MGMT Boston - W2, Q3 24 - Sense / Greg Montemurro, Posh (2024)

Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 955+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!

TLDR:

• Sense - a growth stage software company bringing better intelligence to the edge of our electrical grid

  • Thanks to Matt Thoms at Baukunst for the intro to Sense

• Greg Montemurro, Chief of Staff to the CPO @ Posh - a fast talking, hard charging product & community leader who opened doors..so he could knock them down

  • Thanks to Abigail Risse at Touchdown Ventures for the intro to Greg

Other Resources:

• MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping 60+ 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 (check out Dana’s Medium blog here)

  • 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 - 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, Blink, Arcee, Lendbuzz, Lightmatter, VODA.ai, Day.ai

• Q2 Operators Highlighted: Adam Fisk / Tech Superpowers, Bryan Dsouza / Aptiv, Noah Massucci / Robin, Erica Kangas / Scroobious, Brian Moseley / Semrush, Sara de Zárraga / RapidSOS, Hannah Leary / OneScreen.ai, Shaili Gupta / xFact

• 2023 1H Recap / 2023 2H Recap / 2024 Q1 Recap

From the community..

Founders: Christopher Micali, Mike Phillips, Ryan Houlette
Founding: 2013
Mission: To reduce global carbon emissions by transforming the relationship between people, homes and the grid
Employees: 100 & ~50% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series C & $157M raised
Investors: Blue Earth Capital, Bolt, TELUS Ventures, MCJ Collective, Schneider Electric, Energy Impact Partners, Prelude Ventures, and iRobot
Key Customers: National Grid
Glassdoor Rating: 3.9
Valuation (estimated): Last reported fundraise was a $105M Series C in Q2 ‘22

Sense is a growth stage software company bringing better intelligence to the edge of our electrical grid. This team is helping to decarbonize the world through better grid analytics as we march through a critical intermediary step: electrification.

Sense’s mission is to reduce global carbon emissions by transforming the relationship between people, homes and the grid. Because decarbonization begins with electrifying as many things as we possibly can.

Founder and CEO Mike Phillips has built software companies through many cycles, including the dot com era. In the early days of AI and machine learning he founded a company called Speechworks, licensing speech recognition technology from MIT which was purchased by (what later became) Nuance Communications. He founded another company, Vlingo, which created the first successful voice assistant before Siri used by Samsung and Nokia devices. After surviving and winning a legal IP battle, Vlingo was acquired by Nuance Communications too. Mike has a chart in his office that maps the rollups over a 20+ year lifespan before their 2022 Microsoft acquisition.

His career journey is important to understand because it provided great context about the evolution of markets and technology that Mike and his early team brought to Sense. When they were ready to build something new at the intersection of machine learning, data and consumer in climate tech, they had a battle tested plan.

Electrification helps decarbonization because we can then use software to more intelligently identify areas of efficiency. As we onboard more electric vehicles, integrate more heat pumps, and stop burning stuff in our home and cars we need to see what is where.

When you get a bill from your energy provider and it shows that energy usage bar chart relative to your neighbors, it’s not very actionable. Did you know the transformer at the end of your street can only support charging 3 EVs at any given time?

Our electrical grid is the largest machine in the world, based on 100-year-old technology. It’s amazing it even works because it’s practically devoid of real time insights. When Mr. & Mrs. Smith move in next door with the 4th EV in the neighborhood and the power goes out, do you know how the utility knows? When you call them!

Estimates from Bloomberg, McKinsey and others state that $21T of investment is needed to upgrade our electrical grid in order to hit net zero emissions with capacity also needing to double by 2050 (src). This is a massive transition with software needed to help deliver the insights to guide us.

Today that all seems pretty clear. But in 2013 when Sense was first raising money it wasn’t a consensus. They couldn’t find any local VCs to fund them even though Mike already had two prior exits! Luckily he got plugged into the rest of the climate ecosystem, secured the funds, and they were on their way.

Sense was originally a consumer-only product which gave individual households insights at the edge of the electrical grid by writing software for electric panels. In the years since their platform has evolved to embed their software directly into next-generation smart meters and provide insights between both individual households and the entire grid. They’re pushing the next generation of energy infrastructure using real time networking to make better use of data for the consumer and utilities.

We now know wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity but are tricky from a timing perspective. Sense is helping grids better balance electric loads and variable supply and demand. Their tooling helps facilitate better interaction using data and AI. Their consumer app helps individual households identify areas to save on their electric bill in real time and they have sensors for homes that integrate with solar power systems for more intelligent routing.

The team plans to build global impact by getting into every home through core utility infrastructure integration. In 2024 they are focused on meter rollouts to utilities across the U.S. They are partnering with major utilities on the east coast to bring Sense’s technology and insights to over 3M consumers, with more on the horizon. Throughout the rest of 2024 they’ll continue to grow their team mostly on the technical side of the house, including AI and machine learning roles.

