Next up: Boston’s Top AI Marketers!

We set out to find the elite marketers (any level of experience) who are rewriting the marketing playbook in any of the following categories:

• AI-Driven Transformation – Demonstrated leadership in identifying opportunities and successfully implementing AI within the Marketing function to enhance processes, insights, or outcomes.
• Efficiency & Value – Achieved measurable improvements in the efficiency, effectiveness, or strategic impact of the Marketing function directly attributable to their application of AI.
• AI Champion – Go-to resource for all things AI and encouraging the adoption of AI across the marketing team or organization.

We gathered the responses, our expert judges reviewed the submissions, and we are finally ready to release the list. From rising superstars to marketing executives, you’ll find honorees from Boston’s hottest AI native startups to global tech giants.

So, who made the list?

Click here to discover the Top 20 AI Marketers in Boston 

A massive thank you to our expert judging panel for their time:

• Dan Slagen – SVP, Marketing at Zapier
• Jess Iandiorio – CMO at Cimulate from Salesforce
• Sarah Hodges – Managing Partner at Pillar
• Nathan Burke – CMO at 7AI

Finally, this initiative wouldn’t be possible without the support of our sponsor, Zapier!

Episode 430 and today’s guest is Phil Beauregard, Managing Partner of Impellent Ventures.

I first met Phil back when Boston was going through another massive resurgence of growth following the financial crisis of 2008. It was a special time when local founders and investors banded together to help build and scale the Boston tech ecosystem.  It was a movement that is reminiscent of what we are seeing today with the Mass AI Coalition. There was a major buzz in the air back then, and it worked, resulting in the launch of multiple successful companies, including two of Phil’s own startups which were both acquired.

There is a phrase that Phil commonly uses, which is “why join the Navy when you can be a pirate,” and I think it speaks volumes to his mentality and how they deploy capital at Impellent Ventures.

They simply don’t follow the herd, especially when it comes to finding elite entrepreneurs. They are entirely location-agnostic and welcome working with exceptional founders who are tackling massive, real-world problems in emerging ecosystems… not just out in Silicon Valley.

Impellent Ventures is focused on making seed and pre-seed investments.  The firm is led by Phil, David Brown (who previously appeared on Episode 190), and Tariq Trotter, aka Black Thought of The Roots, who serves as a General Partner at the firm.

In this episode of our podcast, we cover:

• A conversation around building startups outside of San Francisco, and why we are living through the “consumerization of the enterprise” era.
• The correlation between smaller fund sizes and investor returns.
• Phil’s background growing up in New Bedford and studying business at The Wharton School at UPenn, plus how he first caught the entrepreneurial bug and met his co-founder, Matt Grace.
• The inside story behind his two exits: Objective Logistics to Carbon Black and Rekindle to HubSpot.
• His transition from operator to investor at Impellent Ventures, plus all the details on their unique investment criteria, portfolio company examples, and how Tariq Trotter joined the firm.
• His role as an early advisor to multiple successful tech companies, including the critical advice that Toast luckily chose not to take.
• How Phil is leveraging AI to build his own Relationship Intelligence System, helping him scale his ability to “pay it forward” to the ecosystem.
• Plus, so much more!

Transcript

Keith Cline (02:37)
Phil, thanks so much for joining us.

Phil Beauregard (02:39)
Thank you for having me.

Keith Cline (02:42)
feel like this is overdue. This is one of these conversations that I’m like, how have we not had this podcast conversation being that I’m over 420 episodes into this thing and your partner David Brown was episode 190. So maybe we just had to spread it out a little bit, but I’m excited to finally have this conversation to, we’re gonna talk a lot about a lot of stuff here. So hope you’re ready.

Phil Beauregard (03:04)
Cool, I’m ready. Yeah, I think 425 sounds right. Like I’m kind of like the C student, you know? Right at the side of the normal curve, not like a standard deviation away from cool, but like kind of getting there. So I feel like that’s the right place, you know? So that’s cool.

Keith Cline (03:13)
Right.

Right?

Okay, we need to talk about something that, know, Boston’s having another like moment. There’s the mass AI coalition. There’s this buzz of, hey, great companies can be built in Boston. You don’t have to go to San Francisco. So you run a fund that actually funds a lot of companies that are, you know, not just Boston, but elsewhere and not like major tech hubs sometimes. So I guess I wanted to get your point of view of why is it a good thing to build outside of San Francisco.

Phil Beauregard (03:58)
necessarily think that the whole idea is to relegate San Francisco into this kind of pejorative slash, what’s the opposite of a dunce cap, right? Like, I mean, San Francisco is the most startup and innovation dense geography filled with all these amazing people in the entire world. I I don’t think anybody denies that. We certainly don’t. I mean, we’d be total dolts if that were the case. I think that really what it comes down to is that we lean into the concept that genius, IQ, grit, maybe even more grit, ⁓ and all of these qualities that can make for people that start…companies and build products and have ideas is evenly distributed across zip codes, but capital and good mentorship in the things that come with density are not. ⁓ So what does that all mean? That means that if you’re familiar with the concept of estuaries ⁓ or places where there are breeding grounds and all of these things are just starting to pop up. ⁓ The little fish, right, that are about to go into the big ocean. I think the idea is to find and recognize those people as soon as humanly possible and surround them with love and mentorship and some capital, ⁓ institutional capital.

I don’t think it’s a new concept necessarily. I do think that the prosecution of the strategy is a particular bent that has been effective for us. And that comes from the days, and we can go into this a little bit later on, in teaching by the Jeff Fagnans of the world from when we were 26 years old. And the real idea is like, we will say it in Pellant, keep your hands busy.

And what does that mean? For us, it really means put our rucksacks over our shoulders, hop a commercial flight, you know, because our PJs are probably in service or something along those lines, or we’re in between our private jets over here. But yeah, get our asses on the budget airlines ⁓ and fly to where the entrepreneurs are and fly to where the influencers are and fly to where, you know, people are holding tremendous civic pride. And billionaires and centi-millionaires, they go back to Pittsburgh, they go back to Toronto Waterloo, they go back to Rochester, they go back to Philly, they go back to Austin, and they put their names on hospitals. Right? And they live there. And they want to see the environment pulsate. And so all of these things in the universities, they all combine.

Keith Cline (06:58)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Phil Beauregard (07:11)
to create an ample breeding ground for what goes into good entrepreneurship. It just so happens that if there aren’t support mechanisms like the downstream capital and the mentorship, they’re right from the get-go ⁓ in ample and quality, then those fish will immediately leave because they’re getting told to go to San Francisco immediately. Because that’s just such an un…

Keith Cline (07:36)
Right.

Phil Beauregard (07:39)
Relenting marketing machine on LinkedIn. are like when you’re talking about the Boston AI stuff, right? It’s I immediately nod my head because it’s just it’s it’s Honestly, it’s a coordinated campaign that I saw right from Will from WHOOP and Giuseppe from 186 and you know, all these different leaders, there and these are all friends. ⁓ And they did a great job of everybody just attacking it right away and saying, this is who we are. Let’s rally around it and let’s let’s let’s make this heard. And I think they did an awesome job of it. And that’s where it starts. It starts with that spark and it starts with attention and then a narrative forms. And so is it true? It just so happens that Boston has it’s not new. Some of the best universities and research labs and PhDs in science in the entire universe. mean, a lot of them, you know, walked their way over to San Francisco. We don’t need to mention all of their names that we got told growing up in Boston. Already left, and that’s why Boston’s so shitty, and you know, it’s a frontier market. And Puritanical and all that other stuff that the San Franciscans used to call us back in the day, and probably still do. ⁓ Yeah, I mean, it’s a place where greatness can happen.

I think the idea is, and where we really need to focus is to nurture that. And the question ends up being, how do we do that appropriately? And two main mechanisms there are capital, mentorship, relevant mentorship. Relevance is important, curated mentorship. Because if you have…people that haven’t been there done that or just for whatever reason aren’t necessarily capable of giving good advice to entrepreneurs at these critical periods. And I mean, when you’re that early, a critical period could be choosing the right bank or not taking venture debt or learning how to forecast your cash. That’s almost like the blind leading the blind. It’s almost like a, you know, physics professor trying to teach somebody about Shakespeare. Unless there’s some sort of amazing polymath. So long story short, that’s why we’re interested in these places.

And the way we think about that is to get on planes and meet people where they are because we do believe that face-to-face is important. We do believe that that enters into the equation. We do believe that that is part of the sales process to sign up great entrepreneurs and help them. And when we do so, hopefully we can make our small mark and start to create or help create some of these companies and aid them and abet them.

And if they want to go to San Francisco afterwards or one of these other places, I mean, they should a hundred percent, whatever, whatever works. So.

Keith Cline (10:43)
Yeah. I mean, like Boston, I mean, to your point with the Mass AI Coalition, like Ryan Durkin, like he is a force of nature. Like he had reached out to me, I don’t know, last October. It was like, hey, I’m thinking about doing this stuff. And I’m like, if there’s one person that can pull this off, it’s him. And he has gotten so many people and rallied the community together, which has been phenomenal. And Boston needed that because…

Phil Beauregard (10:50)
Hmm.

Keith Cline (11:10)
There’s all these success stories in Boston, people just don’t really talk about them. It’s very humble type of crowd, heads down, just keep building. So it’s good to celebrate once in a while.

Phil Beauregard (11:16)
You know, it’s really funny because first things first, addressing Ryan, like, I don’t know Ryan personally, ⁓ but I remember Chase Garbarino told me about Ryan, must’ve been a decade ago.

I just said, this guy is an absolute force. He’s the right person. I think we were discussing some other company or something like that. And that’s when he kind of came on my radar and then seeing what he’s done since, is… Yeah, no, so yeah, that’s precisely it, right? So that’s where I kind of knew that from. And yeah, the other funny part about it is it’s not necessarily…

Keith Cline (11:48)
He was part of the CampusLive crew, remember them? For us?

Phil Beauregard (12:05)
What the person is saying about themself. Because that just becomes, people just think that you’re not humble bragging or, people don’t wanna hear other people until they become kind of Elon Musk and even then it’s obnoxious, ⁓ talk about themselves and be like, I’m awesome, I’m awesome, I’m awesome, I’m awesome, right? But when everybody else says that person’s awesome, right? Then you start to say, whether I respect their opinion or not. mean, something’s going on over there, right? And so what San Francisco’s been fucking awesome at is everybody’s like, Bill Gurley is a god. Peter Thiel is the most fantastic person on earth. ⁓ Have you heard Peter Fenton talk? Those Sequoia guys, my God. Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz. You know, like, you’re just fucking inundated with all of these names and these people and they become a pantheon. Right? And to a degree, sometimes it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I mean, the human race and us as sapiens are so used to constructs. Right? And what I mean by that is that why the fuck do I need a Rolex watch?

Because everybody else is talking about it it looks cool and this, that, and other. It’s a piece of fucking metal on my wrist, dude. Like ⁓ anything can work, right? Why does the world need Andreessen Horowitz? Because everybody says it’s cool and it just keeps getting bigger, right? So other people talking about, Durkin’s really good at getting other people talking about this. And I think that this is where that sort of stuff starts.

Keith Cline (13:34)
Yeah.

Well, when I was preparing for this podcast, I was listening to another interview that you gave and I learned a fun fact. So is it true no VC fund greater than a hundred million dollars has generated a greater than a 5X return?

Phil Beauregard (14:09)
I was sense corrected on that. ⁓ And there’s one. yeah, I forgot who it was. It’s like one or two. Like, I’ll have to get back to you on it.

Keith Cline (14:18)
Okay, one, but still rare.

Phil Beauregard (14:25)
have to get back to you on, no, no, no, it’s beyond, this isn’t a counter to your point or to my point that you just referred to. Like,

Keith Cline (14:31)
No, no, it validates the fact that it’s just one.

Phil Beauregard (14:36)
The mere fact is, that like, it’s almost like the laws of physics apply and gravity applies to fund sizes in AUM, right? As it pertains to startups and VC. funds that are sub hundred million dollars, statistically, you know, are far more alpha oriented and can beat the three Xs so they can range up to, mean, think, I don’t know what founder collective one ended up being, but I think it’s 20 plus, right? ⁓ So yeah, so I mean, and those guys are our greatest mentors here. I used to say whether they know it or not, but Paley knows it at this point, because I won’t shut up about him. ⁓ He’s just…

Keith Cline (15:16)
Yeah, insane.

He’s amazing. He’s just extraordinary person who takes time. He’s so busy. Anytime I reach out to him, he’d be like, sure, let’s get on and count. Just, okay. Never me. It’s just amazing.

Phil Beauregard (15:45)
He surprised me and maybe that’s a backhanded compliment, but he surprised me at his openness and his willingness to help at the get-go when I first started. yeah, he’s been otherworldly. But those guys just deserve all the success that they have. And they’re very good at getting people to like them. And it’s intentional.

Like you can see the intent behind it. And it’s great. And they’re just super helpful. But yeah, so they deserve that 20X plus and all the other great things that they do. You don’t see that at the larger firms, right? Because at those stages, most people know this math, but when you have a billion dollar plus vehicle, nevermind 10 to 15 billion like Andreessen Horowitz.

It’s you have to move much, much larger checks. ⁓ and just the mere kind of like fact that when you’re moving a hundred million dollar checks instead of a million dollar checks or $50 million checks instead of $2 million checks, the outcome has to be that much bigger. And there’s only so much liquidity slash like ceiling in the entire industry to create multi trillion dollar outcomes to fulfill the entire need of that fund. Right. From a, from a return.

Do I think that that’s changing to a degree? think that, you know, people five years ago were like, there’s no such thing as a trillion dollar fucking company. Right? And it’s like, well, you know, strap, strap in and, know, into your seat belts and get ready for the ride because, know, crush your glass ceilings. Because now we are seeing a true…

Keith Cline (17:15)
Yeah, Well…

Phil Beauregard (17:31)
consumerization of the enterprise era where people that didn’t ever consider buying software to make their lives easier or enterprise software or creating their own agents, physicians, people that have never touched this stuff in their entire lives, individuals, contractors, they’re buying software. From Anthropic and from OpenAI and from all the app layer companies. So you’re seeing the true consumerization. And what does that mean? The total amount of money going into software is going up.

