MGMT Boston - W8, Q1 23 - PartsTech // Sejin Mong, Starburst
PartsTech // Sejin Mong, Starburst
TLDR:
PartsTech - Think of PartsTech as the “Kayak for aftermarket auto procurement”
Sejin Mong, Starburst - Customer Success leader who was a teacher once and lifelong student now who made the transition from education to cloud software
Other Resources:
Boston Tech Big Board - building out data on every Boston area venture backed software company I can find
Q1 Startups Highlighted - Jellyfish, Hi Marley, Goldcast, Paperless Parts & Moxie Apparel
Q1 Operators Highlighted - Laina Crosby, Sheila Connolly, Jack McDermott, Nick Abate, Stephanie Roulic & Campbell Brofft
Whether you’re investing capital, time (current or prospective employee), or dollars (current or prospective customers) everyone reading this is a potential investor in these companies. I’d like to introduce PartsTech, a Boston founded growth stage software company building an automotive marketplace worthy of your time and attention.
PartsTech
Founder: Gregory Kirber
Founding: 2013
Mission: PartsTech helps automotive repair shops find the right parts and tires fast
Employees: 90 & 10% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Series B & $10M - $30M raised (estimated, amount unannounced)
Investors: Insight Partners & OpenView
Key Customers: NAPA Auto Parts, O’Reilly AutoParts, AutoZone, Advance Auto Parts, etc.
Glassdoor Rating: 5.0
Valuation (estimated): +$200M (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in an average $10M-$20M Series B fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Think of PartsTech as the “Kayak for aftermarket auto procurement”. They match auto shops with major suppliers like Napa Auto Parts, AutoZone, Advance Auto Parts & others to get custom parts through large distribution channels to individual auto shops faster, cheaper, and more efficiently. If you got your brake pads or rotors fixed recently, there’s a good chance they were purchased through PartsTech.
The startup was founded in Cambridge in 2013 by Gregory Kirber and soon joined by founding team members Erik St. Pierre & Olexy Sadovy. Greg, PartsTech’s Founder & CEO, grew up around auto shops and has lived in the after care auto business for most of his life. He worked in a Mercedes Benz dealership in Norwood, MA on the automile, and later opened his own repair shop on the Dedham-Hyde Park line. Greg wasted an immeasurable amount of time on the phone calling up national distributors to source parts for repairs. You would think there was an easier way. But at the time there was no B2B e-commerce solution for the auto business. Not only was more than 50% of his day spent on the phone, but more than 20% of the parts that showed up were not the right fit. Greg got his MBA & JD at UConn, where he took the time to go deep down the entrepreneurial rabbit hole to solve this aftermarket auto procurement issue.
Let’s say “Ray” owns a local auto shop and needs to restock some supplies. He calls up his supplier over at Callahan Auto Parts. Well, he probably needs to call at least two suppliers to make sure he’s keeping his parts discovery honest because Tommy Callahan doesn’t always have the details handy. For both of those calls he might wait on hold for 5 minutes. Then he chats with Tommy for another 5 because he likes to hear how the kids are doing. Finally you get your price and everything ordered. Great! Except then the wrong parts arrive. Now you’ve got to call back to repeat the same process as before. Except you’re on hold again. There are two customers in the lobby. This whole process is costing you time, money, and your sanity. Oh, and I forgot to mention - you’ve got a car on the lift the whole time, which doesn’t have wheels on it anymore and you can’t take off to do a new job until the correct parts arrive. A double whammy.
Sourcing parts the old way over the phone has major hidden costs. There’s a time savings calculator on the PartsTech website that details this problem starkly. For a shop servicing 10 vehicles per day over a 5 day work week, manual sourcing could cost the shop an additional 650 hours and $13,000 per year. That’s crazy!
The PartsTech team set out to build a software platform for auto shops so small businesses could more easily obtain the right part for the right car with the right shipment data. The PartsTech platform helps these shops automate the ordering process and more easily obtain parts at competitive prices from major distributors so they can spend less time on the phone and more time fixing cars to keep their customers happy.
