Graham Stanton

🚰 VODA.ai is building software to make one of our scarcest, most important resources safer and more cost effective to manage🚰 It's W13 / Q2 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got VODA.ai, an AI startup helping analyze our nation’s water infrastructure at a local level to deliver better service for utilities and local populations across the country. Co-Founder & CEO George Demosthenous was working in product management at a utility technology vendor that builds metering & network infrastructure for utilities. George consistently heard that while the technology Mueller was selling was effective, the external pipe detection equipment and sensors they were purchasing didn’t necessarily stop leaks. There are 2.2M miles of drinking water pipes across the U.S. In Jackson, MS more than 65% of their processed water does not make it to end customers. In Detroit’s Highland Park neighborhood an estimated 70% of water is lost from 120 year old pipes. Imagine if Apple shipped 100M iPhones stateside and 50M were littered across the Pacific Ocean floor on their way over from Asia. Crazy, right? VODA.ai is building a software company that uses existing data to assess the condition of pipes that cannot be seen and determine which ones will have the highest likelihood of an event, like a leak or a break. VODA.ai created an AI engine dubbed “daVinciTM” here in Boston that uses pattern recognition in the way that LLMs probabilistically identify the next word in a sentence. daVinciTM has been tested head-to-head with other alternative models and has always outperformed! No pressure.. Since COVID they have grown both revenue & customer count by 200%+ y/y, continuing to leverage AI with both their product & team. AI’s emergence has helped VODA.ai’s sales cycle fall from a full year to three months as utilities broadly want to leverage best in class AI software. This Seed-stage startup has already analyzed over 1M miles of pipe (almost 50% of America!) and over 2M miles of service lines with customers from Boston to San Jose, CA. They are planning to more than 2x revenue in 2024, becoming the go to decision support platform for water utilities across the country in the next five years. VODA.ai is backed by local Boston investors Innospark Ventures and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. MassCEC has named VODA.ai a top carbon reduction emission leader, the team has twice been voted (by water utilities!) the Best Smart Water Solution at the Smart Water Summit, and VODA.ai plans to continue to grow their team in Boston in the quarters ahead. Operators to Know: -Kyra Dubinsky, Chief of Staff -Cory Sides, SVP Sales -Dan Hack, EVP of Operations and International Sales -Lowell Rust, MBA PMP, VP of Customer Success 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 next week, will you?? #bostontech #startups #AI

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Snap Q2 2024 earnings: brand revenue languishing, continued push into DR With brand revenue in systemic decline, Snap seems to be contending with the much more competitive brand advertising landscape wrought by the Everything is an Ad Network dynamic: Snap must square off against relatively new channels like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and the entire retail media ecosystem for brand budgets. With stagnant user growth in North America, Snap appears to be losing those contests. Meanwhile, Snap is progressing with its DR infrastructure and SMB recruitment efforts, but from a low revenue baseline and with a multi-quarter handicap, having not taken seriously the threat of Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy from the start. The result is tepid growth as Snap's advertising platform is rehabilitated for the new operating environment.

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🎨 📺 Sharon Roth is a Product & Design leader who’s built her career in the lab, across different modalities, to bring more creative product experiences to life 📺 🎨 It's W3 / Q3 / 2024 and this week in our MGMT Boston up & coming operator series we’ve got Sharon who serves as the Senior Director of Product Management at Quantified.ai, the AI-driven flight simulator for sellers. The app feels as real as your next video call, scales across teams, programs, and companies, and ramps reps 42% faster. Sharon is leading Quantified AI’s Product & Design team after previous roles in Product leadership at Tamr & Honor Education. She’s excited to be back working in an Enterprise focused company, leading Design alongside Product, focused on strategic & execution based discipline. ❓Questions Are Your Roadmap ❓ It’s popular to encourage new hires to ask a lot of questions. But it’s always a good time to ask questions! When a member of your team comes to you and says “we really need to build X feature”, they’re coming to you for good reason. Dig into the why to understand how often the issue comes up, when it happens in a customer conversation, and why they’re asking for it in the first place. Is there an even better way to build a solution? Also, people are always excited about getting to a solution. By delaying the solution discussion to first get everyone to agree on the problem, you can coordinate a better response. Sharon has been in rooms where stakeholders can’t agree on the problem they’re trying to solve, which can sometimes be even more painful! By asking better questions and articulating the underlying issues thoroughly, they can work together as an organization to chart a better path forward. 3 Career Insights / Learnings 🙋‍♀️ Seek New Challenges - “Trying new things is how you learn and grow. At a startup, there are so many opportunities to try new things. As startups evolve, you need to embrace all that’s going to happen and make it a positive thing. Otherwise don’t go to a startup!” 🤝 Act with Integrity - “Do your best, show your work. But also treat others with respect and kindness while doing it. How you treat people and how you show up every day will impact your work environment. You’re responsible for the energy you bring to the room, so be authentic and try to inject some positivity. It will help you build the type of network you want to have too” 🗣 Invest in Communication Skills - “It helps you ask questions well, advocate for yourself, have your ideas be heard. It also helps others understand your impact. It takes continuous practice to do well.” If you’d like to learn more about Sharon’s career, the full post is linked in the comments. Go ahead and sign up for the newsletter to see the operator learnings we bring you in the weeks ahead too, will ya? #bostontech #operators

