MGMT Boston

💻🤝 Cephable is a personal, private, and accessible AI platform that enables users to control their digital devices through adaptive voice commands, head movements, virtual buttons, and AI task automation 🤝 💻 It's W12 / Q4 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got Cephable, a Seed stage startup building a platform designed to enhance accessibility and inclusivity. Cephable was founded in 2023 by Alexander Dunn, an applied ML engineer who was formerly the CPO at Voicify. A tinkerer by trade, he saw that his younger brother, who has a disability, was unable to keep up with friends while gaming, and falling behind with the technology at school. Globally there are more than 1.3B people (15-20% of the global population) with disabilities who have an annual discretionary spending power of $13T according to the World Economic Forum. This includes cognitive, mobility, hearing, vision & other restrictions that prevent millions of people from enjoying games & digital experiences. 💵 Can you imagine not being able to access an ATM to take out some cash?  🐢 Or fire a tortoise shell at Wario on the Rainbow Road racetrack?  ✉️ Or how about just logging onto the computer to send an email? Cephable is enabling a new digital customer via their software platform which launched publicly in August 2023 to solve the “disability tax,” an additional cost that many people with disabilities have to pay for adaptive tech. Today they’ve built innovative, responsive algorithms that are adaptive to visual & audio commands across languages and commands. Cephable recently announced partnerships with Microsoft & Qualcomm to build “out of the box” PC experiences which will include Cephable controls integrated into OEM (original equipment manufacturing) devices like Lenovo, HP & Dell computers & tablets. These large scale enterprise partnerships will take the startup from 10s of thousands of users to 10s of millions in the coming quarters. This fast-growing Boston-based startup grew their end user base from early adoption to its 2024 year-end user base by more than 10,000x. They’re expecting to grow another 10,000x in 2025, turbocharged by their newly established enterprise relationships. They are closing in on seven figures of annual revenue in the 1H of 2025, with their average Enterprise pipeline deal size now approaching seven figures too! Next year they will plan to bring on more engineers, marketing resources, and grow their customer success & sales operations teams. Cephable is backed locally by Hyperplane, Founder Collective, and other notable VCs. Operators to Know: -Jason Fields, COO -Jonathan Campbell, Director of Engineering -Cordellia Yokum, Senior Software Development Engineer -Shristi Chitlangia, Software Engineer -Julia Franklin, Chief Learning Officer -Alexa Orban, Director of Marketing Communications If you're interested in learning more, including the key roles Cephable is hiring for, the full post is linked below

One of the things that makes Boston's tech ecosystem so powerful is the connective tissue. 💪 And few are doing as much to connect exciting ventures, founders, investors, institutions and operators as Matt Crane. 🏆 That's why it was fun - and quintessentially Boston - to first connect with Matt at the Underscore VC Summit, following a conversation with Mirakl's Amelia Van Camp, then sit down a couple of months later for a wide-ranging chat. We covered a lot of ground including: 👉 Distilling the wins - and the scars - of many years as an operator, including de-risking high impact hires at various stages of growth. Focusing on ability to deliver relevant impact today will save you many sleepless nights. 👉 Navigating the "middle school dance" of founder/operating advisor matches. There's hardly a job title to be found in LinkedIn headlines anymore. In the era of pervasive "CXO/Investor/Advisor" branding, how do you connect with people who are capable of delivering the right kind of impact? 👉 How Flashpoint is closing out the year. Our December isn't your December. Yes, we're also closing Q4 while budgeting and planning for '25. But it's against a backdrop of working to protect clients from a host of daunting cyber, physical and geopolitical threats. Welcome to the world of threat intelligence. Thanks again, Matt, and look forward to more collaboration in the New Year!