It’s not just your buyers at the little companies and other startups and Salesforce and like, you know, your typical accounting firms and so on and so forth. It’s literally your next door neighbor is buying Anthropic Claude Code is buying probably more often than not is buying an app player that’s helping out their business. And that is net new dollars into the ecosystem. And that’s why revenues will go up far past what they used to. And that’s why market caps will go up higher than that. Nevermind inflation. So.

Keith Cline (18:24)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Phil Beauregard (18:37)
I don’t even remember where we were, but I just wanted another other grant.

Keith Cline (18:41)
Well, let’s talk about your background story. So you grew up in New Bedford, right? How did you end up at Penn?

Phil Beauregard (18:46)
Quaint little city by the sea. How did I what?

Keith Cline (18:50)
Yeah, great place.

How’d you end up at Penn? You went to Wharton.

Phil Beauregard (18:56)
I went to my college consultant who was a consultant to, not college consultant, I’m sorry, guidance counselor. I just did college consultant. I just gave it a shine. ⁓ At New Bedford High School, so my graduating class was 4,000 people it started with. I think it ended up graduating like 2,900 or something. was a super high attrition rate.

Public high school, pretty rough. And the guidance counselor, my guidance counselor served 500 kids And so my short time in her office one day when I was a junior and she at the end of my junior year, she was saying, listen, like, what do you, we’ll talk about applying for colleges and this, that, and the other. And she said, what do you want to do? Like, what schools are you thinking about? And

I said, I don’t know, mean, the stock market was really up. My dad was a lawyer, so was like, maybe law, but I don’t think so. The stock market was up so high at that point. This was like 1999 or 1998 or something along those lines. Like we were on a little bull run. And I was just like, business? And she’s like, business, great, sounds good. Where do you wanna go then? I said, what are the top three business schools that do business. She essentially, truly, because at that point I was thinking about soccer and I don’t know, probably going on dates or something like that. So she ended up saying, well, she didn’t even get past Wharton. She literally was like, number one is Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. I was like, I wanna go there.

Keith Cline (20:22)
You know, business.

Phil Beauregard (20:47)
And she was like, well, you should do these. I was like, I don’t want to go there. So, so ended up, ⁓ yeah, ended up making my way to Penn, not knowing my ass from my elbow. And, and, and to a degree, I still don’t, but, that’s, that’s how I chose Penn. and yeah, so that was the, the rest was, the rest was, was, was history. Let’s call it history.

Keith Cline (21:10)
From what I saw on your LinkedIn, you started out doing the investment banking thing, which is pretty typical, but did you always want to start your own company?

Phil Beauregard (21:18)
I had no idea what that meant. No, the answer is no. I think when I was a kid…

I remember wanting to be my own boss or having those inklings. And maybe that was just me being obstinate or maybe it actually was foreshadowing the type of person I was to become, right? Like somebody that’s a little bit, honestly, more of a pirate than a Navy man. And I remember…

Even in my management 101 class the first year at Wharton, the professor, this guy comes out and he’s a really smart guy. Obviously very bonafide, like all this tenured shit and so on and so forth, consultant to the stars, who knows. And he comes out and he says, if you want to be a CEO, here’s the track. And he put it up on a presentation and it was like.

Long story short, was like you have to do 20 years at a consulting company, then you have to go into like, you know, 10 years at the company and move your way up the ladder. And by the time that you’re 55 or 50, I think it was, you can first become a CEO of a company. And

Keith Cline (22:32)
you

Phil Beauregard (22:32)
You can imagine like my response now it’s like what the fuck but back then you nobody would nobody was thinking that like really thinking that way i mean the only entrepreneurial blogs out there were Mark Suster’s Fred Wilson’s the VentureHacks that then became Nivi Naval who just yeah yeah and Brad Feld that’s it nothing else can you imagine that entire linkedin

Keith Cline (22:46)
Mm-hmm.

Angelist.

Phil Beauregard (22:59)
universe filled with nothing but just LinkedIn was even LinkedIn. So I mean just those were the people that were talking about entrepreneurship. And so it was slim pickings. I mean they were good pickings but it slim pickings. And yeah so this guy was saying that and I was just like fuck that. You know I want to I want to be the CEO two years out of school. Now that’s a little asinine but long story short, know, did the investment banking thing. 2009 came rolling around. That situation figured itself out. And, you know, walked out with my proverbial box. And I had written, this sounds so much haughtier than it is in my mind. I had a notebook, a moleskin, and I had written some algorithms in it around, you know, how do I rank waiters, waitresses, and retail salespeople? And what if I reward them?

Keith Cline (23:31)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Beauregard (23:54)
with the shifts that they want.

Keith Cline (23:56)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Beauregard (23:58)
Creates this competition. Back then it was like microeconomic concepts of like deadweight loss and all this other stuff. it was a fascinating like and it actually was really I mean it was pressing and so I took that and I was like maybe I can do this company thing and I started working from a coffee shop and I had no idea what to do and had no idea I needed a technical co-founder I mean those terms weren’t even a thing like

Keith Cline (24:18)
You

Phil Beauregard (24:20)
And so, ⁓ two years later, it took two years of like just toiling away with, with no pay, and ended up getting funded by Jeff Fagnan and Rich Miner and Lee Hower three Boston greats. And that, that, that was, yeah, that was the start of my, ⁓ all still like, you know, amazing, amazing folks. And that was,

Keith Cline (24:34)
That’s a great roster right there.

Phil Beauregard (24:43)
know, definitely an inflection point in my career and kind of like my network in Boston and just kind of who I was.

Keith Cline (24:51)
How’d you meet Matt Grace, your co-founder?

Phil Beauregard (24:54)
He was a guy from Dartmouth, so we were from the same area. It was like literally two people. Everybody was just like, yeah, this guy. Thinks about starting companies and he is a software guy. ⁓ Again, not necessarily Palo Alto or anything like that, right? Like ⁓ New Bedford, Massachusetts and Dartmouth. So yeah, we just kind of came together as social circles and everything else like that and said, all right, let’s go mess around with this stuff.

Keith Cline (25:25)
Well, you ultimately created what you’re looking to do, right? So this was an old version of your website here, Objective Logistics, right?

Phil Beauregard (25:37)
Not the oldest, but that was one of the oldest, yeah, that was way back in the day. Yeah.

Keith Cline (25:40)
in one of the older versions.

And then, because you were doing from what I, because I remember the company, I remember, you like you guys raised, it was like a, ⁓ you guys were doing AI, weren’t you back then? Like machine learning kind of thing or?

Phil Beauregard (25:56)
It was,

it was, there was machine learning. It was back then, you know, we just, we went into POS systems and amassed data and then normalized data and then used the data and then automatically, you know, rostered employees. So sure. ⁓ I remember there was like big data, gamification, like they’re all different monikers that were attached to it. ⁓ But.

At the end of the day, was way, I truly can say it was way before, what is this way back machine? ⁓ It was way before its time. Yeah.

Keith Cline (26:27)
Totally. I mean, this is the version of your website that I totally remember. As soon as I saw this, I’m like, I remember the logo. I’m like, yep.

Phil Beauregard (26:33)
Dude, our first presentation was like a PowerPoint that was like 40 pages long and it’s quite frankly one of the most horrifying things that I’ve ever seen in my life. In fact, gives me night terrors to think about it. The logo was Times New Robin, objective logistics over a globe, a PowerPoint, Microsoft, Earth. It was pretty bad, it was pretty bad.

Keith Cline (26:48)
you

So you were, I think I saw your address. You were like the Kingston street, right?

Phil Beauregard (27:06)
Yeah, we ended up moving to, so we did a couple different things. We moved from, one of the things that Fagnan mandated, actually, in the term sheet, you know, off market terms, Jeff, ⁓ was that we had to move to Boston from New Bedford. And of course we were like, hell yeah, let’s go do it. So we ended up, we ended up illegally, I think we’re past the statute of limitations here, illegally getting an apartment at Binney Street in Cambridge.

And so was literally a two-bedroom apartment and we were working out of that. Like we would like sneak in like other people and like, you know, cause we weren’t supposed to have a workplace there. And there were a couple other companies over there. I don’t know if I want to out them. I guess again, ⁓ Crashlytics Wayne and those guys were there. then, yep. and Matt Bellows from Yesware was there and Lucky Labs, Noah was there. ⁓ So we were all in that same place in our own little apartments. And then.

Keith Cline (27:51)
No way.

Okay. Yep, yep, yep.

Phil Beauregard (28:06)
when we had to go legit, we went to one around Kingston. So yeah, that’s right.

Keith Cline (28:10)
But I just remember that building had a lot of great early stage companies too. Like Terrible Labs was in there too, weren’t they? In the Kingston street.

Phil Beauregard (28:16)
Yeah, terrible labs. was Matt, Steven Marcus and Matchbox. Steven’s over at a great venture firm now on the west coast named Riot Ventures that just did true anomalies most recent round. So yeah, there was some, there was some OG stuff going on. don’t remember. It was, I don’t remember if Promoboxx was there, but somebody, no, maybe not Promoboxx, but somebody else was there. Yeah. There were, there were.

Keith Cline (28:21)
box.

Maybe. I just remember,

I remember stopping by and just looking at the exterior Rolodex of companies and I was just like, oh my God, I know all these companies. This is so cool.

Phil Beauregard (28:47)
Yeah. So, so we, was a little, I, the rent was 20 bucks, 19 bucks a square foot to start. And it was when downtown crossing wasn’t really a thing. you know, we’re from New Bedford, so we can handle a couple, ⁓ miscreants, hanging around. So we, it looked dingy and stuff, but it was great. And then, that’s when downtown crossing started to, started to pick up a little bit.

And it was a cheaper And

Keith Cline (29:23)
Eventually the company was acquired by Bit9, which ultimately became Carbon Black, which was then acquired by VMware. So how did all that take place?

Phil Beauregard (29:31)
It was, we had had a…relatively substantially larger transaction that was that we thought was going to get closed with a different company and that company which was this huge strategic acquirer I Don’t say the name of it pulled their Pulled the transaction we had done all the meetings we’ve gone through all the diligence. We were literally at signing and They ended up pulling their their offer with I think we had three weeks of cash left

So it was brutal. ⁓ I mean, that was rough. That was hard. Like I talked to lot of entrepreneurs on a daily basis, obviously, and kind say like, what’s the hardest thing you’ve ever been through in your life? Or like, you know, we’ll ask certain questions. I wouldn’t say that’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through in my life, but I certainly would rank it top 10 of kind of like feeling like shititude type situation. ⁓

Keith Cline (30:07)
Wow.

Yeah.

Phil Beauregard (30:33)
And so after that, we ended up essentially, I don’t want to call it a kick save, but like we ended up talking to Patrick Morley and we had a crazy good team and you know, some great math and you know, some great tech and stuff like that. um, they were able to, to, you know, strategically utilize like, like what we had to offer. And so we ended up selling to them and they ended up going public, um, right, right afterwards. They had combined with carbon black and went public. So, um,

Keith Cline (31:01)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Beauregard (31:02)
Yeah, it was the best outcome we could get at the time. And certainly not what I had expected seven and a half years prior, especially as my great friends were about to take, or on the course to take companies public, like Jason from Draft Kings and all these different folks that were running these large Boston companies. these things happen.

We were, proud of what we ended up doing. And then there was rekindle too, which was a little bit smoother after about a year and half to HubSpot.

Keith Cline (31:38)
Well, so I wanted to talk about rekindle. So how was that born? Because it was during the same timeframe, right?

Phil Beauregard (31:43)
Yeah, so I had another idea. Those are the only two ideas that I’ve had in my entire existence. The idea stopped after that. I’m kind of not kidding. ⁓

Keith Cline (31:52)
But the rekindle idea is brilliant.

Phil Beauregard (31:56)
Yeah, Rekindle was really good. ⁓ And Miner, like the whole group of guys did the same thing. It was like this parallel entrepreneurship thing, where some people were like, you know, one CEO should not form two companies and like, they’re probably right. I mean, there’s been like one person that’s done it, right? Like Jack Dorsey. ⁓ two now, two now, Elon Musk. ⁓

Keith Cline (32:15)
Jack Dorsey,

Phil Beauregard (32:20)
And yeah, I didn’t end up having the experience, either of them obviously, but ⁓ yeah, Matt ended up going over to that. I put him in charge of rekindle him and a guy by the name of Mike Lisovich, who’s now, he was high up at Cargurus. I don’t know where he’s at right now. ⁓ he’s at Klaviyo now. ⁓

And yeah, just good crew and we were building, it was really a relationship graph. And what I mean by that is that it was, what people are still trying to do is just like, but this is back when LinkedIn and Facebook’s APIs weren’t deprecated to the point that they are. And you could really get information on how people are connected via those two APIs and then phone numbers. And so we built this really complex, like very quickly relationship graph. And by the time that I had sold Objective Logistics, I was torched. And we had the opportunity to sell it to HubSpot. I needed a bath at that point.

We could have gone to San Francisco and like raised and so HubSpot ended up using it to power Sidekick, which then became their CRM. So yeah, it was a great, it was fun. was fun. So yeah.

Keith Cline (33:22)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

and it was HubSpot’s first acquisition post-IPO.

Phil Beauregard (33:40)
Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. And it made the stock jump. I remember that was really funny because the amount that the market cap jump that occurred because they announced that like it was way overblown, like meaning it shouldn’t have caused that much fervor. And I remember we were like, holy shit, we should ask for more, right? Like.

Keith Cline (34:02)
Hahaha

Phil Beauregard (34:03)
They got a crazy good deal on this one based on what happened here. but yeah, it was just a little tucking. But it was cool, it was cool.

Keith Cline (34:14)
Well, I want to talk about Impellent because I mean, because you became an operator, you did things after. But, you know, I do want to spend time talking about Impellent because obviously you guys are doing really meaningful work. So what led you and David kind of down the path of creating Impellent Ventures?

Phil Beauregard (34:31)
Yeah, so after, I don’t wanna lie over it super quickly, after Objective Logistics and Rekindle, I had this my blue period to a degree where I remember looking in the mirror and just essentially, and this is for the entrepreneurs out there, I was at a shape, I’d gone into it just kind of an athlete and in great shape and eating well and all that stuff. And then by the time I was done,

I was a shell of my former self as it pertained to mental and physical health. I can see it clearly now. I was an anxious wreck. And like overweight and red, drinking too much, like was, I was in a bad way. And so it took me a while to kind of get back to realizing that that was no way to live. Like fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life son, right? So.

