MGMT Boston - W8, Q2 24 - Blink // Brian Moseley, Semrush
Blink // Brian Moseley, Semrush
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 900+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Blink - building a “super app” for frontline organizations to make working lives easier, uplevel their internal cultural experience, and help employers better understand how their disparate workers are thinking & feeling
Thanks to Matt H. for the intro to Blink
Brian Moseley, Director of Enterprise Sales @ Semrush - entrepreneur, small business owner, and partnerships leader with a championship mentality who has built startups and Enterprise teams by learning from legends
Thanks to Steve L. for the intro to Brian
🔥 Upcoming Q2 Event: MGMT Boston Sports, Gaming & Wellness Breakfast - 5/30 @ 9am, co-hosted by Fidelity for Startups 🔥
Inviting Boston-area venture backed operating leaders, founders & investors to join for a Sports, Gaming & Wellness breakfast on Thurs, 5/30 to engage with the MGMT Boston Operators Club, co-hosted by Kristen Craft @ Fidelity for Startups
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping 50+ Boston based up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
Dana Wensberg, Senior Engineer @ Paperless Parts - 4 Pieces of Advice for the next Manufacturing SaaS Startup
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
2024 Boston Tech Big Board - snapshot of 2024 companies to watch
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q2 Startups Highlighted: Starburst, Neurable, Software Defined Automation, airSlate, Ayble Health, Occupier
Q2 Operators Highlighted: Adam Fisk / Tech Superpowers, Bryan Dsouza / Aptiv, Noah Massucci / Robin, Erica Kangas / Scroobious
Would you like to sponsor MGMT Boston in Q2? Reach out by replying to this e-mail!
Blink
Founder: Sean Nolan
Founding: 2015
Mission: Connect everyone, so everyone thrives
Employees: 80 & 35% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $30.7M raised
Investors: Next47, with participation from early investors Partech, Techstars and Workday
Key Customers: RATPDev, Elara Caring,, Saint Luke’s, Physicians Ambulance, Transit Systems
Glassdoor Rating: 4.2
Valuation (estimated): $100M+ (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the Q4 ‘21 $20M Series A fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Blink is building a “super app” for frontline organizations to make working lives easier, uplevel their internal cultural experience, and help employers better understand how their disparate workers are thinking & feeling. This team is building a better workplace experience platform for desk based employees to connect with their deskless colleagues who spend their days out in the world, fixing our problems and servicing our needs - and traditionally are hard to reach.
Blink Founder Sean Nolan was building a telecom company in the early 2000s called Tomorrow Communications which provided network design, data center, and managed services for enterprises through a successful acquisition by CACI in 2012.
Tomorrow Communications had more than 200 employees who were out in the field every day, servicing customers and calls. Sean and his corporate colleagues often only saw that portion of their workforce once a month. It was difficult to get everyday, practical things done like complete timesheets or file expenses.
How do you build a strong culture for essential workers who aren’t really around?
Sean’s team built some internal tools to get stuff done and amplify culture the best they could. But it wasn’t their business. So when the company was sold the solution went away with it.
Sean took some time off to travel and ski. But when he was traveling through Asia and got exposed to “super apps” like WeChat for the first time, the wheels started turning. For the unfamiliar Westerner, WeChat is a communications app that also houses identity, payments, security, and discovery use cases all within its pixels.
Sean had been interested in online communities & chat rooms since he was an introverted teenager, ripping Compuserve & AOL CDs off of magazines to get online to chat with people on his PC. He comes from a blue collar family of teachers & bus drivers who struggled to access enterprise technology from their mobile phones. Existing solutions only really served desk workers.
In the U.S. there are more than 40M frontline workers with deskless workers encompassing 37% of the total workforce (src). These are employees in industries like healthcare, retail, manufacturing, higher education, utilities & transportation (src).
For example, in-home care nurses work out on their own the vast majority of the time. It can feel isolating. We all know frontline organizations struggle to recruit employees. There aren’t enough drivers, retail workers, manufacturing workers or healthcare workers. Some Blink customers (before Blink) had to drive up to 4 hours to get administrative paperwork submitted. They struggle to retain them too, with up to 65% of caregivers quitting in their first year (src). The existing employee experience certainly hasn’t helped.