Here are 5 takeaways from The Data Dilemma in AI at Innospark Ventures last week, our final event of 2024! Innospark invests in early stage healthcare & B2B software startups, envisioning a world where AI is ubiquitous, and MGMT Boston joined forces with their team last week to discuss all things AI, data, and the terabytes in between. Look at this lineup! Rob Lincourt - Distinguished Engineer, Dell EMC Rob Hickey - Former Executive Vice President of Engineering, Data Robot Gauri Agarwal - Research Assistant, MIT Media Lab Kevin Dunnell - Ph.D Candidate, MIT Media Lab Eon Mattis - Enterprise Investor @ Innospark What did we learn? Here are 5 takeaways for all the readers at home racing into the holidays: 🤠 It’s Early: We are REALLY early in the AI wave. All of our panelists were focused on considerations in both the development & deployment phase because Native AI (for the most part, outside of the LLMs) has yet to be deployed at scale 🤔 Testing Techniques: Gauri & Kevin from MIT talked about the tooling & modeling techniques they are exploring to get better results from both synthetic and source data in their research. This includes understanding key considerations like causal inference. There definitely isn’t consensus there and “transformers are still the best thing we have” 🔎 Sequencing & Risk: The Rob’s (from Dell & DataRobot) talked about all of the considerations that Enterprises must take into account to adopt AI and the challenges of nailing that AI vs. human in the loop “value chain” plus the visualization considerations of seeing where success & failure outcomes occur 🐎 Startups Have Advantages: Startups have a LOT of net new opportunities helping Enterprises navigate the AI wave. Don't forget about “good old fashioned AI and ML” outside of the large language models. Data portability is a key factor too. It’s REALLY expensive to move data so helping Enterprises navigate these expensive AI models through innovative governance and access methods is something to watch 😎 Agents are Next: Our panelists believe “agents” or agentic solutions - think workflow software, particularly at the infrastructure level, are really interesting 2025 use cases. The “chatbots” and text prompts will not create enduring value. Native AI companies who win will need to go 2+ steps beyond We’ll see you in 2025! Thanks Innospark! Especially the indomitable Lily Zarrella!

Welcome Nemo Shi, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at Æthos on this episode of 🔥 The Lantern 🔥 Æthos is a community that gathers hundreds of founders and researchers working on responsible AI together. They started as a physical community providing co-working space at CIC One Broadway in Cambridge. Their organization is focused on the ethics of building AI technology and its products, gathering founders and convening experts to have these conversations. They also have been collaborating closely with local organizations like AI Tinkerers, GenAI Collective, Women of AI, and more. 🔍 What’s going on inside Æthos heading into 2025? 🔎 1.) Community - cultivating the experience of founders & researchers in their space, providing resources & programming to create a support system & caring community to grow together 2.) Resources - in 2025 they are collaborating with the Berlin government to bring Æthos to Europe and are also building a Fashion AI Council to discuss responsible AI in this important vertical 3.) Responsible AI - expert roundtables will help shape programming and strategy, including their education consortium, to help universities leverage their AI literacy curriculum to develop AI initiatives & create a playbook on their own campuses 🤝 How can we help? 🤝 1.) They’re looking for founders building responsible AI to join their community 2.) Researchers who care about responsible AI should explore joining Æthos 3.) Sponsorship from corporations & non-profits to help make sure they can acquire the best talent & experts to contribute to their community & mission The Lantern is brought to you by MGMT Boston

📥📤 RevenueBase envisions a world where every B2B business has access to an accurate, always-up-to-date Revenue Database 📥 📤 It's W10 / Q4 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got RevenueBase, a Seed stage startup building a platform which contains detailed information on companies and their decision-makers, empowering smarter decisions, greater efficiency, and sustainable growth—making data the foundation for success. Founded by Mark J. Feldman in 2021, RevenueBase is a productized version of Mark’s professional passion: “figuring out how to find companies at scale that have the problem we solve.” Over the course of his career as a sales, marketing, and operations practitioner through multiple success stories & acquisitions, he learned to scrape websites and acquire accurate data from the far reaches of the web. During COVID Mark would build custom prospect databases for CMO’s and CRO’s in his network. Mark’s business took off and evolved into RevenueBase. The B2B data market is $1B+ (as of 2021) and projected to grow to $3B+ by 2030. B2B marketing budgets made up almost 10% of company revenue in 2022 and almost 20% of revenue in companies with less than 50 employees. There are 375M+ companies in the world and 33M+ in the U.S. But every business only really cares about a small fraction of that universe. Traditional data products have a “bug” because they make more money the more data they sell to you. RevenueBase helps get you less data, delivering the most limited view they can that’s most effective for your business. The number one objective RevenueBase tries to help their customers achieve is e-mail deliverability. And their platform provides the best in the industry - 95%+. Their $5M initial investment of venture capital all went into building an enterprise-grade data pipeline where they can cross reference every e-mail in their database every 3 months. RevenueBase is working with dozens of companies ranging from single person demand generation agencies to publicly traded companies. The team hit their seven figure 2024 revenue goals last month (November), and revenue has quadrupled since 2023. In 2025 they are planning to reach cash flow breakeven to control their own destiny. For any entrepreneurs out there reading, Mark recommends this approach wholeheartedly! When Mark started RevenueBase, he admits he “tried to hang the moon and do everything”. You can’t do everything well. You just need to spend time with customers and look for emerging patterns. In Mark’s words, proudly displayed on his LinkedIn profile, to be an entrepreneur “everything you want is on the other side of fear”. We’ll see you at the top, Mark & team! Operators to Know: -Sammy Mscisz, Head of Revenue -Ivan Zerin, Lead Data Engineer If you're interested in learning more, the full post is linked in the comments And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you in the weeks ahead!