Keith Cline (35:27)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Beauregard (35:30)
After that, it was probably a good three years, I ended up doing some side stuff, some fun stuff, but then I ended up tacking on and I remember a couple people that we’ve mentioned ⁓ called me and said, hey, we have this company that could use your help. Do you think you could help them as an executive? And I just said no. They’re like, no way. I’m happy. Everybody leave me alone.

And then they asked a couple more times and there people I really cared about and I said, yeah, I’ll take a look at it.

And that started four years of three different gigs where I was just extremely successful as an executive, that I would get dropped in by the private equity and the boards. And it’s really when I kind of like became an adult and an operator and had an awesome run. I was naming my salaries and my equity plans and had a huge offer for the next one. And just at that point was like, I don’t think I want to jump from Lily pad to Lily pad anymore.

Keith Cline (36:13)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Phil Beauregard (36:29)
So what am going to do? I want to find something that’s a little bit more permanent. And I had some overtures from some of the larger firms about being a partner in venture. I think that I had a lot of friends and colleagues that were kind of always saying, hey, why don’t you think about that? I think you’d be pretty good at it. ⁓

And I said, all right, at that point I was like, again, once again, why join the Navy when you can be a pirate? I took that momentum and just said, all right, I’m going to go start my own firm. And I was doing a listening campaign and making a bunch of calls and saying, you know, two people that were running venture firms and just saying like, how did you do this? What do you think about this? ⁓ And I called David. He was one of the people. ⁓ And if you guys don’t know David, ⁓ David Brown is quite the opposite of me. He’s the end to my yang. Like David is very tall. He’s got great hair. ⁓ Great golfer. And I don’t know, a single person that has anything bad to say about him. I’m the opposite of those things. I’m not short, but I mean, I’m not like, you know, as tall as David is. ⁓ And so when I called him up, he called me back and was like, hey.

Keith Cline (37:19)
can’t.

Phil Beauregard (37:44)
Little did I know that he was going into his fund 2 and had his anchor who was repledging for a little bit of a larger amount. And ⁓ he said, why don’t, have you ever thought about joining forces? Because entrepreneurship, not entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial venture capital companies are lonely, just like anything else. And so, you know, I’ve been thinking about it combining forces or adding a partner. And so it was a little while after that, but we ended up having a lot of conversations around it, threw the kids into a pit, had the wives agree that this was a good idea, and then we burned the ships. So that was when Impellent started, or Impellent in the form that it is now.

Keith Cline (38:27)
Very.

Alright, so let’s talk about the firm and what you guys do.

Phil Beauregard (38:33)
We touched on it at the beginning, really, Impelling Ventures is a fund that was rooted in the concept of entrepreneurs outside of the hubs or entrepreneurs that are overlooked.

Instead of being heat seekers, we wanted to be truffle pigs. Instead of going just to San Francisco, we wanted to look at all these different places and we wanted to see the best deals and get the most deal flow we possibly could in a certain set of cities that weren’t San Francisco. ⁓ And then just…try to capitalize on those opportunities and get into them early. We wanted to be the first check-in. We wouldn’t mind if we did it with another firm or anything else along those lines and really just be like any other venture firm, the firm that these folks relied upon. But I think our ethos had a bunch of different points that…we really practiced and it’s hopefully up until this point become apparent amongst entrepreneurs, the ones that know us and ask about us, that we don’t give up on our losers, right? Like we, one, we can’t afford to. ⁓ We don’t think that, you know.

It’s just going to be one company that returns our entire fund every single time. We want to act like all of them will at all times and practice unconditional love as much as humanly possible or unconditional support to our entrepreneurs. And we’re human, so I’m sure sometimes that we can be a little bit.

pull down on some of that, but I think more often than not, we are a firm that comes in and just sticks by you through thick and thin because we know what it looks like and what it feels like. And we truly believe that extraordinary people can do extraordinary things if only given the time to do it. And so we just don’t know how big that’s gonna get. And we also think that any human being to this point in time right now in civilization that thinks they can predict what a market’s gonna look like or what a product or company and where they’re gonna end up in 10 to 15 years is totally crazy. So what do we bet on? We’re not betting on the product strategy or just a forecast or exactly where entrepreneurs think that all this stuff is gonna go. We’d rather learn about how they think and who those entrepreneurs are. Because, you know, this isn’t new, but we really practice the art and science of betting on people. And that’s turned out extraordinarily well for us so far. It’s only, you know, six years in for David, five years in for me, but we just, you know, got ⁓ representation by Cambridge Associates for our next vehicle, which is, you know, a rarefied air for us.

we’re doing pretty well. Well, our portfolio companies are, so they make us look good.

Keith Cline (41:44)
Well, some of the, mean, obviously there’s more portfolio companies than this, but the ones that kind of stood out to me are just entrepreneurs that I respect greatly, like EnFi with Scott Weller and Josh Summers, Grocers List with Ben Jabbawy like he’s awesome. ⁓ I guess an entrepreneur that I don’t know about a recent investment that when I saw their video, their explainer video, it was just so obvious, Gander Robotics.

Phil Beauregard (41:56)
Yeah.

Yeah, there’s such stories behind all of these by the way, like meaning like how we got the deals is just making me laugh a little bit because EnFi I knew Josh and Scott, Scott was an LP of our fund and he was like, we started a company, I’m like, fuck you. And it because I was like, okay, when? And I was like, can I give you money? And he was like, I think it’s all filled up by Unusual and Lars, I’m like, double fuck you. Like, what is your problem dude?

Keith Cline (42:27)
Hello?

Hahaha!

Phil Beauregard (42:40)
Like, you know,

what is your deal? And then he was like, maybe we can find you some space. And then he was like, we can’t find you some space. I’m just like, I’m never talking to you again. You’re lucky I don’t come to your house and do cold murder on you right now. ⁓ And we ended up being able to tuck into that one. So that was awesome. then Josh, Josh is extraordinary. mean, he’s great. They’re doing extremely well, by the way. They just topped up with an unbelievable strategic venture firm. ⁓

Keith Cline (42:50)
you

Yeah. Fintop, Fintop, right?

Phil Beauregard (43:08)
Cool, that’s a good one. And Fintop yeah. And then Ben, I mean Ben, like, Ben texted me and was like, I’m thinking about doing something. essentially I just wrote, yeah, I’m in, what do I send the check? And so he was like, well, don’t you want to hear it? I was like, no, I don’t care. We don’t care.

Keith Cline (43:32)
No brainer. Like what he did with privy was just, like that’s a boundary you want to back.

Phil Beauregard (43:36)
I had court-side seats to that one, man. Court-side seats, like, Ben is an extraordinary human being. I mean, to go from 100 plus employees down to two, and the shit that he went through, and then to bring that back up with the sale to Attentive was just like, how could you not bet on a guy like that, right? And then Gander, another one, by the way, that you didn’t mention, that’s probably faster than all, I mean, anybody right now is, Morrissey Market. Brad.

Keith Cline (44:08)
Really?

Yeah. Killing it?

Phil Beauregard (44:12)
I can’t even begin to explain to you how fast that company’s growing.

Keith Cline (44:15)
Wow, okay, I need to them on my podcast. I haven’t had them on yet.

Phil Beauregard (44:18)
Unbelievable. And you know what? Could not happen to a better group of people. That guy, Brad McNamara, he’s a great human being. The people that you mentioned are all great human beings. So that’s pretty cool. And talking about another great human being, I didn’t know Michael Ottery from Gander Robotics, but the way that we met them, by the way, we have such an enormously strong Boston presence.

Keith Cline (44:33)
Bye.

Phil Beauregard (44:47)
Like we were thinking, we were doing it the other day. We’re like, we are in on every Boston deal that like we think is it’s just, we continue to be, we’re back in Boston once a month. Like the only reason that I don’t live there is because of family. ⁓ you know, and my kids. Yeah.

Keith Cline (45:00)
Right, like me, I live outside of Philadelphia. And people are like, you’re not in Boston? So here we are, we have two people talking about the Boston Tech ecosystem that actually don’t reside there.

Phil Beauregard (45:10)
I think that’s the strength of what people have created there to a degree and how tight that community was and hopefully they can carry it into the future. ⁓ But Gander, I got a call from Bill Aulet and John Corey, boom, within a day of each other and say, this is a guy you gotta check out for various reasons.

Keith Cline (45:15)
Fact. Agreed.

Mm-hmm.

Phil Beauregard (45:31)
And so said, well, mean, if these two guys are calling. So I got on a call with him, didn’t know what he did. And I asked him the prototypical question of like, what’s the hardest thing you’ve ever been through in your life? And he essentially just, Michael just was like, you got 10 minutes? And I was like, this is gonna be something. And by the way, I’ll usually tell entrepreneurs like what my things are, not for the sake of comparison, but to be vulnerable. Cause I mean, they’re pretty shitty, right? Like in that way, they’re like, my God, he’s willing to talk about that. ⁓

Keith Cline (45:55)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Beauregard (46:01)
So Michael, and he doesn’t mind me sharing this obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t, was born to a single mother with three siblings that were different fathers. ⁓ He was homeless up until the point where he moved in with his alcoholic father who’s now incarcerated for what he didn’t specify but said it’s the worst thing you can possibly imagine. ⁓ And dropped out of college, got kicked out of college.

Keith Cline (46:06)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Beauregard (46:30)
and was just kind of at Wits End after a couple months of school, and was at Wits End Community College. And he signed up for the Navy. He was like, need structure. Like, this is either gonna save my life or I’m gonna die. And so Michael ended up, flash forward, I mean obviously there’s a lot in between there, but he’s a naval commander. ⁓

You know, he graduated with dual engineering degrees and he’s currently at MIT, obviously, like, just finishing up his MBA. And he created a submersible, a carryable submersible, or is creating, that you can drop off the side of a ship, a naval ship, but also a cruise ship, that uses modern, you know, technology, AI and sonar to…

Keith Cline (47:02)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Beauregard (47:22)
pinpoint where a man overboard is, or object overboard in the water far better than anything that’s ever been invented before. It deploys a life-saving device and a player. And so it’s just like he made something that’s non-kinetic kind of defense technology ⁓ that you know, is going to save a lot of lives. And that’s what they’re working on now. we, alongside Underscore, just were like another one of those, you know, okay, what, where do I sign.

Keith Cline (47:54)
Right, yeah, like when I saw the video, like, and I saw the two founders backgrounds, I’m like, oh, this is a winner. like, all of sudden, it’s like, this is the first use case for this technology. It’s just gonna be like, I bet you massive other things to think about. So, all right.

Phil Beauregard (48:08)
Yeah, and Michael will admit to himself that there’s a lot between idea and where it goes, right? So execution is 99 % of the game. So we’ll see.

Keith Cline (48:20)
Well, we need to talk about your partner, of course. ⁓ So here’s a courtesy of LinkedIn. Someone shared this for all you, I think. ⁓ So ⁓ your partner is what most people know him as his Black Thought of The Roots. So how did that come together?

Phil Beauregard (48:40)
Yeah, you’re sitting outside of Philly right? So Tariq is like a brother to me. He’s been a good friend of mine, a dear friend for a long time now. It all started when Twitter or X to me had utility and I slid into his DMs. This is in like 2014. And just to say, I mean, I was a huge fan of The Roots.

Keith Cline (48:42)
Yeah.

Phil Beauregard (49:05)
and Tariq’s intellect and kind of like what they were doing there. were so, the longevity and everything else like that. I mean, that was like a company, not just a band. And ⁓ yeah, I never in a years did think he was gonna respond, but I said, hey, would you come to Harvard and come speak to the students at the iLab for part of a series? And he ended up saying yes. So he came, ⁓ he gave this talk. ⁓ Dennis Keohane was the interviewer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Keith Cline (49:33)
tennis was? Really?

Phil Beauregard (49:35)
And he did a great job. But Dennis asked him a question that I explicitly told Dennis not to ask. And that was, don’t ask him to rap. And Dennis was like, Dennis fucking asked me to

Keith Cline (49:48)
I have to ask him to rap.

Phil Beauregard (49:50)
little shit, ⁓ but it ended up being like he dropped, was right before FUN Master Flex, was Tariq’s first viral online moment, like he dropped this crazy awesome freestyle in front of, in a Harvard Letterman sweater, in front of all these Harvard students and people that got invited into the room. It was just nuts, like standing like crazy. ⁓

Just fire. And Rich Miner was there and Jen Lum. And me, Rich, and Tariq ended up just hanging that entire night and became friends. It evolved from there. when I was joining, and Tariq was making angel investments, right? Like he was seeing Nas and Jay-Z and stuff like that. And so when we were raising for our first vehicle together at Impellent.

I was like, yeah, Dave, let’s go to New York and wouldn’t it be great to have Tariq and Amir Quest and Jimmy and Dave Chappelle and Manuel Miranda be investors in our fund? That’s cool, right? And the answer is obviously yes. And when we sat down with Tariq for dinner,

Keith Cline (50:55)
Wait, all those people are investors in your fund?

Phil Beauregard (50:57)
No, we didn’t end up getting all of them. They, they, unfortunately, a bunch of Goldman Sachs bankers, you know, said, said, stay away from these guys back then, back then. And they were wrong. ⁓ But no, I mean, we got, we, got a couple of them. And so, yeah, we ended up, we ended up saying, making the overture to Tariq and he just said, yeah, he said like, but I I’d also like to be a partner at Impellent Ventures. And we were like,

Keith Cline (51:00)
Okay.

Phil Beauregard (51:26)
well that’s a different conversation entirely Tariq, clear your schedule, right? And so that’s how it came to be, was a lot of conversations again, know, fools rushing in. And yeah, Tariq’s a GP and he’s amazing, he brings a completely different perspective. But he’s also still on The Fallon Show and stuff, so. He’s got, guy’s got a lot going on.

Keith Cline (51:50)
which is why you get the luxury of having like an LP meeting where we get to go to the backstage of the Fallon show and so and I look at this picture I’m just like I know like least half of these people. I’m like this is awesome.

Phil Beauregard (51:56)
I will see you.

Yeah, 30 Rock is like our third office. It’s actually super cool. Like you just like sit in the hall. I remember one day I was sitting there and I don’t really get whatever. I’m amazed by and feel a little bit skittish around my wife and not celebrities, right? ⁓ But standing there, I remember one day.