Today they have 27,000 supplier locations and millions of products on the platform focused on shop preference, availability, and delivery times. An accumulating advantage for a rapidly growing marketplace. PartsTech, like most marketplaces, tracks GMV (gross merchandise value) as their north star metric. And in Q1 of this year they’re on track to hit their goal early! They’re also watching the number of active auto shops on the platform, average order size, and other leading indicators of platform health.
That somewhat neatly summarizes PartsTech and the problems they’re trying to solve for the auto industry. But like any startup there’s a whole other category that helps define startup success: company building. PartsTech is a remote workforce and CTO Olexy Sadovy helped recruit the entire engineering team, almost half of their workforce, from his home country in Eastern Europe. Ukraine. Imagine a software business beginning to inflect as your whole physical world is shifting rapidly under your feet. PartsTech’s engineering team was put in the crosshairs almost a year ago to the day. Literally.
PartsTech’s VP of People, Kate Caton-Noyes, recalled the chaotic rush last February: “We offered to move our team members anywhere, send resources, and offered any other aid they needed. We looked at chartering buses through Poland and offered to help evacuate team members through Georgia. But the vast majority stayed.” Any other HR leaders have that in their job description? Unprecedented!
Today PartsTech has an engineering hub in Lisbon, Portugal too so team members have another European location farther away from live fire they can access if needed. The team plans to continue to hire engineering roles out of both Lisbon and Ukraine for the foreseeable future. We’ll all be thinking of the PartsTech team in the days and months ahead no doubt. PartsTech is getting the U.S. team together in April (in a warm location) which I’m sure will be an important time to bring people together. We’re all praying for the safety of their Ukrainian team members for as long as it takes to bring peace to their country.
A few final notes about the PartsTech platform. It’s free to use. They pass a ton of value to auto shops as their main source of monetization is from the major distributors at the transaction level. And with their growing ability to aggregate supplier volume they’re able to pass those savings on to the small businesses they serve. They’re also experimenting with some premium features for auto shops this coming year like onboarding additional tire suppliers, analytics, premium quoting features, and additional support capabilities for larger PartsTech customers.
Last, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention PartsTech’s CFO CJ Gustafon has a pretty cool newsletter called Mostly Metrics he writes in his spare time. You should check it out if you want to learn more about startups, business metrics, and everything in between!
Operators to Know (Locally):
Kate Noyes-Caton, VP of People
Amy Daly, Director of Customer Support
Doug Ellinger, CMO
CJ Gustafson, CFO
Olexy Sadovy, CTO
With the team remote & emerging company stage I included execs but kept the spotlight on the local team. And my investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the PartsTech team I’m sure I missed some operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
More roles coming in the weeks ahead!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are some key ways PartsTech fosters collaboration with a remote workforce?
How does PartsTech balance communication between a European engineering team with an American GTM & Operations team?
What are the most important factors driving PartsTech’s marketplace growth and success over the next 12-18 months?
What areas of product or team expansion will PartsTech focus on over the next 12-18 months?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about PartsTech you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more automotive shops into the digital age. All road warriors applaud your efforts. See you around Cambridge and on the interwebs!
Sejin Mong, Senior Director of Customer Success @ Starburst Data
Simple question. How many people do you know who went from teaching in a public school system to leading cloud software teams? Well, I met one. Her name is Sejin Mong, a teacher once and lifelong student now, who traveled from Ann Arbor to Cambridge on a winding road from education to startups to build a career in the world of growing technology companies.
Sejin & her brother were born in the Midwest to first generation Korean immigrant parents who held education in the highest regard. The family moved to Ann Arbor before settling in Bloomington where her parents completed their respective PhDs. Today, both are professors at Montclair State University in New Jersey and still stay up late planning their lessons and building a great educational experience for their students year after year. That type of worth ethic rubs off.
Sejin went to Cornell where she majored in Industrial Labor Relations. She first learned about the program in high school from a flier she received in the mail. It ended up being a really useful area of study because it taught her about labor economics, collective bargaining, human resources & organizational behavior. This led her to intern for Teach For America on their admissions team one summer.