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I’m excited to share that Motion has raised $30M in Series B funding, led by Inovia Capital with participation from Threshold Ventures as well as our existing investors Headline, Abstract Ventures and Sugar Capital. In recent years, as audience targeting on ad platforms became algorithm-based, growth leaders shifted their focus toward creative. Very quickly, creative became the biggest lever for success in paid social. Terms like “creative is the new targeting” were popularized across the industry and we entered a new era of digital advertising. In a sense, it’s a pivot back to the old-school advertising principles of the David Ogilvy era. Conducting customer research, storytelling, and craftsmanship are all essential once again. But while the principles are timeless, the digital world is a very different environment. The creative strategist is the modern-day Ogilvy. They know how to blend art and science to ship winning ads. They are as creative as they are analytical and they bridge the gap between media buyers and creative teams. They live by data but know how to move beyond the numbers and let creativity run. We believe the creative strategist is the most critical role in performance marketing today and will be even more so in the age of AI. Soon enough, AI will drive the cost of new creative production to near zero. Which means that the most valuable question teams need to answer is: what to create? We raised this capital to accelerate our product roadmap and to build the command center for creative strategists. Motion’s customers are the best-of-the-best in paid social, and creative strategy is at the core of their workflow. Our goal is to build the tools that creative strategists need to succeed their craft. Over the last 12 months, we've doubled our team to 50 people and we've grown ARR by 3x. The Motion team is on 🔥 and we're hiring across the board. We are fully remote and looking for the most talented people anywhere in the world. If that's you, please get in touch with me or Libby Moyer and tell us about your superpowers!!

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Parker just posted Rippling's new fundraising memo. It's the manifesto for compound startups and one of our initial inspirations for building Atlas. Here's a nugget that I really liked that summarizes how we feel about the competitive advantage of all-in-one startups over vertical startups (in customer support especially): "When we build corporate cards, we're not innovating on the way we issue corporate cards (through Stripe issuing or Marqeta) or the way we scan and extract metadata from receipts (which is mostly a vendor relationship for us today). We're going to win on the capabilities we have that are common to all Rippling products—the integration with the rest of Rippling and with employee data, the platform capabilities, and the common UX described above." Here's the full doc: https://lnkd.in/gYH59HVZ

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DeepCast shipped a number of really cool new features recently in advance of a broad outreach push to podcast listeners. One new feature is our new Daily DeepDigest tool that sends you a concise daily email including any new episodes from the trailing 24 hours from any podcasts you Subscribe to (on DeepCast). Think daily podcast cliff notes or podcast news ticker tape, with a hint of Morning Brew various brews or PitchBook News—it's increasing information throughput when you're pressed for time. And this feature is rapidly evolving to distill other key extractions from shows you're already interested in, but also exposing you to other shows you might be unfamiliar with that also have nuggets to share—and thus increasing your aperture yet still conscious of your time. Want to go deeper on any given episode? Click the episode detail and you're off to an episode on DeepCast, where you can subsequently read a longer form distillation of that episode or go straight to the source and listen to the episode. (And podcaster friends, these pages are definitely increasing indexing and thus Google entry points to your shows!) I'm loving this feature as a user, personally. Can't wait to see what others think! #BuildingInPublic #Podcasts #AllTheWorldsInformation #HowYouWantIt