Blink started in the UK transit industry in 2015 and Sean wistfully recalls that pretty much every VC in London rejected him but he found a couple crazy Angel investors to back his vision. After navigating the initial customer journey, they focused on rolling out a new solution to uplevel the employee experience for frontline organizations.
Blink has unlocked mobile access to pay stubs, shift swapping, overtime work & digital forms to help companies with large workforces operate better. They paired these “must haves” with important enterprise tools like the ability to login without an e-mail address, enterprise grade privacy & security, and the ability to wipe an app remotely in the event of an offboarding.
Most importantly, they haven’t stopped there. They’re building community into the Blink app to better connect employees on the go. Blink combines communication capabilities with productivity & utility for every worker, wherever they are. They have the industry’s highest adoption rate and usage because of their tight integrations with existing apps like ServiceNow, Workday, ADP, and DailyPay.
Healthcare is their largest and fastest growing segment with transit, manufacturing, logistics, and retail rounding out the customer base. Convincing customers that their solution works has been the biggest challenge.
Convincing customers that Blink really can deliver on transforming culture, operations, communication and productivity with one tool was a challenge. However, now with 100+ enterprise customers shouting from the rooftops about Blink has certainly helped scale in specific industries and grow effectively. It definitely helps to now be able to introduce prospects to their 100+ existing enterprise customer footprint so they can scale out industry specific GTM models to grow more effectively.
In the coming quarters they plan to roll out their workforce insights & frontline intelligence product. AI generated questions will help dig into employee concerns and feed the insights back to HQ where executives can diagnose and solve turnover challenges. Blink is diligently co-developing these new features with current customers.
Eighteen months ago they made the decision to expand from the UK to the US. Sean moved to Boston and hired CRO Jim McInerny to build out the team. In the months since they’ve added local leadership like Sloan Kendall from Gainsight, Marcy Paterson from ServiceNow, and Amanda Haltmaier from HubSpot. Blink counts almost 20 employees locally here in Boston.
In Boston they’re strong in the EMS sector so ambulance personnel at companies like Cataldo & Action Ambulance aren’t rushing back to the office after saving peoples lives to file paperwork! Even the MBTA is a customer.
In 2023 Blink grew U.S. top line revenue by 159% and welcomed 52 new customers, now counting over 100 enterprise customers. In 2024 they will continue to focus on the U.S., its fastest growing market, planning to double the size of their U.S. headcount over the next 12 months.
For Sean, Boston has been the best combination for a European founder - easy commutability home to the UK, time zone overlap, a great culture, and access to top talent as an Enterprise SaaS startup. And on a personal note, it felt like a great place to raise a family building a startup for the long haul.
Operators to Know (Locally):
Marina Addonizio, Senior CSM, Enterprise
Tanner Fogarty, Senior Enterprise Account Executive
Matt Haley, Account Executive
Amanda Haltmaier, Global Sales Development Director
Courtney Hayes, Senior Marketing Manager
Sloan Kendall, Head of Global Partnerships
Marcy Paterson, VP, Solution Consulting
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Blink 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:
Could you share some details about the onboarding process & training?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 100 employees?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 / / teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Blink you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more frontline organizations and their deskless workforce into the digital age. All consumers applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Brian Moseley, Director of Enterprise Sales @ Semrush
Brian Moseley is an entrepreneur, small business owner, and partnerships leader with a championship mentality. He has built startups and Enterprise teams by learning from legends. He’s taken notes and lessons to heart to build the future he wants to live in. Today, Brian serves as the Director of Enterprise Sales at industry-leading SEO technology company Semrush.
Growing up in St. Louis alongside a younger brother, Brian’s dad was a computer programmer, and his mom was a nurse turned healthcare executive. Brian had entrepreneurial skills from an early age; for example he would make extra money by selling his neighbors garage sale items on eBay.