I see this wisp of white hair and a guy asked me where the bathroom is. I’m tucked out of Tariq’s dressing room and that’s Steve Martin. I… Yeah, and it’s funny. He was like, hey, he was like, hey, do you remember where the bathroom is? And I said, yeah, it’s down to the hall to the left. I’m like, oh my God, like my dad, three of me. And he actually dropped a line on me. He was like, oh yeah, he’s like, I haven’t been here for 30 years, right? And I’m just like fucking Steve Martin.

Keith Cline (52:30)
Asking you where the bathroom is.

That’s awesome.

Phil Beauregard (52:52)
That was

That was cool. We saw Jayson Tatum riding through the championship and like that sort of stuff. But yeah, to tell you the truth, I’d rather be spending time with my wife and kids, but that was cool.

Keith Cline (53:03)
that, but it’s still a nice little perk. right, obviously AI is everywhere and I always like to ask the podcast guests, know, like how are you incorporating into your workflow, your day, your personal business? Like just kind of like open-ended question.

Phil Beauregard (53:18)
I’m currently using it right now for, like everybody else, I have an executive briefing tool that essentially just gives me my, in the morning it wakes me up with my coffee, that just gives me an entire analysis of my day tells me who I’m meeting with, what they are to me. ⁓ It even gives, ⁓ for certain types of people, it gives me a ocean analysis of their personality. What our last, kind of CRM-ish type stuff, but just take general takeaways and then I can expand into them on my Google Drive because it spits it out there as well and go in and just kind of have a bigger dossier that lives there. then Granola kind of does all that stuff to me.

So there’s a lot of those things. ⁓ And then I also have a relationship intelligence system, which is essentially a skill or agent that tells me where my relationship stands with anybody and what the ledger looks like. Cause I always want to know if I’m taking more than I’m giving. And I think one of the things about Boston was always like, there was this huge, like, everybody used to talk about pay it forward a lot.

Remember back like Matt Lauzon and like Balter and Sarah Hodges, know, the tech prom Mike Troiano Everybody would just kind of that phrase, pay it forward. ⁓ Scott Kirsner ⁓ And so that was, that’s something that stuck with me for a long time is that like, I, I’ll always tell my kids and also just like other entrepreneurs, like put plant seeds, whether or not you’re to come back to that part of the forest. Cause you just never know. Right. And so.

Keith Cline (54:33)
Yeah, totally.

yeah.

Phil Beauregard (54:59)
We try to do that. We try to pay it forward as much as humanly possible. ⁓ So that’s my relationship intelligence system. And then we have, ⁓ you know, some other kind of stealthy internal tools that help us with our decisions and days. So we have a lot of agents spun up to the point where we’re not going to hire an associate. ⁓ Not yet. Yeah. The only reason we would hire an associate in the future or associates would be because we don’t want to go to dinners anymore. We don’t want to go to events. Our livers are well, are over experienced, over taxed. And, know, there’s only so many bourbons that a human body can take over a lifetime. So rather export that to the young ones.

Keith Cline (55:29)
Your job is to go to these dinners.

Ha

All right, one more question. ⁓ So on your LinkedIn, you have founding advisor at Toast and Shield AI. Like how did you become a founding advisor? Like obviously everyone knows Toast and the success that company has been, but Shield AI is a massive success too.

Phil Beauregard (56:08)
Yeah, so toast is an easy one, right? Like Steve Papa’s a close friend, or anybody that can call Steve a friend. ⁓ And yeah, Steve’s a close friend of mine. And Steve, back in the day, knew we were creating restaurant technology, so we helped those guys out in the beginning. ⁓

and Steve and Aman obviously, they were amazing guys. And the funniest part of that, I gave a lot of good advice ⁓ and helped them out a lot. But there’s one thing that’s the funniest part of it. And this is really early, by the way, once they, I mean, they obviously became massive and like, know, toast went like this. so, but I remember we were sitting there and it’s fucking documented.

I gave the one worst piece of advice ever. And that was, they were originally building a check splitting app on mobile, like literally like you and a friend go out and like split the check and we’re done. And they just realized how shitty POS systems were.

Like from like a build standpoint, how archaic and innovators dilemma. And that was when micros is moving to the cloud and like, blah, blah. We were so in depth in the POS world. And Amon was like, we’re going to rebuild the POS. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re not going to do this stuff. I because it’s so bad. And I was like, don’t do it.

Keith Cline (57:36)
do it man, don’t do it. Well you gotta Oracle owns micros at that point, right? you gotta go take on Oracle, okay.

Phil Beauregard (57:40)
I literally, come on Keith, you and can’t justify that advice.

Keith Cline (57:46)
No,

I mean, granted he had the guts to go do it because I mean, it’s just like that was such a legacy software that you had to rip out of these restaurants to replace it with the cloud, which it makes sense now, but hindsight, right?

Phil Beauregard (58:01)
And they taught me a very, very valuable lesson. Do not. Yeah, and also just like when somebody’s amazing, of course they’re gonna reinvent the fucking future. ⁓

Keith Cline (58:08)
Yeah, disruption, disruption.

Phil Beauregard (58:17)
And so that was toast and still very close with those guys to this day. Played golf with them on very recently actually. And then, I’m terrible at golf by the way. so anyway, then Shield AI, I met those guys at the Harvard iLab and Brendan. And it was when there were three people. You know, a guy from Lincoln Labs and, I mean, Brandon and his brother Ryan. And Brandon was this guy that walks up to me and I’m talking to him. And if you ever meet Brandon, Brandon’s like this good looking, like in great shape guy who’s like telling me his background. And he’s like, yeah, I was a Navy SEAL captain. I’ve done four deployments. He looks like he’s like 15, except jacked. And he’s like, yeah, Stanford and Harvard or whatever.

Keith Cline (59:09)
Right?

Phil Beauregard (59:14)
I’m just like, I hate you already. ⁓ I don’t like to cover your jib. Get out of my face, you perfect human being. And Brandon was talking about these search and rescue drones. And so I was like, these guys are amazing. I ended up introducing them to Founder Collective early on to Andreessen. I have all the emails that I sent them all out.

Keith Cline (59:38)
Wow, you made those intros, wow.

Phil Beauregard (59:40)
Well, so, so no, but Andreessen said, no, they were like, we don’t do defense technology. Yeah. Until they invent Ben’s really funny because like I, every time that I send a deal, I actually have to send another deal to Ben right now that I really think that like, but I will append one of my companies, like meaning there was DraftKings, there was this, they’re like, sent these companies all to Ben, to, to, these guys and I’ll append one of the emails where they said no to it.

Keith Cline (59:44)
They did? Okay.

Phil Beauregard (1:00:07)
And she’ll ask one. I’ll be like, I got another one for you. Here you go. Right. And there’s like six, usually six unicorns in there, dekakorns. ⁓ And so, and so it’s really funny. And I started to Accel and Sequoia and all these things like.

Keith Cline (1:00:11)
Right. This one went public. this.

Ha ha ha.

Phil Beauregard (1:00:24)
Andresseen ended up doing it at the B and I kind of ribbed Scott Cooper a little bit about it. was like, hey man, I was like, you did it. You rebranded Defense Through American Dynamism. Like good for you. Like, you know, that’s cool. And he ended up being like, yeah, we did it. We’re really excited about it. I was like, well, you could have gotten at it at 4 million posts. And he was like, he was like, know, he like, he essentially said it was just like, we’re writing $15 million checks, man. can’t, like, it was.

Keith Cline (1:00:43)
Wow.

Phil Beauregard (1:00:51)
we’re cool with where it’s at now. Right? And I was like, there’s the law.

Keith Cline (1:00:53)
We’re good. We’re happy.

But David Frankel’s

pretty happy too, right?

Phil Beauregard (1:01:00)
Frankles, I don’t like I don’t I want to bottle those guys like I I don’t I have a very high opinion of myself and what we’re gonna do here but like you keep seeing these new things you’re just like dude how do you guys do it like you know Coupang and then SeatGeek and TradeDesk and Uber and WHOOP and and and Suno like these guys are just ridiculous

Keith Cline (1:01:16)
amazing.

Uber, Uber.

Pillpack, PillPack PillPack’s like like a.

Phil Beauregard (1:01:29)
PillPack’s another one that I helped out a lot.

Keith Cline (1:01:34)
Yeah, that was like, well TJ was kind of around Sloan and he met Elliot at Sloan, Yeah.

Phil Beauregard (1:01:38)
I was very close. So… I didn’t know Elliott, but TJ, they’re another one of my famous anti-portfolio companies because I remember TJ was like, you want to invest? And I was like, well, I didn’t have any money. That’s why I didn’t. But I was like, they’re founder issues here. Because they were getting rid of their third co-founder, was like, I don’t know.

Keith Cline (1:01:51)
No.

Okay, alright, alright,

Phil Beauregard (1:02:03)
TJ’s a dirty hippie and like, know, so on and so forth. you know, I’m just ribbing him. He’s amazing guy.

Keith Cline (1:02:09)
Well, the crazy thing about that company, my dad, so I grew up in Hooksett, New Hampshire, which is right next to Manchester. My dad’s company, had a leather coat factory when I was growing up in that same mill yard that PillPak was in, the Amoskeag Millyard. Yeah, just random.

Phil Beauregard (1:02:23)
Really? Leather coat fashion?

So were you like six years old wearing leather coats? You must look awesome.

Keith Cline (1:02:30)
I had the replica of the Michael Jackson thriller coat. I was all in. ⁓ But you know what it taught me though? Hard work, because I had to go clean the factory every Sunday while my friends were playing. I was picking up leather scraps, cleaning bathrooms, you know, like it was like a badge of my brother, then my sister, then me. Is that what’s wrong with me? Now it makes sense, totally. So anyways.

Phil Beauregard (1:02:35)
means a lot.

Oof.

Probably have, probably get chronic bronchitis nowadays or something like that from that, right?

this.

Keith Cline (1:02:57)
Well Phil, I could talk to you forever about stories, but I guess I gotta cut it because people will be like, my God, they just keep talking. Well thank you so much for…

Phil Beauregard (1:03:04)
Now let’s go create some more, man. Like we gotta go create more stories. I’m done with those. I wanna go create more of them. So everybody that has an awesome company, come my way. If you wanna venture capitalists that swears a lot and we’ll get into fist fights for you, I’m your guy. Just joking.

Keith Cline (1:03:07)
We need a part two with like, you know, so… ⁓ my god, there’s so many others to talk about.

Yes.

All right, well, Philip,

thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through your background story, obviously the great advice, and obviously all the great stories.

Phil Beauregard (1:03:29)
Yeah, and by the way, one thing that I do want to cap it off with is that everything that we’ve talked about here is a hindsight type thing and it all sounds very Instagramy. There’s a filter over all this stuff when people talk about themselves. ⁓ So all of that stuff up until now was a hell of a lot harder than it sounds, or at least I depicted it. And not as smooth too, but you have a funny way of kind of looking back at things with a little bit of romanticism and I can’t.

Just keep going. It’s awesome. Life is awesome. All right, brother.

Keith Cline (1:04:01)
That’s a fact.

7AI is the first agentic security platform that harnesses the speed and power of AI to finally give defenders the advantage over evolving threats.

We connected with Yonatan Striem Amit, Co-Founder & CTO, to learn about his background, what led him to create 7AI, the unique AI challenges they get to tackle, and more.

In this video:

Yonatan answers.

• Who is 7AI?
• Details on his Role & Responsibilities
• Unique Challenges with AI
• His background and the prior companies he founded
• Why 7AI is a great place to work

Video Transcript

Who is 7AI?

We’re building what we call the the agentic operating system for the modern soccer for the agentic sock. Everything from rethinking from first principle how do security operations center be live manage data detect find threats and handle threats as they come across in a world where agents are the constant thing of what we’re doing. So we’re rethinking the stack building everything from a sim technology operation AI triage detection engineering and everything that delivering that to our enterprise customers.

Details on his Role & Responsibilities

As CTO really my role is to oversee everything we do from a product perspective to a technology perspective and make sure that we are constantly ahead of the curve and building a truly AI native company. Now our company and the team is doing is the challenge of doing two things.

First, how do we build a AI native product that rethinks from the grounds up everything around security operation. How do you manage data? How do you detect threats on this data? How do you when the threat occurs, how do you manage it? How do you understand if it’s true or false? How do you orchestrate responses on top of that data? And how do you really secure enterprises in the maximum autonomy and the maximum velocity and speed required for the modern increasing threat?

But my part the second part of the job is how do I build an organization that is truly an AI native organization? How does how do we make sure that everyone in this company is not only building something that rethinks from first principles our customers journey they also rethink our own journey as a company from the grounds up. How can we push developers to do to be more autonomous be more able to ship very very quickly to the market get feedback iterate become independent and really drive that AI native velocity into the field. So my job is both leading the strategy of the company but also working very closely with the my entire engineering product team in making sure that we’re leveraging everything that AI can give us. Right now

Unique Challenges with AI

we’re building a completely new AI native from first principles company. This means that everybody in this company has to rethink from first principle what it is they do and how can they do it in a way that’s faster, better, and leverages the maximal impact of what AI can do. And that thing of course changes every 3 to four months. You’re constantly at a point where you’re reinventing and asking yourself how can I go faster, better, deliver more value more quickly to the over the finish line.

This creates a set of unique challenges. We’re a high velocity, high intensity, high effort, extremely high reward, highly independent group of people who are building and shipping together continuously. That means that every person here is what used to be a whole team is now every individual person in our team working together to to really break what was even considered possible, you know, not only a year ago. And that entire mindset of I’m going to push everything beyond what was possible months ago to the the extreme is one of the biggest pleasures we derive in the company but also one of the biggest challenges that we have on the company.

It’s also a huge opportunity as people to reinvent themselves for that AI native era. There is a tsunami happening in the world with what AI is doing. And what we’re offering people is to bring a surfboard and join us to ride on top of it really at the forefront really pushing it towards the edge to understand how does it can it change everything both in our professions and also how we deliver value to our customers.

His background and the prior companies he founded

It’s funny I think my entire career I have been leading myself toward uh building 7 AI. So for the past two and a half years I’m the CTO and founder of 7 AI. Prior to that, I was ahead of CTO and founder for a company called Cyberism where we pioneered and really created a revolution in cyber security towards detection and response. And we were able to take a problem that was completely invisible and create cast light into that world. We were able to find nation state hackers even before they were ever could possibly found before that.