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Let's finally get rid off the "VC alphabet song" and redo the system to become more founder friendly. "The benchmarks set by funding stages are often arbitrary and not necessarily aligned with the actual development needs of individual startups." #vc #venturecapital #founder #fundraising #startups #fundingstages #funding #fundingrounds #pitchbook

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Instacart is a market leader when it comes to leveraging AI tools to boost productivity at work. I had an amazing conversation with JJ Zhuang, Instacart’s Chief Architect, who has shepherded over 50 AI-driven initiatives to market across the org. We explored what catapulted Instacart to the forefront of AI integration, supporting radically diverse use cases across various functional areas. One striking insight (echoed by Ethan Mollick and others elsewhere) is that you often don't need specialized tools for specialized work. Frontier models like GPT-4 can seamlessly adapt to a wide range of functions and use cases. They're not just for engineers; they're incredibly versatile tools used by marketing, comms, and legal teams. From generating code to proofreading and ideation, GPT-4 empowers every department to leverage AI for enhanced productivity and innovation. By integrating LLM’s like GPT-4 into their workflows, teams can streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and unlock bandwidth for new creative possibilities. How can you harness the power of AI in your own work to boost productivity? Share your thoughts below 👇 Want to hear more insights from JJ? Check out the full podcast episode by clicking the link in the comments.

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Insightful breakdown from my great Partner Omri Amirav-Drory on the simple factors that really separate the top 1% of investors from the rest, and how more operators should become investors! https://lnkd.in/gEiZdT2h

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As we’ve begun building Oversubscribed Ventures, we’ve learned that the world of venture capital is way too mysterious and insular. We wanted to crack it wide open and make it accessible to everyone. So, we launched a new podcast, with Phil Schwarz. Some of you may already listen to our World’s First Podcast (and if you do, thank you!). The Oversubscribed Podcast takes a lot of what makes World’s First Podcast great and focuses on the business world. This is a business podcast for anyone and everyone who is curious about stories of success, failure, recovering from rejection, pivoting, and more. Why launch a new podcast? - The lessons that come out of talking to founders, executives, etc can apply to everyone, whether they’re starting a company or not; - We could add something to the (way too few but super impressive) female voices in the startup and venture world; and - We could inject our own personality and - admittedly - often inappropriate humor into the conversations (iykyk). We hope our Oversubscribed Podcast does all of this and more. Link below, and of course you can find it anywhere you can listen to podcasts. More to come! Link: https://lnkd.in/e2E6kynn

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If you've ever dreamed of buying a business, STOP what you're doing and read this. I've just interviewed Chelsea Wood from Acquisition Lab and she drops some bombshells about the reality of M&A & how it all really works 👇 You've probably seen the flashy posts on social media... 💥 Buy a business with no money down! ��� Become a millionaire through acquisitions! It all sounds so easy, doesn't it? Well, on the latest episode of The Expertise Economy podcast, renowned M&A expert Chelsea Wood explains how different the reality is from the fantasy being sold online. Here's just a taste of what we get into: ◾ The "Buy Then Build" methodology ◾ How most people glamorizing M&A on social media have NO IDEA what they're talking about ◾ What Acquisition Lab is and why the program ONLY accepts a small percentage of those who apply to join ◾ How to identify profitable acquisition targets ◾ Tactical tips on mitigating risks through seller financing ◾ When and how to attract top talent to your acquired business ◾ The future of online education businesses And more! Chelsea's honesty was refreshing. She's not selling a dream - she's helping execute one, but only for the right people. If you're considering M&A or buying a business, you owe it to yourself to watch this interview. It might save you from making a very expensive mistake. Check out the full episode on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/d--67mKN #BuyingBusinesses #AcquisitionLab #Startups #EducationBusinesses #Community #BuildingBusinesses #OnlineEducation #ChelseaWood

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I hopped on with Adam LaGreca at 10KMedia to go deep on incident response. We covered a variety of topics: 🛳️ Why pragmatism is important 📊 The fact that leadership want fewer, severe incidents, and don't view them as 'opportunities' ✨ How we're thinking about AI in incident response 🔮 Where we're headed in the future 🎧 Listen more in the link below!