Sense is proud to be a part of Boston’s growing climate community seeing big potential throughout the Boston ecosystem, aspiring to be one of the companies leading the way in the years ahead. Sense is backed by Blue Earth Capital, Bolt, TELUS Ventures, MCJ Collective, Schneider Electric, Energy Impact Partners, Prelude Ventures, and iRobot.

Operators to Know (Locally):

• Karen Rubin, COO

• Colin Gibbs, VP Energy Services

• George Zavaliagkos, VP Technology

• Sam Alden, Director of FP&A

• Maggie Fitzgerald, VP Business Operations

• Vikas Garg, Senior Electrical Design Engineer

• Joel Margolese, Director Software Engineering

• Stephon McCoy, Head of Strategic Integrations, North America

• Aisha Strauss, Director of Customer Success

• John Watlington, Director of Hardware

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Sense team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

• More roles coming soon!

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

• What are the most important initiatives as Sense works to integrate retail & utility use cases?

• How is the company progressing toward its 2024 goals?

• What is the long term vision for the company?

• How will Sense continue to shape its team in 2H 2024 and beyond?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Sense you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more consumers better insights about their energy usage. Our planet applauds your efforts. See you around town!

Greg Montemurro is a fast talking, hard charging product & community leader who opened doors..so he could knock them down. His own dad was even named after him! Greg just wants to build things and make a dent in the universe with the help of 900+ of his closest Boston area friends. Today he serves as the Chief of Staff to the CPO at fast growing fintech AI startup Posh and is the Founder of GenZ community platform Capital Z.

Born in Cologne, Germany the Montemurro family had moved to Europe for Greg’s job. No, not that Greg. Come on now, he was an infant. The elder Greg Montemurro happens to be a six sigma master black belt who led manufacturing strategies & facilities for Ford. The family then relocated closer to Ford’s HQ in Michigan and eventually made their way back to Massachusetts. Old(er) Greg leads manufacturing quality at Toast these days. And Greg’s mom is a legendary schoolteacher, also built Ford Tough.

From an early age, Greg learned about structuring and solving problems with an “end to end” mindset. He remembers learning about six sigma techniques as an eight year old. But when it came to the classroom, processes didn’t click into place as soundly. He was a varsity runner (currently training for his first marathon) and, in his words, “an awful student”.

Greg thrived in the extracurricular realm. There was an early iOS game, Dark Summoner, where he found a backdoor bug which allowed him to manufacture tokens for new characters. When he posted it to the Internet, a side business was born. His parents desperately wanted to know where the $300 in this new PayPal account came from. 100% legal, mom & dad! Greg mined Bitcoin, he modified video games, and he was just more interested in life outside the classroom.

UMass Lowell was kind enough to grant him admission under the stewardship of new business school dean Sandra Richtermeyer. Sandra was determined to find real world opportunities for her students and Greg took full advantage. When he was a freshman he started a company in the blockchain & biometric space before FaceID to help prevent bank fraud. He quickly realized he was in over his head, not quite ready to be a founder, but he won some prize money in a campus pitch competition to fund his ambitions. It turns out though that removing passwords altogether is a scary proposition for traditional consumers.

His first internship was as a teenager at FLIR Systems, where he was able to automate his entire job in just a few weeks. His friend’s mom needed an intern and it sounded a lot better than working at Whole Foods! She was the one who encouraged him to check out the Boston area DCU FinTech Innovation Center.

Greg was ambitious, eager, and determined. So he e-mailed over to the center to get involved. Once, twice, seven times..nothing! But they did add him to their newsletter distribution so he could see their upcoming events.

Then one fine day Managing Director Vasilios Roussos gave him a shot. He e-mailed Greg back that they were hosting an event that afternoon and he could hold doors at the entrance if he could make it in time. Greg shot out of Lowell, skipped a calculus class (sorry again mom & dad!), and borrowed a friend’s car to hightail it to Boston.

He opened doors as only a namesake Greg Montemurro could. Jennifer Jordan, the TechStars FinTech Managing Director at the time, saw the Greg-arious teenager in action and ushered him into the pitch sessions to see what it was really like for startups to pitch investors.

When Vasilios landed funding to secure an intern in 2018, he brought Greg onboard full time to join the center. Greg was a freshman! He juggled a full work week, school work, and campus leadership positions like being the President of the Real Estate Association, then forming a new student consulting group the Manning Consulting Group, and finally serving as Student President of the Business School his senior year. Oh and he was commuting back and forth to Boston too.