When the Internet was in its infancy, he remembers his dad telling him, “If you learn how to build websites, you’ll be a millionaire.” His Dad inspired his sense of travel and love for technology, while his mom taught him how to save, invest, and, most importantly, empathize with people.
A dedicated athlete, Brian excelled at ice hockey playing in high school and for his college’s ACHA club team. During college, he and his roommate made extra money by selling websites to the local college bars and pizza places.
The First Startup
As Brian prepared to graduate from college, he met his first Mentor, Michael LaBroad, a former Budweiser marketing executive and CMO of Bass Pro Shops & the NHL. Michael had a small marketing consulting firm and hired Brian as his first employee. Brian got to sit next to Mike for two years, learning the ins and outs of marketing from an industry veteran. Mike later helped him get his first sales job at Total Hockey, an ice hockey retailer where he sold large-scale jersey & equipment packages to youth hockey programs throughout the midwest.
New Zealand Ice Hockey
After a successful collegiate hockey career, Brian still had aspirations to play hockey at a high level. He wasn’t able to play professionally, but he found a semi-pro league in New Zealand, which drafted him for their 2011 championship-winning team.
The New Zealand Business Brokerage
When not putting in time on the ice, he worked at a local business brokerage as a sales & marketing associate. His job was to help small business owners sell their businesses. He helped small business owners evaluate what a business sale might look like and various valuation scenarios. It was an old school, offline, “Mad Men” type role, but Brian learned a lot about small businesses and how to evaluate them.
The First Marketing Agency
When he returned to the United States, he joined a sports marketing agency in St. Louis. Selling website & social media packages, his team won business with steak dinners and relationship selling. It was hard to differentiate, and Brian didn’t feel that this way of operating played to his strengths.
One day, he received a call at his desk from Brian Signorelli, an Account Executive at Boston-based SaaS startup HubSpot. He didn’t sound like a salesperson he’d ever heard, approaching their conversation by asking him questions and trying to uncover his problems.
The sports marketing agency where he worked wasn’t interested in buying HubSpot, but Brian wanted to invest. A week later, he called Brian Signorelli back and asked for a referral for an Account Executive role opening at HubSpot. Flying to Boston on a beautiful June day, with sailboats on the Charles River looking like a timeless portrait, HubSpot (and Boston) felt like home.
HubSpot Agency Sales Rep
Brian interviewed with Pete Caputa & Dannie Herzberg in an office filled with other rising stars from schools like MIT, Harvard, Babson, Bentley, and more. As soon as the offer came in, he leapt at the chance to grab this transformational career opportunity.
His first sales manager, current Sequoia Capital venture partner Dannie Herzberg, was one of the best professionals he had met in his entire life. Dannie was an incredible leader with a superpower of motivating and inspiring salespeople to overachieve their targets. Brian took advantage of the coaching, laying out his goals and working with Dannie on action plans to achieve them. This included taking Toastmasters to learn to become a better public speaker and more effective communicator.
Brian started as a hunter, signing on new agencies to the HubSpot Partner Program and quickly became the #1 achieving sales rep in North America. With his deep experience working with agencies and the small businesses they served from his early years as an entrepreneur and agency executive, he helped build a training program to teach other agencies how to sell effectively. This playbook later became productized at HubSpot.
HubSpot Agency Sales Coach
In his next role at HubSpot he entered into a “farming” type role, coaching agencies on how to sell HubSpot as part of their own service offerings. He would even help teach them how to interview & hire the right sales reps. Alongside Pete Caputa he learned what made a successful agency program, watching Pete run weekly business groups & agency community meetings to help enhance their business & growth acumen.
HubSpot Sales Manager
Finally, Brian became a manager himself at HubSpot. In this role he led a sales team of 8 people, learning what worked and didn’t, taking a lot of coaching to figure out what it means to be a good sales manager.
Databox
Working at HubSpot was an incredible run over almost four years and then Brian left to join his former HubSpot mentor Pete Caputa when he became CEO at Databox. As a Senior Sales Manager, Brian helped Databox grow their ARR from $120k to $600k and signed up 250+ agency partners in his first year as they transitioned from an Enterprise solution to a more of a touchless product led growth motion.