Pro-tips on networking from one of the best at the craft, Matt Crane of MGMT Boston. Many of these pointers have helped me have more fruitful conversations that are honestly more fun too.

🎤 📣 Jenelle Tortorella Kelly is a masterful communicator & former broadcaster, post sales leader, and competitor who has turned a passion for helping people into building and leading customer facing functions 📣🎤 It's W8 / Q4 / 2024 and this week in our MGMT Boston up & coming operator series we’ve got Jenelle,  who tell the stories of enterprises through her teams VP of Customer Success at SmarterX, a data company giving retailers and brands the data they need to sell regulated consumer products. Her responsibilities include owning the customer experience and all revenue, from new logo acquisition, to expansion and retention metrics for a high-performing global CS & post sales team of 20. This is her first role reporting into the CEO; with that responsibility comes board exposure and having to navigate helping teams on the ground floor, while maintaining the 10,000 foot view. 🗣 Clear Communication 🗣 My communication skills have carried me in my career. I champion a direct and clear communication style, where I try to always lead with empathy. I’ve found a “pyramid” approach to communication works well in both a team setting and for executive communication. What I mean by that is to start at the top of the pyramid – clearly articulate the core message and most critical information upfront. Then, layer in detailed context and supporting data as needed. This strategy not only facilitates efficient decision-making but instills confidence that you’re fluent in the subject matter and can go deeper as needed. When communicating, I also like to “hit all the bases” of communication style and preferences – so I like to talk through critical topics live and then follow up in writing. Remember reiteration is important as it highlights key points and ensures comprehension across all levels. 3 Career Insights / Learnings 🏄♀️ Embrace Change "I believe that action always trumps inaction because waiting for perfect conditions often means missing out on important opportunities. This approach also means making the best possible decisions with the information you have at the moment and understanding that progress comes through taking risks" 🙋♀️ You Are Your Best Advocate - I’ve taken to heart the advice that you must be your strongest advocate. While mentors and champions are invaluable in providing guidance and opening doors, it’s equally important to step up and make yourself heard. That often means raising your hand, taking initiative, and asking for what you need and backing up your requests with solid data" 💪 Perspective Is Earned - "Perspective comes from experience and reflection—it’s something we build over time. I remind myself of this daily, using it as a guide to stay open to change and to advocate effectively...it enables me to see the bigger picture, empathize with others’ points of view, and make well-informed decisions." Go ahead and sign up for the newsletter to see the operator learnings we bring you in the weeks ahead!

Welcome Jehan Hamedi, Founder & CEO at Vizit on this episode of 🔥 The Lantern 🔥 Vizit is a visual AI company. They are building a visual intelligence, AI based platform that helps brands analyze, measure, and optimize their digital imagery to drive more sales and more engagement with their target audiences all around the world. They work with large brands with massive imagery portfolios like L’Oreal, Unilever, and Mars 🔍 What’s going on inside Vizit this fall? 🔎 Vizit recently announced the raise of their $25M Series B, led by the team at Industry Ventures. Vizit is continuing to expand their platform, building out new content sources and an API to export data into partner systems. Customer centricity and customer obsession - through both roadmap building & GTM materials - continues to be built with customer input. Now 60+ people, they're growing the team with plans to potentially double headcount by the end of 2025. A lot of that growth will be based here in Boston! 🤔 What has Jehan learned from building Vizit? 🤔 Software companies should be thinking about creating an automated path to customer value, not just adding features and functionality. For example, when you land on Klaviyo's web page, they’ve nailed this perfect path into their platform to show you the value customers can get and unlock with clear workstreams to get there. Invest in product early and harden that product market fit as early as you can before you spend on GTM, PR, etc. Think about your customers, how they’re using your platform, and the value they’re deriving! If you're creating and delighting your customers very quickly, you’ll get a lot more of them very quickly through the power of your product. 🤝 How can we help? 🤝 The community has already done a lot for Vizit. Their top priority is growing their team and building the future. It’s an incredible place to work with a fantastic team! The Lantern is brought to you by MGMT Boston