She applied for the Teach for America full time program her senior year, was accepted, and then placed in the Indianapolis Public School system for a two year tour of duty. Not too far from Bloomington too. That first year of teaching was an incredibly eye opening experience. Sejin had 56 high school students for 40 desks in her classrooms so she couldn’t assign them seats. She had to think on her feet every day balancing lessons, school supplies, and even space planning. Not to mention she was living alone in Indianapolis building a career and discovering adulthood while also trying to make friends on the weekends and balance a long distance relationship with her boyfriend (now husband).
Sejin was the only TFA member in the school and the only female teacher teaching math or science. Oh and she’d barely touched math since high school. Like any person in that position, teaching students just a few years younger than her on a subject she didn’t feel like an expert in, Sejin “kind of freaked out”. What got her through that first year is she felt like she was able to ask questions to better understand her students and figure out how to meet them where they were. She was also able to build relationships with other teachers in the building and TFA corps to learn from experts, receive feedback on her teaching, and continue to learn by doing.
But in many ways she wished she could have helped these students earlier. So, in her second year, she transitioned to an Indianapolis middle school to teach 6th graders. She really enjoyed the age group and liked being in a K-8 school where she could see a broader age range and get feedback from teachers who had had her students previously. They had enough desks too! At the completion of the program, Sejin moved to Boston to be closer to her partner who had just begun his PhD program at MIT.
This was her first experience living in the Boston area and Sejin moved into her first apartment sight unseen. The broker who rented the place to the couple commented that “she had a lot of trust” to give him that sort of responsibility. But it was on the edge of Beacon Hill so it worked out pretty well! Sejin finds Boston to be a great “big little city”. It feels familiar now that she’s learned most of the neighborhoods by now. She loves to walk around the 10 block radius of their current home in Cambridge with her son to hit local establishments like La Saison, High Rise Bakery, and Formaggio to name a few favorites.
Now for the career part. Sejin was at a crossroads of trying to figure out whether she should continue to teach in Boston, transition to something else in education, or shift her career entirely. There were a lot of unknowns but she wasn’t quite ready to leave education at the time. She ended up taking a role in the Boston Public School district office, the oldest public school district in the country. Her team sat in the data & accountability office helping other teachers use data to improve their teaching throughout the school system. It presented a great opportunity to go back to teaching later too if she felt the pull.
Their analytical work was funded through a federal grant consisting of facilitators who went out to various Boston area schools to utilize & understand classroom data in order to help improve their classroom best practices. In a way, before Sejin knew what startups were, this was her first startup experience. There wasn’t a pre-existing format to rely on, they weren’t attached to any individual school, and Sejin was the only team member who hadn’t worked in the Boston school system. A lot of firsts! The program began with a one week bootcamp at the Harvard School of Ed to learn some data modeling, how best to work with the schools, and procure the data they needed for their analysis. With limited training, a very startup-like experience indeed!
There wasn’t a blueprint and things were a bit confusing at the onset. At least with teaching there was a blueprint. There was a lot of travel involved meeting with teachers, principals, and superintendents. Luckily Sejin reaped the benefit of being introduced to her new city and its neighborhoods traveling to different schools every day.
Working with the Boston Public School district was a tremendous experience but Sejin felt called to do something slightly different. There were certain skills she wanted to better utilize and she felt insulated as an administrator of sorts. It was during this period of introspection that Sejin first caught wind of Panorama Education’s software tools during one of her school visits.
Panorama, an EdTech company founded out of Boston, offered a survey product with a much more holistic look at students and their reach was impressive. They happened to have an opening for a “Professional Services Manager” and, when she looked at the job description, Sejin’s husband called out that those were all the things she loved doing - being task oriented, analytical, communicative, working well with other people, etc. Sejin applied on a whim to join the small & scrappy Panorama team, serendipitously bumping into a Panorama employee who also taught at the Harvard Grad School of Ed she had previously overlapped with at BPD during her interview process.
Sejin describes her experience at Panorama as “some of the best years that she’s had in her career. I felt like I was really authentically myself at work.” She put in a lot of time at the office, built some really close relationships, and was really fulfilled by the experience of what they built in those early days. She learned to stretch herself in ways she hadn’t done before. It was her first true technology role working side by side with engineers, iterating on things for the first time, and even working with a Marketing team for the first time. She didn’t even know what a Product Manager was until they hired their first one! Panorama provided a great mix of learning new things every day where Sejin also felt like she could provide a lot of value.