Prior to that, I was one of those nation state hackers. I was working for various three other agencies for over a decade building cyber weaponry cyber campaign both on the defensive side and on the offensive side to really make sure we understand what’s going on here and then even prior to that I had had a long vacation in academia for both undergrad and grad school to be on the for machine learning. So my entire career has been focusing and culminating on how can AI not only shine the light where it was pos not possible before but also solve the problem in a way that was completely un unfathomable not not only two years not even two years ago.

Why 7AI is a great place to work

We are talking to leaders from the largest frontier labs in the world from the largest corporations all the way through early stage founders and head of engineering in in various companies from from very large enterprises to tiny two people startups. Nobody’s more advanced than we are in that journey. Nobody’s at the point where they have the answer. So joining 7AI means you are currently at the forefront of rethinking and reinventing how and what we do and also allowing yourself to tie yourself and really surf that tsunami happening. So instead of being on the sideline you have to ask yourself how am I not only part of that part of that wave I am leading that wave and that is what career 7i look like right now.

The 7AI in on top of everything else and what we’re building 7AI is also extremely wellunded. We we’ve had a very large seed round, $36 million. We’ve also had a $130 million A- round, the largest A- round in history for any cyber security company. The company is now undergoing massive expansion. We have enough capital to last four years. We have enough opportunity to grow and really build a generational opportunity here. So, it’s a combination of a early stage, fastmoving, highly ambitious startup with the ability to go and say we are not going anywhere. We’re not disappearing. We are here to stay to build in Boston. Let’s go.

ezCater is the #1 food tech platform for workplaces.

We connected with Hana Chalmers to get a look at what a day in the life of a Social Media Associate at ezCater looks like.

In this video

Hana answers.

• What responsibilities come with your role?
• A typical day
• What attracted Hana to ezCater
• Advice for someone looking to join ezCater

Video Transcript

Here is a cleaned-up, highly readable version of the transcript organized by its sections:

Introduction

Hi, I’m Hana and I am a social media associate.

What responsibilities come with your role?

Since I’m a social media associate, I help manage all of our organic social media channels—LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Instagram—anything you can think of, we’re on it as ezCater. So, I’m normally managing all those channels. I am handling our editorial calendar, planning out what we want to post for the rest of the month. I’m scheduling out posts. I’m doing content creation. I wear a lot of hats in the social media realm, but it’s very, very fun. And it’s nice to have a different day-to-day.

A typical day

For me, the day-to-day really varies based off what’s going on that week. Social is very fast-paced and always changing. I would say sometimes there could be a big campaign launch going out, so I’m doing a lot of prep for that. Most of the time, I’m doing community moderation. Every morning I try to go through and respond to as many comments as I can, going through all of the accounts that may have tagged us or DM’d us. And then a lot of times I’m scheduling out posts, making sure that everything is set for the rest of the week. And then my favorite part is always when I get to do content creation. I love being able to film videos and taking an idea from the start of my document into an actual video that we get to post later. So that’s what I do day-to-day.

What attracted Hana to ezCater

I really loved that they had this really great culture. They’re very people-first, very human-first. And the culture recipe just really aligned with me as a person. That was something very important to me going into my second co-op, hoping that maybe this could end up being something full-time in the future. They are very flexible and, of course, the free lunches were a big, big thing for me wanting to come here. And I’m very glad that I did because the people are great and it’s just as what was promised to me online. So, I was very, very happy.

Advice for someone looking to join ezCater

I think my advice would be to just be yourself. I know it’s super cliche and a lot of people say that, but at ezCater, we really value who you are as a human. And so, when you’re in the interview process, don’t try to fit a certain mold. Part of our culture is that we want you to be a culture add, not fit into our culture. And so, being yourself is probably one of the biggest things here at ezCater. And you always add to the company no matter what your background is and what your personality is. We always love to see people being themselves.

Paperless Parts was founded with a mission to drive innovation by making manufacturing more accessible.

Jason Ray, Co-Founder & CEO, shares the details on Paperless Parts and what it’s like to work there.

In this Video

We discuss:

• Details about Paperless Parts and what they do
• Use cases / Customer Examples
• The Paperless Parts founding story
• The culture at Paperless Parts
• Why Paperless Parts should be on your radar

Video Transcript

Keith Cline: Jason, thanks so much for joining us.

Jason Ray: Oh, it’s great to be here, Keith. Thank you. I’m excited to talk to you.

Keith Cline: Because we’re going to talk about Paperless Parts, which is the leading intelligence platform for the industrial supply chain. So let’s talk about Paperless Parts. What does the company do?

Jason Ray: Yeah, thank you so much. So let’s… I think to understand what we do, you got to understand where we’ve been. So 10 years ago, we started this company, and we focused on how do we speed up the pace of innovation in the industrial supply chain. Mainly, it came back to understanding that, by and large, the US industrial base is run by brute force—really awesome people working really hard using antiquated software. And all of that manifests in the estimating process being really slow.

It was really… it was weird to find this niche. You know, you look at it and it’s like, well, there’s problems all over the place, but all those problems boiled up, and the nexus of all that was estimating. So 10 years ago, we set out and we said, “We’re going to remove this bottleneck. We’re going to make it so that the estimating process in contract manufacturers and job shops is fast, it’s consistent, and we eliminate the risk that these folks are taking as they evaluate hundreds to thousands of unique designs every week, every month.” So we said, “Let’s go solve that problem.” And in solving that problem, we will learn an enormous amount about the US industrial base, we should see innovation speed up quite a bit, and we’ll continue to figure out how we improve connectivity across the industrial supply chain.

So now, fast forward 10 years, we have this mission at Paperless Parts, and it’s to connect the nodes of the industrial supply chain. Because we find that a lot of the problems that were manifesting in the quoting process were actually a product of accidents happening at the intersections in the supply chain. This is one of my favorite phrases: “accidents happen at intersections.” Right? It’s like… it’s such a simple phrase, but it’s true for everything in every business. The intersections is where you should look for the problems—the handoffs, the data being shared between teams. The supply chain is no different. So as you move from an OEM—a Boeing to a GE—to a tier 2 supplier, tier three supplier, down all the way down to the raw materials, files get saved off, they get repackaged, they get split apart, they get shared. And that activity of handoffs that manifest in the estimating process, that is the… that is the messiest part of the industrial base.

And so our goal is to build connectivity, and by building connectivity, it’ll be more secure and make it so that these interactions up and down the supply chain happen a heck of a lot more seamlessly. So usually when we talk about this, people don’t believe that this is a problem. They’re like, “There’s no way. Like, you’re telling me someone’s printing out, you know, a 2D drawing of a part that goes on my airplane, and then they use white-out or use sticky notes to redact it, and then they scan it back in, and then they send it to one of their suppliers, and that’s how American manufacturing works?” It’s an… it’s a little bit of an extreme case, but I’ve literally seen that process happen, and it’s… it’s very antiquated. So, um, we’re going to fix that.

Keith Cline: So so how does it work? Meaning, uh, who’s the end customer? And because it sounds like there’s multiple parties involved using your software, so how… so what’s the typical customer experience like?

Jason Ray: It’s all to all tiers of the industrial supply chain—from the smallest contract manufacturers making individual widgets that go into assemblies, that go into bigger assemblies, that go into airplanes and medical devices and rockets and you name it, all the way up to the companies that are designing and building the rockets. And so that allows us to have maximum impact because our customers interact with each other through our product.

Keith Cline: Complex problem, one that maybe people weren’t paying attention to. So so how… what’s the founding story? How’d you come across this idea?

Jason Ray: Yeah, it’s interesting because each of the three founders approached the problem from a different angle. So I was in the military, and I was in a supply chain role, and I was trying to buy parts both for a legacy platform—I was on a wooden ship, a minesweeper, and 30 years old, supply chain had gone cold, hard to buy the parts. And then I went to Naval Sea Systems Command and I was buying missiles—so brand new platform, trying to source and get quotes from 2,000 suppliers so we could get the thing on contract, and that was brutal and it took forever. And so that’s the angle that I saw it from.

My co-founder Scott Sawyer, he’s our chief scientist, um, he was the… you know, he’s the technical brains of the company. Scott was running a hardware startup and they needed to buy hardware, and they couldn’t buy it in the United States, and they couldn’t get it prototyped quickly. And so when push came to shove, they had to bet the company on injection molded tooling, and the bet didn’t pay off. And it made building startups in hardware very scary and very risky. And so that like… that alone slows down innovation. Like, if I can’t start a business tomorrow and I can’t prototype things and I can’t buy small production runs and test the market, I basically have to go out on a lot of risk, I have to raise a lot of money, and I have to really hope I’m right. And so that’s the angle that he saw it from. He was like, “My gosh, I would have loved to have been able to work with suppliers in the US for this.” And instead, we had to go overseas.

And then my co-founder Jay Jacobs—Jay built Rapid, and Rapid was the world’s largest sheet metal prototype shop, second largest CNC machine prototype shop. And Jay had built a lot of novel software and solutions to the problems we solve at Paperless Parts, but he had done it at Rapid. And so Jay was really the… the catalyst that said, “You guys should go build a software company.” And I… I think… I think you’ve seen what the problems are, go fix it.

Keith Cline: All right. So a lot has evolved since that moment. What’s the latest at Paperless Parts?

Jason Ray: So we just had our user conference in Boston. Um, we had 300… a little over 300 of our customers come into Boston for it, which was a really nice showing. Um, it grows every single year, so it gets bigger and bigger each year. We’ve had it four years in a row now. Um, we are launching new functionality, as are all software companies, and it’s AI. So we have to say it a bunch of times so, you know, our stock price will go up and people will think the company’s super valuable.

Um, but all kidding aside, we… we focus on highly domain-specific artificial intelligence technology that is very different than building a wrapper around a frontier model. I think a lot of companies sit on top of frontier models and they erode their gross margins, and they build businesses that may scale in revenue rapidly but don’t scale in profitability because of how they’re designed. We took a very different approach. The manufacturing industry is not one where you call up all of your customers and say, “Hey, we’re going to pass on some token costs to you, okay?” That… it doesn’t work that way. These are long-term contracts. These are people that like predictability around revenue, and they’re demanding customers that want the latest and greatest technology.

So we spent a lot of time building highly scalable, highly cost-effective models that allow our customers to interact with their designs—everything from the most modern design coming out of, you know, Creo, Catia, SolidWorks, all the way back to 1960s hand drawings. And we’ve been able to do that just because of the sheer amount of data and the sheer, um, number of customers that we work with. And we’ve taken these models and now we’ve built leading AI models around understanding technical data.

Keith Cline: So what’s it like working at Paperless Parts? What’s the culture like?

Jason Ray: You know, I got the best compliment I’ve ever been given, um, at this user conference, and I think this… this may sum it up. Uh, one of our customers, who I hadn’t… hadn’t met yet, walked up to me and he… he’s like, “Yeah, nice to meet you.” He’s like, “You must be a good guy.” And I was like, “Okay.” I was like, “Well, thanks.” I was like, “What makes you think that?” And he’s like, “I think good people only work for really good people. If… if they… if they don’t, then they would leave.” And he’s like, “I’ve interacted with so many members of your team, and they’re just such good people. They’re nice, they care, they’re communicative, they’re responsive, they really want me to be successful, and I can just make the assumption that you’re a good guy because I don’t think people like this would stick around if you weren’t.”

And I think that… that sums up the culture pretty nicely. Like, that’s not me, per se. Like, I’m not, you know… it’s not, “Oh, because Jason’s a good guy, we have a lot of good people that work here.” I think we just have a culture of really good people. And… and I’m using that word intentionally because like, I think a lot of… a lot of founders and a lot of tech people will be like, “Oh, we got the best people in the world, they’re the smartest, you know, we hire only out of these organizations.” We… we hire good people that care. They want to do a good job, they put a lot of effort in, they take time to get to know our customers.

Really early in our company, we said a key piece of our culture is that relationships matter. So a while ago, I wrote a letter to our board that said, you know, “AI is happening, amazing, and we are going to be paperless, not peopleless.” Because the manufacturing industry is built on relationships, and it’s built on understanding that there’s another human that really cares about your business and is working to make that successful. And that’s what we do. We lean really heavy into putting our arms around our customers, and it leads to phenomenal outcomes, right? But it’s… it’s… that’s the first step. You know, like, our… we have best-in-class retention of our customers. They stay with us, they expand with us, um, and it’s because everyone is focused on the goals that they want to achieve.

So I hope that answers the question. We have a lot of fun, too. Um, we spend a lot of time in the office, mainly because we want to. Um, people are always doing things together. Um, what else about our culture? Um, I think that… I think that kind of sums it up, but definitely a lot of teamwork. If you like working with a team to solve problems, you’ll definitely like working here.

Keith Cline: Now, top-tier talent, regardless of market conditions, they always have options for them and their career. So why should Paperless Parts be on someone’s radar?

Jason Ray: Because you can feel the impact of what you are doing. I think… I think there’s a spectrum of feeling impact. The one end of the spectrum is you get a paycheck, and that is a representation of the impact you make on the company that you are working for, and that is like really far from feeling the impact. On the opposite end of the spectrum is you get to walk around a user conference where your customers walk up to you and thank you because their businesses are more successful, they can spend more time with their kids going to their soccer games on the weekends, they… they look at it like, “I’m going to be able to hand my business off to my children,” or, “I’m actually going to be able to sell my business someday, and that’s changed my entire life.” Like, I don’t think there are very many businesses where the people writing the code and the people doing the work are that connected to the customer base and the outcomes the customer base is having.

It is also incredibly tangible. So, Paperless Parts—the products that are getting quoted through our software, and it’s about 50,000 a week right now—those products go into everything. So when you think about seeing Artemis launch, you can quite literally sit here and say, “Our customers quoted the parts that are on Artemis that launched.” Like, that’s a direct connection. You can see it instantly. When you look at, like, new medical devices coming out, you look at, like, autonomous vehicles driving around, it’s crazy. Like, it’s real tangible impact that you can then also like… you imagine when people ask you, “What do you do?” Like, “So, what do you do?” You have to try to explain, like, “I do martech, and I help companies advertise, and they… they like us, but I don’t know any of our customers by name, and I’ve never talked to any of them.” Or you could say, “Well, you know, do you see that recent launch that went up? Yeah, our customers made a lot of the parts that went on that, and they won those parts because they were able to quote them through Paperless Parts.” And that’s just… it just… it’s freaking cool. It just is.

