she is best served to handle it on behalf of the organization, leading with empathy and humanity, even if her heart is in her throat. Her hands still shake every time and that’s OK. We’re human. Her goal is to provide as soft of a landing as possible.
Last, she’ll offer a way to keep in touch as she closes out any offboarding conversation.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
All of Us Are Developing - “We need to give people space to make mistakes and rebound from those mistakes. When you’re in conversations with executives and they’re showing their humanity, it’s important to understand we’re all human going through life for the first time. The same applies to us. We’re all going to be challenged with new experiences and developing new skills. It can be easy to doubt ourselves and our abilities, and everyone should know that’s a normal step in the process. Adam Grant has a great quote ‘Impostor syndrome isn't a disease. It's a normal response to internalizing impossibly high standards. Doubting yourself doesn't mean you're going to fail. It usually means you're facing a new challenge and you're going to learn. Feeling uncertainty is a precursor to growth.’”
Quickly Recognize & Address Failure - “We don’t have a crystal ball and we shouldn’t let that uncertainty stop us from making decisions. We’re not always going to make the right decision. As you’re making a decision, it’s ok to not have all the information but continue to keep yourself honest and if things aren’t going well be quick to change. Don’t live in that bad decision, be quick to address failure”
Mutual Respect - “No one will respect our personal and professional boundaries if we don’t respect our own. There is no work life balance, it’s a work/life flow at the end of the day that is always a little imbalanced. As we navigate this new hybrid work model, it’s important to draw boundaries for ourselves and others”
Gina is professionally focused on helping Mirakl grow and scale. Personally, she’s focused on leaving things better than she found them. One day she’d love to get in on the ground floor of an early stage startup, helping another business with the characteristics of Mirakl create a solid early foundation from startup to scale up. Because building a balanced business isn’t just confined to people, process, or operations.
If you want to learn more about Gina, you can find her during the week somewhere near Mirakl’s new location in the financial district after their big move, recalling some warm memories from a recent European vacation, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing Gina. Mirakl is lucky to have a caring & thoughtful People leader to help them manage the ups and downs of the startup journey. Hope you had a great trip across the pond!
Operators Club Corner
In the months ahead as we turn the page to 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
Dillon McDermott, Head of Sales @ Zowie
Dillon McDermott has worked in the SaaS world for 13 years, mostly leading sales and other go-to-market teams. He’s a Boston native, and currently resides in South Boston, but spent 8 years in San Francisco. Recently, he was VP of Sales for Thankful.ai, helping to grow new business sales and leading the company to an acquisition in July. Prior to that, he led the North American sales team at SurveyMonkey, focusing on their CX and Enterprise Solutions products.
This one’s for the job hunters. There’s a lot of you out there – myself included until recently!
Here’s a fun stat - in 2023 there have been over 240,000 roles eliminated in the tech industry (per MorningStar). This has impacted more than one thousand companies…and we’re not even through Q4 yet! 😬
The market can seem bleak, and on top of that the hiring process is often grueling. Fortunately, as companies plan for 2024, hiring is inevitably picking back up. But man, it seems like lots of companies are spooked! I mean, execs are fresh off of a few quarterly board meetings where they’re justifying another missed forecast, reviewing the impact of their latest RIF, and talking more about operating efficiency than growth multiples.
No one wants to misstep, and the so-called “growth” companies have switched out their hockey stick charts in favor of cost reduction techniques (or, penalty kill strategies to stick with the analogy?).
So where does that leave job hunters?
Well for starters, enough with the doom and gloom! One of my biggest operating themes, and certainly one I carry into a job search, is STAY POSITIVE. The process is frustrating–plain and simple. And while rejection will outweigh success in this chapter, it just takes one! To lend a hand, I thought I’d share a few tips that have been helpful for me during the job search:
Stay Organized
Maybe it’s been drilled into me from a decade of sales management, but I manage the job search like I’m managing a pipeline.
I’ve got my CRM (Google Sheet) of prospects and have it all broken down by company profile and key details: HQ location, employee size, funding, compensation, stage of the process, key stakeholders, and, of course, up to date next steps… old habits, ya know?
And yes, much like sales, you’re going to lose plenty of times. The key thing is what can you learn from a loss? It’s always helpful to step back and analyze what you think went well, what could be improved upon and how you can better prepare next time.
Ask for feedback! Any decent hiring manager should provide you with some constructive feedback that can help you out moving forward.
Leverage AI
Of course you have! Seriously though, ChatGPT and other freemium AI enabled tools are a secret weapon in the interview process. Some future company will make a killing with an AI-fueled career management platform…startup idea? 🤔
ChatGPT is helpful for refreshing the resume, building email templates for outreach, coming up with some compelling interview questions, etc.
For example, a prompt you could use to help nail that marketing gig could be “Provide a list of 10 strategic questions when interviewing the Director of Marketing for a SaaS company.” Have some fun with it and test things out. You’ll find some good ones! But, make sure you’re genuinely interested in the answer or discussing the topic in depth.
Look for other freemium tools that will help you be more efficient with the process too – email address finders, company news/funding stories, Google alerts for companies you’re interested in, BuiltWith to inspect what tech the company has just to name a few.
Stand out from the crowd
I saw a stat that said 80% of interviewees don’t send a follow-up / thank you email. This one is just TOO easy.
Make sure to send a brief but thoughtful note to your interviewers. But, this isn’t just to show face and say thank you. Use this as another opportunity to show your stuff. In your message, make sure to share specifically what about the conversation that fires you up about the role/company, offer something that may have pleasantly surprised you, another question you didn’t get to, or some third party info you found that ties back to a part of your discussion. Trust me, not many other candidates are doing this and it will immediately set you apart.
Go the extra mile. Let’s be honest, as job hunters, we have the time! If you discussed some of the responsibilities or objectives for the role, it’s a great opportunity to showcase what you know. Is building a hiring plan important? Setting up a strategy for a customer expansion strategy? If you’re truly qualified for the role, and know your stuff, put together a simple plan, an example of how you accomplished a similar task/project before, or a few bullets on how you’d approach achieving those targets.
Get yourself plugged in!
There’s some great communities out there for job searchers. Of course, for folks here locally, MGMT Boston provides an incredible network. I tapped into the network for my search and was referred into a company I interviewed with.
Other online communities on LinkedIn & Pavilion (for GTM folks) are great outlets as well
Reach out to the ones pulling the purse strings! Many VC firms have a talent team for placing candidates into their portfolio companies. Same goes for PE firms. I’ve worked with recruiters from companies like OpenView and Craft Ventures who have looked to match me with relevant opportunities within their portfolio.
Find your communities, and be active. It’s no secret you’ll find more success through your connections than firing off application after application on company job boards.
Find other sources to pour energy into
A lot of people say searching for work is a full time job. In general, I try to approach it that way. But hold up…give yourself a break!
I found that having some outlets to tap into your creativity, expend your energy or dedicate some time to is truly beneficial. Doesn’t matter what it is, but X out of the resume and close the laptop. Your mental wellbeing will thank you.
For me, getting outside and running has been my go-to. Most days I’m out looping around Castle Island in Southie or the Esplanade.
I’ve also never been much of a reader in my adult life. But, I’ve been reading a book every couple of weeks and it’s a habit I’ll be taking with me in the future. My most recent read was Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies - a great one for the group here in Boston who are into crime novels!
Finally, if I can help in any way let me know! If you need some help with interview prep (I’ve done a lot of them recently), resume guidance, introductions to folks in my network or just some general career advice just shoot me a note. I’d love to chat!
Best of luck,
Dillon
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