📈⚖ Clockwork is building FP&A software for professionals, by professionals ⚖ 📈 It's W7 / Q4 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got Clockwork, a startup creating a platform for growing businesses who need access to powerful financial tools but didn’t have the resources or time to invest..until now. Founder & CEO Fady Hawatmeh started his career at Boeing, working on FP&A (financial planning & analysis) and strategy for the aerospace giant. During his tenure he built a library of financial models for family & friends back home in St. Louis. These were entrepreneurs short on time who were running restaurants (like his dad!), small businesses, and consulting firms who needed help with FP&A.  Eventually, he built his own outsourced CFO consulting firm based on the demand of 100s of Excel spreadsheets building models on models for clients. Their bootstrapped business became Clockwork, an FP&A software platform built for growing, resource constrained entrepreneurs because none of the other solutions in the market (now competitors) offered anything close to what was needed for small business owners. Clockwork is democratizing FP&A for the 30M+ small businesses in the U.S. who need better tools to scale their operations so they can spend more time with customers. Their GTM focus is on companies without CFOs as those roles tend to be the last executive role a company hires. The team will be adding conversational AI tools into their platform in 2025 to enable leaders to use prompts to elicit data and analysis with “smart alerts” that will flag certain trends and even use industry benchmarking data to guide actions. In addition to their AI roadmap items, they will be adding more integration partners. Their vision is to become the Workday for companies “you’ve never heard about”. Peter Zotto, the former Co-Founder & CRO of Profitwell, has joined Clockwork as COO to help fine tune their foundational operations to scale. Having the addition of a COO who has “been there and done that” with a playbook that aligns well with Fady’s vision should help the team accelerate into 2025. Clockwork already has 1000s of users on the platform and doubled their revenue growth each quarter in 2024 without adding headcount, backed by Underscore VC, G20 Ventures, and more. Fady recently moved the company to Boston from Chicago where all new hires will work to build a generational company with the surrounding talent and network to make it happen. We’re glad to have you building here in Boston! Operators to Know: -Matt Cronan, Director of Engineering  -Adam Grant, Sr Software Engineer -Shelby Martinez (Churney), Director of Customer Success & Onboarding  -Manasa Priyamvada Mannava, Sr. Software Engineer -Kyle Saechao, Software Engineer If you're interested in learning more, including the key roles Clockwork is hiring for, the full post is linked in the comments And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you in the weeks ahead!

🗽🛠 Brian Mongeau is a servant, soldier, operator, and leader who’s invested his time (and dollars) into leading teams with a bias to action in a multitude of demanding environments across the globe 🛠🗽 🛠 It's W6 / Q4 / 2024 and this week in our MGMT Boston up & coming operator series we’ve got Brian, the VP of Operations at growth stage cybersecurity company Caveonix. After beginning his career in the Army serving our nation as a Green Beret, Brian has successfully made the transition to venture backed startups..with just a few pit stops in between! At Caveonix, Brian is responsible for executing strategic initiatives & handling leadership responsibilities across Sales Operations, Customer Success, Solutions Architecture, and Partnerships. Through honing their product focus and staying committed to serving customers, Caveonix is on pace for triple-figure growth in 2024. Both Brian and his wife are from the Boston area and want to grow their careers & lives here. It’s the tight sense of community, smart people, and even “slight edge” that Boston residents have that’s tough to beat. 🕵♂️ Chaos & Ambiguity = Opportunity 🕵♂️ In the Special Forces, Brian went through a lot of tense situations. Ever the statesman, he likes to say that chaos and ambiguity present opportunities. He’s been trained for it! As he’s transitioned to the startup world, he has learned that many people are worried about change and chaos. But his experiences have taught him that these situations are opportunities to learn and demonstrate your abilities. During his time in the Army, they had a process for navigating rapid change. First, they encouraged their operators to take a tactical pause, look around, and get their bearings. Basically, rapidly figure out your “context & stakeholder mapping” before taking your first step. Then when you do take a few steps, stop and ask yourself “is this working / making sense?” Respond, iterate, and do it again. If you can slow things down in a chaotic environment and develop a deliberate learning cycle through processing your learnings, in military and civilian environments, you can go far! 3 Career Insights / Learnings 🤓 Maintaining Learning Mentality - “The best people I know, who consistently impress and who I’ve tried to emulate, are the people who put learning front & center every day with a sense of humility” 🤝 💪 Hone Your Strengths, Lean on Team - “I used to think that not being well rounded was a weakness...I’ve learned that being effective is about honing your strengths and building a well rounded team that can fill in each other’s gaps” 🏃♂️ Have a Bias for Action - “It’s better to have an 80% solution acted upon than waiting for a 100% solution. You can always iterate & improve if at the very least you’re in the game and moving forward. If you wait, you might miss opportunities” Go ahead and sign up for the newsletter to see the operator learnings we bring you in the weeks ahead!