Vasilios Roussos, the Centers Managing Director, kept putting Greg in positions to succeed. He has been the most influential person in Greg’s career, empowering him by asking pointed questions and giving him the space to go find the right answers. When he joined, the Center was onboarding their first accelerator class which included an MIT student founded startup named Posh.

Greg dreamed of being a future management consultant, so Vasilios empowered him to lead DCU’s partnership with McKinsey on Go to Market to help the corporate world interact with DCU’s startup accelerator cohorts. By working closely with the McKinsey team, he learned about the work they did and came to his own conclusion that perhaps McKinsey was not his trail to trod. And Greg continued to receive new opportunities at the Center.

He led marketing, due diligence, sourcing, automating & building new tools all the way through college and COVID. Upon graduation he became their Operations Coordinator. The FinTech startups that went through the DCU accelerator program have raised $600M in capital and created hundreds of jobs. Vasilios was the strategic mind and Greg was their workhorse.

Greg got to work with a lot of experienced leaders who were excellent sounding boards. It was awesome. But he also wanted to meet more peers his age. So he organized a happy hour in Charlestown at Anchor with some local GenZ VCs he had worked with. Ten people showed up, all introducing themselves in a circle, and four of them remain Greg’s closest friends today. Capital Z was born.

Underscore VC opened up space for their next happy hour and they had 30 Zoomers join in the fall of 2021. Happening more or less monthly, the group has continued to grow every month. Smart people keep showing up. They brought on partners like Citizens Bank, First Republic, SVB, TriNet and more to sponsor their events. They hosted their first holiday party at the Center and over 70 people joined. The best GenZ founders, investors, & operators in Boston have used CapZ to get more connected and the group is now more than 900 strong in 2024.

Professionally, Greg had been at the Center for 5+ years on a rocket ship and was starting to think about what was next. He had an offer to join a venture capital firm through a prior co-worker, but Posh was looking for Operations help and he really liked building stuff. In particular, automating systems and removing his job by solving hard problems.

Posh had scaled to dozens of employees & clients and Greg jumped at the chance to work with SVP of Client Solutions Michelle Earle. He led project management responsibilities, built an internal tool that helped team members write code in plain text, and made their processes & products work better. Bringing customer & event data into Salesforce and Coda, Greg helped their customer facing teams gain better visibility from a product perspective with their accounts & activities.

After a year in Client Operations, Greg joined Posh’s co-founder & CTO Matt McEachern as his Chief of Staff. He’s rediscovering his technical roots on their “second biggest” product problems, working on hard product problems to help make their AI voice product perform better, faster, and reduce customer implementation time too. In his new role he has additional responsibilities to help pull in the resources across the entire team so they can all move fast and drive progress forward.

Getting Comfortable Through Repetition
With his career starting when he was just a teenager, Greg has gotten really comfortable being uncomfortable. In fact, his anxiety response just doesn’t kick in very often. Even while working alongside very gifted engineers, he doesn’t feel out of place.

After working on so many problems at the DCU FinTech Innovation Center, seeing so many founders and teams, he’s proven he can break things down into component parts. Repeatedly asking questions to smart people, and learning the right questions to ask, is a skill he has honed over the past 5+ years.

He writes things down, breaks those problems down into a system, runs through them, and is totally fine putting together simple prototypes without over obsessing about perfection. He listens a lot too. They built the DCU program around the lean startup methodology and Greg got to witness some of the smartest and most ambitious people in FinTech on their best & hardest days over years.

72 companies, hundreds of founders, and almost a thousand more ran through diligence, Greg has learned to always ask more questions by figuring out “what are you doing this for? Who is it for?” Greg has learned how to ask questions he knows people will have struggled with, so they can search together for better answers…and then design the solutions to follow.

3 Career Insights / Learnings

Be Excited - “Excitement is palpable and contagious. People can tell when you're excited. And they love helping excited people”

Just Try - “We could talk for a long time about all the things I”ve tried that haven’t worked very well. But I learned so much every time I tried. It’s very rewarding when I see all the experimentation I put in at the Center being put into practice at Posh. You’ll never be completely ready!”

Figure Out Who You Are - “I’ve been lucky in my career to be around so many authentic people. I’ve seen that people who don’t change who they are, regardless of the audience, have a big advantage. People can sense authenticity. Learning who you are and embracing it has really helped me get more comfortable and perform better”

One day, Greg wants to start a company. He’s really thankful to have been in highly unstructured roles where he can go find problems and implement end to end solutions. He’s happiest building hacky solutions, solving hard problems with smart people and seeing where it goes. Being paid to learn a lot from smart people is something he absolutely loves. All he knows is that if he ever has to work at a company with a badge on his waist, he won’t be very comfortable.

For more about Greg you can find him building FinTech AI at Posh, running his merry band of 900+ community members at CapZ monthly(ish) events, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the teams, technologies & community you continue to build in the years ahead!

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