So that’s… I think that’s why top-tier tech talent chooses to come here, because they… they get tired of working on software for software companies for… that are making more software for other software companies. It’s just like that… that… that grind of no tangible impact gets old fast. It’s like, what do you want to be able to tell your kids you did? Like, “I sped up the US industrial supply chain,” or, “I made it so that ads show up more effectively and people buy a bunch of random BS on their social media accounts.” Like, what do you want to be able to say? Like, life is short. So that’s… uh, that’s my rant.

Keith Cline: Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Paperless Parts, you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their job listings there. Go to venturefizz.com/paperlessparts and you’ll see their jobs. Jason, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the details on the company.

Jason Ray: Yeah, thanks, Keith. Really appreciate it.

Rapid7 helps protectors build comprehensive cybersecurity programs and overcome the chaos of the ever-changing threat landscape.

Rafe Brown, CFO, shares the details on Rapid7 and what it’s like to work there.

In this Video

We discuss:

• Details about Rapid7 and what they do
• Use cases / Customer Examples
• What attracted Rafe to Rapid7
• The latest at Rapid7
• The culture at Rapid7
• Why Rapid7 should be on your radar

Video Transcript

Details About Rapid7 and What They Do

Rapid7 is a company that focuses on cybersecurity. At our heart, we call ourselves a company built by practitioners for practitioners. What that means is we really think about the people who have to defend networks day in and day out—the “protectors,” as we call them.

The security industry, unfortunately, is full of a lot of noise and chaos. Attackers are constantly changing their methods, and companies are trying to defend massive, sprawling digital footprints. Our goal is to bring clarity and order to that chaos. We do that by providing software and managed services that allow companies to see their entire environment, look for vulnerabilities, detect if an attacker has gotten into their network, and then help them respond to that quickly. Ultimately, we are trying to make a secure digital world accessible for all companies, not just those with massive security teams.

Use Cases & Customer Examples

Our customer base is incredibly diverse because, frankly, everyone needs cybersecurity today. We secure everything from massive global banks and healthcare systems to mid-sized businesses and local governments.

For example, think about a major hospital system. They have thousands of connected devices—everything from laptops to critical medical equipment like infusion pumps. If an attacker compromises their network, it’s not just a data issue; it’s a patient care issue. We work with organizations like that to proactively scan their environment, find where the weak points are before an attacker does, and monitor their systems 24/7. If a suspicious log-in happens at 2:00 AM on a holiday, our managed detection and response teams are immediately on it to isolate the threat before it can spread.

What Attracted Rafe to Rapid7

When I was looking at the next step in my career, I wanted to find a company that checked three major boxes: a massive market opportunity, a highly differentiated product, and a truly authentic culture. Rapid7 stood out on all three.

Cybersecurity is one of the defining challenges of our generation, so the market relevance was obvious. But what really hooked me was the mission-driven nature of the team. People here genuinely care about protecting our customers. It’s not just about selling software; it’s about being a trusted partner in the fight against cybercriminals. From the executive leadership down to our newest engineers, there is a shared passion and energy that is incredibly contagious. I knew I wanted to be a part of that journey.

The Latest at Rapid7

It is an incredibly exciting time at the company right now. We are leaning heavily into AI-powered managed cybersecurity operations. The threat landscape moves too fast for pure human intervention alone, so we’ve integrated advanced AI and machine learning into our platform to help automate the heavy lifting of data analysis. This allows our teams and our customers to spot anomalies and threats at an unprecedented speed.

Additionally, we are expanding our global footprint and continuously scaling our cloud security capabilities. As more enterprises migrate their core infrastructure to complex, multi-cloud environments, we are ensuring that our team is right there ahead of them, delivering the next generation of visibility and risk management tools.

The Culture at Rapid7

If I had to sum up the culture at Rapid7 in a few words, it would be: collaborative, accountable, and continuously learning. We have a set of core values that we actually live by—things like “Be an Advocate,” “Bring You,” and “Impact Together.”

“Bring You” is a big one for us. We want people to bring their authentic selves to work, because diverse perspectives make for better problem-solving, which is critical in security. We also emphasize a low-ego environment. Cybersecurity is a team sport; nobody wins in a silo. We celebrate wins together, we learn from misses together, and we invest heavily in our people’s career growth and development.

Why Rapid7 Should Be on Your Radar

If you are looking for a career where your work has a direct, tangible impact on the safety of the digital world, Rapid7 should absolutely be on your radar. We are tackling complex technical problems at a massive scale, and we’re doing it alongside some of the brightest minds in the industry.

Whether you’re in engineering, sales, product management, or customer success, you have the opportunity to build something meaningful here. We are a global leader, but we still maintain that fast-paced, innovative mindset. We’re growing, we’re innovating, and we are looking for ambitious people to join us.

Episode 429 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Lior Div, CEO & Co-Founder of 7AI. 

One of the most exciting parts of this platform shift to AI is watching elite, repeat founders get back into the arena. It’s often these experienced builders who have the appetite and the playbook to swing for the fences and create a truly category-defining company.

Lior is exactly one of those entrepreneurs. Along with his co-founder, Yonatan Striem-Amit, this duo is uniquely qualified to build the leading agentic AI security platform. They have deep expertise in the cybersecurity industry and… by the way, they’ve done this before with their prior unicorn, Cybereason.

7AI empowers enterprises to shift security tasks to AI agents. The company recently made waves across the entire tech ecosystem by announcing a massive $130 million Series A round of funding led by Index Ventures, with participation from Blackstone Innovations Investments, Greylock, CRV, and Spark Capital.

To put that into perspective: a $130 million Series A is the largest Series A round in the history of the cybersecurity industry. It is exactly that type of aggressive funding, along with blue-chip investors, that creates market leaders.

In this episode of our podcast, we cover:

• A discussion around the rapidly changing landscape of AI and how that affects cybersecurity.
• Lior’s background story, including being part of Israel’s elite Unit 8200 intelligence group and how he got involved in the cybersecurity industry.
• Scaling Cybereason, plus why he chose to build his companies in Boston.
• The background story of 7AI and all the details on the company & platform.
• The distinct operational differences between building a traditional software business versus building a native AI company.
• 7AI’s aggressive growth plans ahead, a look inside their company culture, and what it takes to build a trusted brand in security.
• The most important skills someone needs to be a successful CEO.
• And more!

This podcast is brought to you by one of the strongest longtime supporters of the local startup ecosystem, Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. With more than 1,500 bankers and relationship advisors and $44B in loans as of Q4 2025 – SVB delivers expert guidance, specialized products and a team that knows the innovation economy inside and out. Learn more at SVB.com.

Transcript

Keith Cline (02:57)
Thanks so much for joining us.

Lior Div (02:59)
Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s a pleasure.

Keith Cline (03:02)
⁓ I feel like this is overdue. ⁓ I’ve known you for a while now and I’m like, how is it possible that I haven’t had you on the podcast yet because you’re what I consider like one of the anchor startup CEOs in the Boston tech scene. You you build big companies and that’s what I think is super exciting about what you’re building with 7AI. And we’re to talk all about 7AI and what you guys are doing. But I want to address the elephant in the room and that is AI and cybersecurity, right? So

⁓ There’s so much going on, right? And obviously 7AI is addressing pieces of it, but it’s a really big spectrum. Like I just, you know, I was reading about, you know, what glasswing is in Claude and Anthropic. So there’s, and that’s more of a, from what I gathered, more of a, in the code writing, right? So that’s, so anyways, before I get into that, let’s talk about what’s going on in this crazy world of AI.

Lior Div (03:58)
Yeah, so first, thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be on the podcast and it’s pleasure to build a big company here in Boston again. ⁓ But I think that when we zoom out, actually, it’s a good segue to why we established 7AI. When we were done with my previous company, we looked at the landscape of cybersecurity and we said, okay,

Keith Cline (04:10)
Exactly, again, and that’s what I love.

Lior Div (04:28)
We as an industry invested a lot in creating a detection system to detect things on the endpoint, to detect things on the cloud, and so on and so forth. And the question was, what’s new under the sun? Is there is something that is actually changing everything in a significant way? Because I think that you alluded to it a little bit when me and my co-founder Yonatan, when we’re building a company,

we want to build something that it’s significant, built to last and something that it’s meaningful and big. So the question was, is there is something big going on in cyber? And the, the, we left our, our previous company, the answer was kind of no. It’s like there is big companies. It’s like, we’re kind of set, but very quickly what’s happened. We had a conversation with the head of product in OpenAI and it was exactly when they released the first 3.5 version, the ChatGPT ⁓ and the ah-ha moment that happened to everybody. But we had a deep conversation with this guy and basically we looked at it and we said, okay, if the bad guys gonna have access to this type of technology and because our in our history, we’ve been kind of on the other side of the fence, we looked at it and we said, okay everything gonna change and whatever we did as an industry in the past 30 years actually gonna almost become ⁓ irrelevant in a significant way. So that was the thesis. Of course, back then we did not have any proof to these thesis, but now fast forward two years into it, it’s become clear that everything is changing and we can talk in depth how things are changing.

Keith Cline (06:09)
Right. Yeah, I mean, it’s just rapidly changing and it’s changing by the day, like months or seem like years of how quickly things change. Like if you asked me before, like probably around the holidays, people were like, well, it seems like AI is, it’s gonna take people’s jobs. And I’m like, well, I think software engineers, they’re just gonna become more superhuman with Cursor. And then all of sudden, Claude Code came out and I was like, oh, okay, this just changed everything. So just.

Lior Div (06:37)
Yes. So if we will think about it, basically the way that we are assessing it every two months, there is something major that’s happening and changing everything. And I’m talking about major, not just a small release of, ⁓ and I think that the, can put kind of a timeline and the last November ⁓ was kind of a pivotal moment when we think about what’s happened. Basically after the release of Claude Code with the new model, people realize that AI can write code and can write code well. And to be honest, a few weeks into it, we realized that it’s not just about writing code well and helping people. It’s actually people should not be in the loop. They should be on the loop and dictating to the AI what they need to do, but the AI needs to write the code. And that thing changed dramatically the way that we build a company. We think about us as an AI native company. We can discuss.

What does it mean to be an AI native company? But once Claude Code starting to write good code and we could compare it to Codex and let one check the code that the other is writing, so we’re flipping between kind of the result, ⁓ it’s reached to the point that the velocity and the cadence of change that we can introduce to our customers is grew in an exponential way.

Keith Cline (08:02)
Yeah, it’s just so radical how everything’s changing. So, all right, we’re gonna talk more about 7AI and the cybersecurity landscape and what you guys are doing to address that. But I think it’s important to talk about your background, because if, you know, like you’re uniquely qualified to do what you’re doing. So talk about, you know, your background story and how you got to the point of entrepreneurship.

Lior Div (08:23)
Yeah, it’s funny because ⁓ I started basically in cybersecurity. I’m usually joking. said before it was cool. So think about it in the past 12 years, I’m here in Boston. This is home. But I was born and raised in Israel and over there you go to the army. I was part of the 8200 unit. This unit is equivalent to the NSA here. ⁓ Some people will argue that not exactly, but in general terms, this is the easiest way to explain it. So I was an officer there. I stayed many years in that unit. ⁓ And over there, you basically think about it is a nation ⁓ state level hacking capability, complex hacking operation that our job was to basically craft them, think about them, invented them, execute them. So it’s like soup to nuts, everything from the beginning all the way to the end.

And then basically a few years later after I left there, I joined the Mossad and they equivalent to the CIA here and was there for many, many, many years. Again, focusing on the field of offensive cyber operation. ⁓ After a few years there, many years there to be honest, left. That was around the time that Stacksnet, the attack on the nuclear facility in Iran. Uh was very public and people started to understand that you can leverage line of code in order to achieve military and government goals. So after that, basically, Yonatan and myself, we looked at it and say, people will understand that cyber, this is something that consideration for everybody, specifically for big enterprises. So this is where we left and established ⁓ Cybereason I think that the story of Cybereason was stocked.

Lot, but we built a big company. So at the peak we were around 1,500 people We were selling in probably 50 countries across the world ⁓ hundreds of million of recurring revenue. So it was a big operation complex operation ⁓ and once basically we left ⁓ the question was okay what’s next as I discussed earlier and when we looked at it I said, okay, we’re expert in a narrow field that used to be not cool and now it’s cool called cybersecurity. So we had kind of the itch to do something different than cyber. But then we realized that as you said, we have an unfair advantage when it comes to cybersecurity and with everything that’s going on with AI, was kind of a shame not to combine those two capability into one and build a big company again.

Keith Cline (11:08)
Cybereason planted in Boston, you’re building 7AI in Boston. What drew you to Boston as an entrepreneur the first time and why do you continue to build in Boston?

Lior Div (11:19)
Yeah, so when you think about where to build big companies, the reason that we moved from Israel to Boston was we wanted to be on the East Coast and it was a debate between New York and Boston. And back in the day, we’re talking about 2014, Boston was kind of the hub of big cybersecurity company all the way from Symantec, RSA, CyberArk and others. And for us, it was obvious that we want to be here. Now, fast forward to where we are today, 2026, we could choose to go to any city in the US and build a company there. But what we realized that Boston is still very unique when it’s come to the talent pool that exists here. So when you think about the universities, you think about the different government labs that exist here. You think about the hyperscalers that have an R&D center that’s focusing in cybersecurity here.

When you really think about kind of the full ecosystem that we have around us, this is a fantastic place to build a company. And then we looked at it and said, okay, there is not a lot of ⁓ West Coast swagger cool companies in Boston. And we said, okay, we know how to build it. We have access to capital. So let’s build a West Coast swagger cool company in Boston. And I think that, you know, by now I’m looking like here, this is kind of ⁓ all of our people coming to the office every day. ⁓ It’s a great space and a great, I think, ecosystem to build a great company.