Leveraging the learnings from his agency coaching sessions at HubSpot, the Databox Agency Program grew to nearly 400 agency partners within 2 years of Brian’s arrival; tripling the size of the company.
Databox planned to grow thoughtfully and efficiently, but at the time Brian wanted to try another large scale hyper growth environment. He joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) to try working for one of the biggest companies in the world. But Brian soon learned that the big corporate environment wasn’t for him advocating internally, writing long memos, and learning a different culture & customer focus selling to Enterprise level CIOs & CTOs. It just wasn’t his passion.
Semrush
Semrush was looking for a leader to build out their first partner program and Brian was far more attracted to the marketing technology space. With 600 employees, 50k customers, and on the cusp of to $100M in revenue, it felt like a great opportunity. For the third time in his career, Pete Caputa helped him land a great role reporting to Semrush President Eugene Levin.
Brian’s work at Semrush over the past four years has felt like the culmination of all his skills. He was tasked with launching, selling, and building their first Enterprise partner program for a high ACV product - SplitSignal. Brian sold their first 25 customers and hired out the GTM team around this new partner program. He partnered with top SEO organizations to teach them how to sell & service to their end customers.
Most recently, Brian has been helping to build another Enterprise partner program for Semrush’s new Enterprise Platform. He’s responsible for organizing the GTM strategy, running discovery, and onboarding initial customers through alpha & beta programs as they begin the full commercial rollout.
Enterprise SEO is a complex space and he’s had to leverage all of his HubSpot, Databox & Amazon Enterprise partner knowledge to bring it all together. With the mentors, leadership, and experience Brian has encountered throughout his career…he should be just fine.
Incentives & Alignment - Finding CHI
Over Brian’s career in SaaS sales, he’s worked with multiple revenue teams and many reps, learning the power of incentives. Sales people will do what you pay them to do! This can be good..but sometimes bad.
HubSpot did a great job of incentivizing CSMs, Marketers, and Customer support reps on all the right metrics - leveraging a “CHI” score. The Customer Happiness Index measured how much customers were using the product (6+ tools led to the highest retention) and sales were tied to retention. Databox taught him to measure the metrics that matter and make them visible to your teams - “sunlight is the best disinfectant”.
Both organizations preached that it’s not just about “selling the most”, weighing retention and customer happiness is equally important. In order to get promoted at both organizations, customer retention was always part of the conversation.
Brian believes that Sales & Marketing alignment is one of the greatest things a SaaS company can aspire to achieve. At HubSpot, Brian always remembers VP of Sales Mark Roberge and VP of Marketing Mike Volpe co-presenting sales and marketing performance. Mike would present how many qualified leads were generated and Mark would show how fast his sales team was closing them. Marketing shows "these are the right leads" and Sales confirms "yep, marketing was right".
As Brian has continued to build GTM teams and partner programs, he’s constantly working to help his Agency partners grow and be successful.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Take Plates Off Trays - “The best opportunities come from always trying to take the plates off the tray of your manager. Ask managers about their goals and try to master their job & care about their goals to make their lives easier. If you can better empathize with how to help your manager, you’ll find more opportunities”
Toastmaster Appreciation - “Get comfortable with public speaking and drop your crutch words. Try recording yourself on a call and listen to it back. It’s painful, but one of the best things you can do for your career.”
Be Someone Worth Helping - “Successful people might not mind spending time with you, but you have competition. How do you stand out to ensure they keep making time for you? Follow up and let them know how their time and advice have helped. Be specific. Offer to lend help in return and keep working to be someone worth helping.”
Brian gets a lot of energy from building GTM teams and programs. In the years ahead, he wants to take that builder mindset to other aspects of his life. He has some real estate investments and a part-time sailing business he plans to grow. You might see Brian one day soon washing boats between calls, chasing warm weather from port to port. Wherever the wind might takes him.
For more about Brian you can find him leading enterprise partner programs, sailing, scaling passive income opportunities, possibly officiating his fourth wedding, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see all the personal, professional, and even hybrid experiences between the two you launch in 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