After Sejin returned from maternity leave after the birth of her first child, she was ready to take on a bigger challenge and stretch herself further. She had helped create a team, grow the company, travel, and expand into hundreds of school districts at Panorama.
Starburst Data reached out looking for a Customer Success leader to help them grow their team. Starburst is a cloud software company that helps create a “single point of access” to query your company’s data wherever it lives. They were looking for a leader who could help them with the mission to come in at a leadership level and build the team to an Enterprise level. Sejin was also really impressed by Niall Fitzpatrick, Starburst’s Senior Vice President of Customer Value Solutions. Naill wasn’t Sejin’s first mentor but he was someone who loved building and gave Sejin the opportunity to hone her Customer Success leadership skills and learn in the presence of an experienced executive.
Starburst was a whole different beast than what Sejin had previously experienced. There were team members who had been working in tech for 20 years while Sejin was an educator who stumbled into startups. Her colleagues seemed to have all the answers whereas Sejin seemingly had way more questions than answers during her onboarding. It was intimidating.
Sejin had to ask questions to bring herself up to speed. Every meeting she would prepare & get her list ready to figure out what problem to solve. Then she began setting up meetings to navigate the org and ask people “who do you think I should be talking to?” Recurring meetings with subject matter experts were also critical to upskilling herself to be able to serve her team over that first year. She sat in a ton of meetings, listened a ton, and was rigorous with her follow ups.
She gained the respect of her colleagues not through her rapid knowledge ascent but by taking pride in ownership, humility, and reliability building with her cross functional partners in Sales, Product, etc. Ownership and Humility are two of Starburst’s company values she tries to emulate daily.
The team has changed a lot over the last couple years. Initially, Starburst and Sejin’s Customer Success team was in a “do everything” phase. Today they have a Professional Services team, Onboarding team, Technical Account Managers, and other specializations across their international team. Sejin’s team in particular manages their Customer Success team of Technical Account managers helping to scale account coverage while notching efficiencies across their coverage base. An essential element of responsible scaling.
Here are three insights Sejin shared with me that have informed her work and career:
Working With People You Like & Respect - Startups are hard and it’s really important to work with people and for people you like & respect, Sejin tells me. At both Panorama, Starburst, and her previous career in education she’s learned that to survive best in stressful environments you need to be at companies where both the mission and the people are ones you like & respect: “I was interviewed by the CEO of both Starburst and Panorama. The thing about startups is that things get hard all of the time. You can have a mission that really speaks to you, but if you don’t respect or are learning from the people you work with and work for it’s hard to survive in that environment. It’s always better to have fun when you’re at work!”
Knowing Yourself - Sejin has learned that to know herself well is to know when she’s on the right path or still searching for the right fit. She described herself as a continuous learner that attempts to stretch herself by building on what she knows but also extending that into new things: “I’m usually not super satisfied if I’m not learning. Will this company and this team allow me to learn?” She didn’t realize at the time the risks of making jumps from a classroom to a tech company to a true hard tech company. But she gets a lot of joy from making these changes because they allow her to continue to learn and know herself better.
Building Connections - Over her career, Sejin has learned to look for and build connections from the various lessons she’s learned from her experiences and the people she’s learned from in her different roles: “At first glance you might think that Industrial Labor Relations or teaching have no connection to tech startups but I'd argue that they're all related. Great Customer Success is all about great enablement and education. Great management is about building structure and empowering your people. There's no perfect leap between different jobs unless you make those connections yourself.”
Eventually, Sejin would like to be a VP of Customer Success at a growing startup later in her career. There are many different Customer Success functions - account management, professional services, etc. that she hasn’t had the chance to oversee yet. In the meantime, she’s enjoying her maternity leave following the birth of her second son. Parents everywhere know that’s enough to juggle! There will be a lot of ten block trips around Cambridge over the coming months no doubt.
For more about Sejin, feel free to reach out to her on LinkedIn. Maybe you’ll learn something from her. I know I did. Thanks so much for sharing. Can’t wait to see what new role, company & industry you may happen to teach yourself next!
Any feedback for me? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt
Awesome content, per usual Matt. Thanks for including the PartsTech story. You really grasp the biz model!