Keith Cline (12:59)
And I appreciate that. And I think Boston needs more of that, right? Not to say that it’s just a braggy, because it’s the opposite in Boston. It’s more humble and heads down. And we just kind of do the things and don’t celebrate enough of these victories. And as we were talking about earlier, swinging for the fences, right? So you and your co-founder, like you don’t just say, hey, we’re going to build like a nice company. And they’re like, no, you get the top tier investors. You raise large amounts of venture capital.

I was fortunate because I stopped by your office the day you announced your Series A, $130 million Series A, right? This isn’t like the $7 million Series A from Index, Blackstone, Greylock, CRV and Spark, right? So these are just like massive blue chip VC firms that fund category winners. So how do you, what’s your mentality around building and raising capital like that?

Lior Div (13:39)
You

Yeah, so, you know, many, many people saying it’s like, Hey, we want to build something big or we want to change the world. ⁓ but this is kind of just words that not translate to reality. ⁓ me and my co-founder, we feel that after ⁓ building a company, my previous company for 12 years, we literally understood kind of, I’m joking because there is a lot of university here. said, we did a PhD of how you build a startup. We really understand the good, the bad, a lot of learning from our previous company. ⁓ You know, when you’re running for so long, think about it. We started from an idea all the way to a pre-IPO company. So we did kind of the full gamut of growing company with the ups and downs and like the whole thing. So when we looked at it, we said, okay.

There is a rare opportunity in the market to build something big, and we’re not building small company. We’re not the one that just building something just to want to sell it and flip it to and build another company. No, the whole idea is to how you build something to last and how you create something that generationally is changing the way that we are doing something. So when we looked at it, we said, okay, there is a massive mission. We can fight AI with AI and give power to the defenders. Very simple. And we can change the way that we protect big organization here in the US and then outside in the world. This is a mission that I’m connected to personally. So we said, okay, let’s go. And when we’re going, we’re building something big. It’s not just about the size. It’s really about the impact and the influence that we can do. And right now you speak with every big enterprise. Everybody has this problem.

Everybody when they think about security operation, when you think about kind of the labor intensive kind of ⁓ way that they need to invest and deal with cyber, it’s something that is not going to hold the test of AI trying to attack those big enterprises. So we said, okay, how we give this power of AI to the hand of the defenders. And for us, it’s like, it’s only about going big all in.

Keith Cline (16:13)
So when you were first coming up with the idea for 7AI, what was the state of the Chief Information Security Officer’s mindset? Because I’m sure it’s like, OK, AI is here or coming. But obviously, it’s progressed so quickly since then. But what was the original state that led you down the path of starting the company?

Lior Div (16:33)
Yeah, it’s fascinating because we started one click before everybody understood that AI will change everything. I’m feeling lucky that we had time to really think. ⁓ And if you think about it, we started saying, hey, we’re going to build AI agent to do security operation and we’re going to build the operating system for the modern SOC This is before the word agent was invented.

Keith Cline (16:40)
Right.

Lior Div (17:01)
So this is kind of the point in time that people will say, oh, agent is something that you actually installed on endpoint. And I said, no, no, no, that was my previous company. And in my previous company, we installed agent on the endpoint. Since then, the word agent transformed to be something that AI is doing and making decision and operating in a basically autonomous way. So, and it’s look like or sounds like agent has been here for long time, but that’s not true. This is something new. So where we started the conversation with NVIDIA about, we’re going to leverage AI in order to convince AI do stuff in cybersecurity, it was a novel kind of discussion back then. And over time, it’s become, okay, it’s agent and then agent talking to agent and then swarming of agent and so on and so forth.

Keith Cline (17:55)
Well, you talked about like that startup MBA. You learned so much, right, from that previous experience, which this is another reason why I’m so excited and bullish on what’s happening in Boston, because we have these now serial entrepreneurs that are building again in this unique timeframe where there is going to be category leaders. There are going to be anchor companies built during this stretch. And obviously you’re building one of them. So what is 7AI? What do you do?

Lior Div (18:22)
Yeah, so when you think about ⁓ in very high level, we want to give the power of AI to the hand of the defenders. It sounds very simple, very hard to do. When you translate it into giving them unfair advantage, we’re really talking about speed because when you think about cyber attack, what the bad guys are going to do, they’re going to leverage everything that they can in order to attack as fast as they can and as wide as they can.

So we’re talking about attacks that used to be, you know, measured in minutes or hours now shrinking to be measured in seconds. So now the question is like, okay, how you take a big enterprise and give them the power to identify response and radicate this type of attack almost semi real time because AI will move fast. It’s not really real time, but they’re AI. So now you have to rethink the whole kind of infrastructure that those people are using. So think about the same layer, basically where they store the data and how they detect stuff, the store layer, the orchestration layer of how they’re automating stuff, and the 24 X 7 layer of how they’re actually reviewing ticket and reviewing them. So instead of saying, hey, we’re just gonna introduce a new SIEM, bring all the data to one place, then we’ll have AI, we ⁓ started from the top. We said, okay, first we’re gonna… convince AI to do all the work that need to be done manually today. So we have this layer of agentic AI that can actually take investigation, do a full detection, then providing a full response capability. This is the third layer. And now we’re building a full federated team. So this is kind of the full ⁓ ability to store the data where you want to store the data. So think about it, AI going to the data instead of the data coming to AI. It’s changing in a fundamental way, the way that we’re thinking about architecture ⁓ and how to build those solutions.

Keith Cline (20:22)
And what I think is fascinating is it’s not like, obviously AI is powerful in its ability to do things, but it’s also what you’re building is solving a critical need, right? There’s not enough manpower, there’s not enough people to fill the roles of what’s needed in these SOCs right?

Lior Div (20:38)
Yeah. So this is leading me to, ⁓ you will see us using a lot ⁓ the slogan, do human work. And the reason that we’re saying it is we believe that nobody going to lose their job in cybersecurity, meaning that there is enough open position right now and people can grow into many, many different direction. But there is a lot of jobs that people should not do.

So the toil, the boring, the repeatable, but very necessary to cyber, things that need to be done, it’s like people should not do. doing the same investigation again and again and again, and writing the same queries again, it’s like people don’t need to do it. They don’t need even to automate it. AI can do it for us. People, as I said earlier, should be probably on the loop, not in the loop, because when you’re in the loop, you’re interfering the machine to work in a machine’s speed.

Once you put people on the loop, you basically reap the benefit of both things. So if you think about it, we are big believer that people are necessary to cyber. People need to review what the AI is doing. People can give direction to the AI, but people need to be the manager and the supervisor, not the one that actually doing the day-to-day work.

Keith Cline (22:25)
And this is a solution that’s mainly addressing the enterprise type of customer, right?

Lior Div (22:30)
Yeah, it’s fascinating because while we’re focusing on a big enterprise, ⁓ we have customers all the way from, let’s ⁓ say, 700 people, but very sophisticated, to the peak we have, I believe, 250,000 employees organization that we’re supporting. So we’re focusing a little bit more here, but it’s like actually it’s suitable to everybody. And the reason is very simple.

Instead of creating technology and throw it to the customers and we said, Hey, good luck. Use AI. We created another layer. We call it the Plaid layer. This is an acronym of people led AI driven. And the whole idea around the Plaid is basically saying, Hey, you want to reap the benefit of using AI. You don’t have the people in order to configure it and oversight AI and cyber in your environment.

We can provide the people that they’re expert in AI and cyber. This is the people led AI driven. We’re going to help you to reach to outcome. So we are not buying from us just a platform with feature and functionality. You actually can buy an outcome and we can guarantee this outcome with our people. So we took it all the way to the end that we have now the Plaid Elite team that literally can do 24 X 7 eyes on glass for some companies. So, this is kind of the thing that usually dealing with the mid size of the market and then there is the platter lead that dealing with the upper side of the market. People that don’t need a 24 by 7, they have the people, but they need help of how to use AI in a large scale environment.

Keith Cline (24:10)
So we talked about, you you raised a large Series A round of funding. What’s different building this time around? Like, round of fundings that I see out there, like a Series A of that magnitude never used to happen, right? And whatever error from web to mobile to whatever. So what are you feeling? What are you seeing out there as it relates to building a company this time around?

Lior Div (24:38)
I’m smiling because we were said, hey, we’re building an AI native company. But what does it mean? It’s like everybody can say they’re building an AI native company. But then when we looked at it, and because we have so much experience of building companies, we looked at it and said, OK, they’re organized. So I’ll give you kind of a few anecdotes from what’s going on at 7. So everybody coming to the office in Boston usually four days a week beside Friday. Okay, it’s a flat organization. There is not layers of managers and this and that. Even the way that the R&D is built is small group. A lot of Claude Code can run super fast. They have the autonomy to make decision on the product and ship it to the customer. There is not red tape and layers of a lot of approval. We still have the product function, but it’s like the R&D is moving super fast. And I think that the fundamental change is with the concept of people that they are driven, the Plaid model, and I’ll explain. In the SaaS world, what you try to do as the owner of a company, you try to put the customer here and the R&D there, and to create the maximum layers between the customer and the R&D. So you had customer success, customer support, product, sales engineer, you try to make sure that the customer will never speak with your engineers because the engineers are the most precious thing and this is kind of the slowest thing that moving. So you need to make sure that they’re focused and separated too. The first thing that we did at 7, we took the customer and the engineers and plugged them together. So we have AI security engineers that we’re hiring here in Boston that’s speaking with the customer.

The AI security engineers can listen to the customer, understand what the customer need, in a three day cycle, develop that thing, test it, and ship it to production to the customer hands. We never had that capability before.

Keith Cline (26:50)
It’s fascinating. So ⁓ I’m smiling because I like it. So over the weekend, was listening to so Brian Halligan, founder of one of the co-founders of HubSpot and ⁓ he’s with Sequoia and does an amazing podcast called ⁓ Long Strange Trip and he had Jack Dorsey on from, he talked about block and how he has reduced 40 % of his workforce. And his goal is to make Block, a flat organization, they got rid of all titles. And he’s like, I think, you know, we’re not there yet, but I would like to have, you know, people being like two steps away from me in terms of reporting structure. Like if you think about most companies, it’s like layers and layers and layers. And they got rid of titles because now it’s like, I want people to be, ⁓ lead whatever they’re doing. And then they engage with our customers to talk about whatever that person does versus before customers would want to talk to the executive vice president of whatever that isn’t even the minutia of what that person’s working on, right? So anyways, it’s just what you’ve talked about is absolutely what he was referring to.

Lior Div (27:54)
Yeah, think about it. What is the new word? ⁓ Everybody is a builder. We’re builders. So even my executive, this is people I say, it’s like they were climbing the mountain, they reached to the peak of that mountain. They agree to come back and climb it again, not telling people how to climb it, literally climbing the mountain. So it’s like, I’m using Claude Code. My co-founder is coding every executive. For example, we’re not using a presentation.

Keith Cline (27:58)
Yep. Yep.

Lior Div (28:23)
Everything is through Claude Code. You say what is your idea. It’s creating kind of an HTML. You can present that thing, move on. And usually it’s already created what need to be in the website and to use in other ⁓ things inside the company. So it’s like the whole mindset of how you’re managing, how you’re pushing, what is giving motivation to people and leadership change in the dramatic way. We’re a big believer in leadership in every level. So it doesn’t matter if you are new to the workforce. So you’re 20 something, you just finished your university and you’re joining us or you’re 20 years in. It’s like leadership needs to be in every layer and every aspect of the organization. And we’re giving people the autonomy to basically giving it’s interesting. We’re not giving, we’re expecting that people will have the autonomy to operate. And it’s like we’re creating an ecosystem that enable them to do that and supporting them of doing it.

Keith Cline (29:24)
All right, so we talked about building products, servicing customers. How have things changed as it relates to the go-to-market function? When I think of 7AI, I immediately, you guys have a very, you have a brand, right? I feel it, right? You could feel this consistency of the way you guys produce content and everything you guys do. And then how are you thinking about go-to-market with your sales function and all that?

Lior Div (29:51)
Yeah, so this is the topic that I love the most. So people ask me, it’s like, hey, Lior it’s a new company. What are you guys building? And my response is we’re building a three-star Michelin restaurant in the field of cybersecurity. And people are, I thought that you’re in cyber, what? And I’ll explain how those two things are connected, okay?

So when you think something happened in restaurant that they understood long time ago that ingredient at least in the US is available to anybody. Everybody can buy any ingredient. Okay, so that’s not a differentiation. ⁓ Cooking, everybody can cook. ⁓ And cooking well, there is a lot that cooking well. So now when everything become commodity, what’s the difference between restaurant and you know, all of us will agree that there is difference between restaurant.

So the difference is that three-star Michelin restaurant, are like, okay, the quality is different. Okay. The consistency is different. The quality of service is different. The design is different. When you go in from the person that greeting you to the person that cooking in the and washing the dishes, there is some consistency in the way that they behave and the way that they are carrying themselves and the way that they think. And the place of the customer in this ecosystem that they build. So when you go in, you feel different immediately. You don’t even think about it, but you know that something different is going on there. So what we’re building in a very intentional way, and thank you for saying it, is this three-star Michelin ⁓ approach to the way that cybersecurity. I believe that code will be commodity.

Everybody can write code if not today a year from now, code did become commodity but the difference between company will be all of those things the consistency, the quality, the way that you behave to your customer, the way that you’re interacting with your customer. Are they your partners or are they your customers? It’s like, we feel that they are our partners. We’re building for them together with them. So there is a whole mindset shift of what you’re building and that has to translate to everything. It has to translate to the website, to the fabric that you give, t-shirts, to the way that the logo is written. So literally everything.

Keith Cline (32:21)
How did you come up with the name?

Lior Div (32:23)
That’s fascinating. We wanted something that it’s simple, memorable, but has a meaning. So 7AI ⁓ is like very memorable, very simple. But when you think about the translation of the number seven, and we were looking for something that it’s very basic. So when you think about the translation of the number seven in multiple cultures, it’s talking about the completion.

It’s talking about seven wonder. It’s talking about lucky number seven. So in every culture, it’s talking about usually the end, the completion, and elite. And this is kind of the way that we’re thinking about what we’re building here. So on one hand, it’s something very basic. It’s a number. On the other hand, carry a lot of weight with the responsibility that it’s carry. It has to be complete. So if we’re doing investigation, if we’re doing cyber, analysis, it’s like we have to get to the root of the thing and we have to solve the problem.

Keith Cline (33:25)
How are you thinking about hiring in this? So you’re building a native AI company. So ⁓ not a lot of native AI companies have been built, right? So how do you go about hiring for this type of company?