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Not many topics create as much buzz in 2024 as AI. Hot takes abound. I enjoyed my grounded conversation with Bryan Chappell, CEO of Scout, who is helping companies all over the US incorporate AI into their workflows (Quipli is one of them). While the topic can get heady quickly, I appreciated his thoughts on how rental companies can benefit today in the quickly evolving AI landscape. "One use case today, is that you can turn customer support from a cost center to a profit center. You still keep a 'human in the loop', but AI allows you to give much higher levels of customer support, to a much larger level of customers. This is totally different than we were five years ago with simple AI chat bots. Five years ago we were riding bikes. Now we are driving a Ferrari. With technology today, AI can draft hyper personalized messages using the structured data you have, that ultimately speeds up the response time to customers while simultaneously delivering better service." Listen to the full episode, and all 30+ episodes on Spotify, Apple Music, and Youtube of The Rental Roundtable at https://lnkd.in/ewCCfsAf.

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Doesn’t matter if you are building a fintech or lifestyle brand, or anything in between - hiring great journalists is step 1 to nailing the “brand as media company” thing. Robinhood hired Joshua Topolsky to run Sherwood (and then acquired David Crowther’s Chartr) RH hired former Architectural Digest Editor-in-Chief Margaret Russell. Call it what you want - brand publishing, brand journalism, content to commerce - but the brands getting it right understand both the upside (gaining massive trust & authority and reducing customer acquisition cost) and the table stakes (hiring talented reporters + editors). In turn, they're finding sustainable ways to produce content that matters, and audiences rely on to do their jobs/live their lives - while driving the overarching business forward. You don’t need to hire big names or do it on the scale of these behemoths - you just need to hire people with topical expertise and authority, and find your niche. And there are a lot of incredibly talented people out there.

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📈 Curious about the startup scene in Massachusetts? Explore our detailed funding list featuring startup names, HQ locations, and investor info. Perfect for investors and entrepreneurs alike! Check it out: https://lnkd.in/dAp3xj-Q #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #managementconsulting

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Today, Upshift is reinventing car ownership. This is the day I’ve been looking forward to for years. Today, Upshift is reinventing car ownership with a PERSONALIZED fractional car subscription. Now you can create your own plan uniquely tailored to your needs. Choose 4, 8 or 12 days/month. Pick 250, 500, or 750 miles per month. Opt-in for delivery - or pick it up yourself from a central San Francisco lot. It's all up to you now! And we have a new signup flow that helps you choose what’s best for you. Best part? Plans now start at just $149/month for 4 days/month of car access! That's HALF the price of our former plans! Perfect for a hybrid work commuter driving into the office 1-3 days/week or a weekend warrior getting out of the city regularly. With Upshift car subscriptions, everything is included in one monthly plan - even insurance. We do everything for you- we refuel, clean and handle service and repairs. And we guarantee availability. Your car can be conveniently delivered and parked near your home- clean, gassed, and ready when you are. Unlock and drive via our app. When done, park legally anywhere in our San Francisco service zone. We eliminate the worries of car ownership and leave you truly free to enjoy the ride. Imagine having a hybrid Toyota Corolla or AWD Honda CRV hybrid SUV that appears when you need one and disappears whenever you're done. Now stop imagining. Click here to build your personalized fractional car subscription and have your new car at your doorstep today! #carsubscription #carleasing #carrental #carshare #mobility #transportation #EV #AV #autonomousvehicles #autotech #startups #vc #venturecapital #climatetech #insurtech

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Every company and marketing leader is asking the same question: How do we leverage AI? The center of discussion has been generative AI for copy writing, creative generation, and brainstorming marketing ideas. While this is fascinating, I'm a huge believer that there's *low hanging fruit* at every company using AI/ML and the most highest impact investments are often NOT what people aren't talking about. https://lnkd.in/eY65xRg4 If your company runs digital ads (99% true), here's something that should be at the top of your marketing leader's list.

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Learn a bit more about our DNA and how we operate at Acurio Ventures from Kate Cornell

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