Lior Div (33:41)
Yeah, so first there is the skill and will. Two categories. The will part, we want people that wants to be part of the new wave of change. So we are, I’ll say it differently, we are, I feel that we’re lucky, to be honest, that we’re building a company from scratch. So we don’t need to take a current, let’s say, point of view or culture and change it. We can actually build it from the beginning to the end. So this is one. So when you think about it, it’s like you wanna bring people that in their mind, they wanna be part of this revolution that’s happening in AI and basically lead this revolution. So the will is very, very important. And then we’re looking to see if there is skills, but skills is… it’s not just, hey, can you code anymore? Or hey, can you sell? Skill goes to multiple things. For example, if you were an athlete and you were pushing your team and you were part of the team player, it’s like, okay, this is somebody that we want to be part of the 7AI team. So it’s like the skill and will is very, very important. And the most important thing is somebody that willing to be part of ever changing a situation. So if you are coming to us and say, hey, this is the title that I want and this is the realm of responsibility that I want. I will say, I’m not sure that I have it for you because things are moving and changing so fast. It’s not saying that we’re not pushing people and promoting people all the time, but it’s happening in a different way. It’s happening not in the corporate way that we used to see in the past.

Keith Cline (35:30)
And as far as growth this year, how many employees do you have and what functional areas are you hiring for?

Lior Div (35:36)
Yeah, so we started around 30 people this year. We’re going to end around 150. ⁓ The majority of them will be here in the city. So we’re hiring a lot. And you can think about it every aspect of what we are. It’s like R&D, product, marketing, ⁓ customer success.

Keith Cline (35:43)
Wow.

Lior Div (36:01)
all the GNA support structure, all the way from revenue operation to ⁓ lawyer. it’s like, it’s the whole thing because you need to build a company that have all the function in order to go big.

Keith Cline (36:15)
and you ⁓ moved into new space recently too, like the day I came to visit, was, I think you had just moved in recently.

Lior Div (36:22)
Yeah, so we’re in Back Bay ⁓ and we’re a big believer that it’s a great place to be because everybody can come ⁓ through the T or through ⁓ driving. ⁓ There is parking in the building, so it’s like no matter how you look at it, ⁓ it’s comfortable for everybody in every step in their career. ⁓ So it’s a pleasure place to be honest.

Keith Cline (36:50)
And then, like, what’s next for 7AI?

Lior Div (36:53)
Yeah, so it’s really taking what we are building and put it in the hand of the customers. At the end of the day, the number one criteria, are you successful or not? It’s not just how fast you’re growing and how many people is, are you changing the life of those customers that you give them this product? Are those customers become more protected as a result of 7AI? And if the answer is yes, and if you can help them push the bad guys to go to a different attack, somebody else, you’re doing your job. And basically, this is the job that we’re chasing every day to make sure that our customer base are the most protected that there is right now in the US, and later on, you know, we’re gonna extend outside of the US as well.

Keith Cline (37:44)
All right, so if I’m a technical founder and I’ve got a great idea that I think I can raise some capital and scale a company, what do you think are the most important skills that a person needs to be to lead a company and be a successful CEO?

Lior Div (38:00)
Yeah, it’s a great question, but I think something around growth mindset and the ability to understand the situation, assess and change and change and change. Cause think about, I was a CEO of a thousand plus organization and started from zero. Starting from zero, meaning it’s Yonatan and myself sitting in a room and literally writing code, ⁓ ideating and literally doing the work hands-on. So if you’re not willing to do the work hands-on and really understand that your job will change every two months in a significant way, it’s like you’re not the right person for it. But if you do and you feel comfortable in an uncomfortable situation, then you’re gonna keep evolving and evolving and evolving and evolving. And that’s very important.

Keith Cline (38:55)
Well, we talked earlier about building a company in Boston and 7AI is part of the Mass AI Coalition, which is an amazing effort that Ryan Durkin is pulling off. it’s just in short amount of time, it’s been extraordinary. And I’m just excited for what’s to come. So what would you tell entrepreneurs about building a company in Boston?

Lior Div (39:16)
Yes. So from my point of view, Boston is a fantastic ecosystem to build a company in, like really fantastic. And now that we brought kind of ⁓ all the strong companies that actually focusing on AI together. And by the way, this is a calling to anybody that did not join yet to be part of it because it’s really about the community. But you bring all the smart people and we have a lot of them here in Boston. I think that there is no reason for Boston not to start leading this effort in the ecosystem of building cool companies, big companies, unicorns and above. We have the talent, we have the ecosystem, we have the ability and now we’re sharing data in multiple kind of ways. for example, my, ⁓ my co-founder, CTO, he is leading right now kind of what’s next about AI, how to build an R&D in a good way. So he has a small version of the coalition with the key CTOs to share this note. But this is just one effort out of, I believe, nine or 10 that’s happening right now that it’s fantastic. I think that this is the place to go. I chose.

Keith Cline (40:28)
know,

well, it’s perfect timing too, because there is this movement and the foundation’s already there. It’s not like you’re trying to build something from scratch where it’s like, well, we don’t have the schools, we don’t have the investors. no, all these things already exist. It just needs to come together. And the part with the schools, the students didn’t know that there were companies in their backyard. And that’s our fault, meaning there wasn’t enough engagement with the students. But this is radically changing that because I’m part of one of the task forces that is called Anchor that is making sure there’s tech tracks in Boston, not just San Francisco and New York where the kids would go and see Anthropic and all these companies. I’m like, why don’t they go to companies here in Boston? So that’s changing. There’s multiple tech tracks happening for MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Northeastern, BU kids, right? there’s a lot.

Lior Div (41:21)
Yeah, it’s not about asking why or look at it at the rear mirror. I don’t care about it. It’s like it’s really about going forward. And I’m saying it’s like once we decided as a community that we’re going all in, in order to make Boston the hub for AI. Let’s go. We have everything. And to be honest, what we’re doing on a daily basis, we’re literally doing it and we’re reap the benefit out of doing it because right now I think that there is the talent that we have right now. It’s like they’re happy. They’re happy because they’re touching the cutting edge technology that exists right now. And that thing is not just happening on the West Coast. And by the way, but we’re collaborating with a lot of companies on the West Coast to make sure that there is symbiotic informational exchange between us and them to make sure that everything that’s going on, they’re happening here. So it’s like, think about what we’re doing. And I think that we are doing it very well, is to be on the beat and to be kind of and understand what’s fresh, what’s happening, what’s happening today, not last week, today and making sure that that thing is propagated here to the community.

Keith Cline (42:33)
Alright, some rapid fire questions here. Three apps you can’t live without can’t be Slack, email, or your calendar.

Lior Div (42:40)
Ooh, so I’m very dyslectic, so it’s not email. So, so I think that today, ⁓ it’s probably Claude everything, code, cloud, it’s like Claude everything. It’s shortened the time to do so much. For somebody like me, it’s like, okay, do this, write this, move this. It’s like just a fantastic.

Keith Cline (42:56)
Yeah.

Are you, is it branching over into like, okay, let me, I think I need to this question into the fold of this interview. How are you using it to manage your job as a CEO running a company or maybe your personal life? Like how are you leveraging these platforms?

Lior Div (43:19)
Yeah, so by now it’s fully integrated to everything. All the way to the way that we think about marketing, all the way to outreach to people, all the way to managing my calendar, all the way to everything that I’m doing.

And the nice thing about it, it’s like if in the past you look at it and say, okay, this is a CEO, CEO has an executive assistant, and then there is more people that supporting a CEO, that thing disappear. I don’t have any of those things. We shrink that thing. It’s a flat organization. Multiple people have access to my calendar. I have access to other people calendar. And we as a group can operate very fast together. And there is a lot AI in the mix in order to support all of those things. So it’s like by now it’s fully integrated to our day to day. So it’s not only, hey, AI do this, people do that. No, it’s like the part, the way that we’re doing everything.

Keith Cline (44:18)
Alright, how about podcast book recommendation for entrepreneurs?

Lior Div (44:22)
Okay, ⁓ if you have dyslexic children, read the Dyslexic Advantage. This is the only book that talking about why dyslexia is actually a good thing that will give them an unfair advantage and not just a disadvantage because the disadvantage they already know. So this is one. And the other one is a book that I believe still relevant called Mindset. They’re talking about growth mindset.

And if you’re not aware of this concept, this is something that I believe everybody needs to be aware. It’s really talking about what do you do when things are not going the way that you want them to do and how you are adopt and change and embrace change as part of your being. And I think that those days when AI changing everything around us so fast, it’s actually even more important.

Keith Cline (45:15)
Alright, what do you like to do for fun outside of work when you have time?

Lior Div (45:18)
I’m trying to spend time with my kids as much and I’m painting, but that’s a different story. Yeah, big acrylic and mixed media. So it’s different aspect.

Keith Cline (45:21)
Right.

You paint. Like canvas painting?

Yeah, but obviously ⁓ I’m sure that’s something you enjoy in terms of the creative element and just being in that mindset.

Lior Div (45:42)
Yeah, I believe that creativity is crucial to what we’re doing right now because the ability to implement things become, the barrier of entry become lower. So it’s really about the imagination. Where do you want to take it? And if you can imagine big and if you can think about novel ideas, you probably can implement them those days.

Keith Cline (46:05)
I love it. Well, Lior, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through your background story, obviously all the great work you’ve been doing with the team at 7AI, and obviously all the great advice along the way.

Lior Div (46:14)
Thank you so much. Pleasure as always.

Nexthink is the leader in digital employee experience (DEX) management, helping the world’s largest organizations transform how employees interact with technology at work.

Taylor Bellefeuille, VP of Sales, shares everything you need to know about their Sales team!

In this Video

Taylor discusses:

• Who is Nexthink?
• Details on the Nexthink Sales team
• The Sales Process
• A typical day
• The interview process
• Why someone should be excited to join the Nexthink Sales team

Video Transcript

My name is Taylor Bellefeuille and I am the VP of sales for North America Commercial at Nexthink.

Who is Nexthink?

We’re a digital employee experience platform and in its simplest terms, that means that we help IT teams make technology work better for their employees, right? So, we focus on giving IT teams real-time visibility into what their employees are experiencing on their devices. So, we make sure that those issues don’t turn into frustration or worse, lack of productivity. Like I said, we have over 1,300 customers and we really cover multiple industries from manufacturing to finance, healthcare, etc. brands like Toyota, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever and we support over 25 million employees worldwide. So I would say the entire sales org at Nexthink is around 200 people when you look at leadership, account executives, client directors, BDRs, etc. So we operate at a global level. So we have team members everywhere from Boston to the Middle East to Japan. Our sellers are really split into account executives who are responsible for net new and then we have client directors who are focused on customer growth and retention. So the team is organized really by region and segment. So we have a clear ownership of everything from prospecting through expansion and we also have a dedicated partner team that works with everyone from your large global GSIs and MSPs to your local partners. So our partners are integral to our success, play a large role in our sales cycles. And then I do actually want to call out too we have an amazing cross functional team, right? We have our SEs, our event leads, our marketing team, product, customer success and professional services. So they’re all extremely important to our sales motion. So while they’re not true sales roles, they are absolutely part of our sales success.

The Sales Process

I’ll say that our process is structured, but it’s not too rigid, right? So, it’s extremely consultative. It’s driven by customer value. It really starts with us trying to get an understanding of the customer’s digital workplace challenges, right? So, things like employee productivity, IT visibility, proactive resolution, and from there we move into deeper discovery. We typically do a high-level demo followed by a more tailored more custom demo and many times our customers want to get their hands on Nexthink. So they really want to see what it looks like in their environment. So we’ll work with them on a proof of value that’s really grounded in customer data. And that means really taking our agent our software and installing it on their devices. So we’ll work with them on the use cases and drive towards the value that they care about. And then coming out of that POV, we’ll work with them on the business case creation. And this is where we can pull in another outstanding counterpart to our teams, which is the value lens team that really can pull the data from the POV, but then also pull all the data and insights from our over 1,300 customers to build a business case that then our champion can present to a leadership team. You know, the goal throughout all of this, right, is to develop trust with our customer, create clarity, and really make sure that the customers see the real impact to their business that they’ll get from Nexthink. And then from there, it’s contract negotiations and the real fun begins.

A Typical Day

No two days are the same. Which I think is one of the exciting parts about being in sales, right? It could be a typical day could have customer discovery calls. It could have internal strategy sessions between us, sales engineering, customer success. We do deal reviews, right, where we actually try to uncover you know risks within our opportunities and of course we set aside time for pipeline generation. We’re not a culture of micromanagement and that’s certainly not a role that I want to play as a sales leader. We but we expect results, right? and we have a team of sellers that want to win. So, we trust them to do what it takes to get the job done.

The Interview Process

Of course, we want the best of the best here at Nexthink and we have a great TA team that’s helping find outstanding candidates. That said, we really want the candidates to understand Nexthink and the role and what they’re getting into. So, it’s just about us learning about them as it is about them learning about us throughout the process. So typical process will be the candidate will meet with someone from our talent team to do a screening call. From there they’ll meet with myself or someone else from sales leadership. We’ll typically loop in a peer. So maybe another account executive or client director to have a conversation with them. And then we also have our sales candidates do a mock presentation where they are given a scenario and they have to present back to us. And that usually includes myself again an SE leader and maybe a peer. And really the focus of that is to more understand like how they think right how they can conduct a presentation, how they approach complex deals and how they collaborate. So it’s not just about their resume and the deals they’ve done in the past, but it’s really about how they handle sales scenarios. And that’s usually the final step in our process before we move forward into reference calls and an offer.

Why Someone Should Be Excited to Join the Nexthink Sales Team

Nexthink is a really exciting place to be. I’ve been here just about a year and a half and it’s been an awesome ride so far. I think from a technology perspective, we’re solving real meaningful problems for our customers and we’re doing that as a category leader. As a seller, especially in technology, at least I do. I want to work for a company that is constantly pushing the envelope, right? Growing, innovating, adding more products, more sellable SKUs for sales, right? And I truly believe that our product engineering teams are second to none. They’re some of the brightest people I’ve worked with. and having a story to tell about kind of the future of the industry in addition to what products we’re building and how we’re evolving with it is so so exciting. There’s also some really awesome people here, right? They’re smart, hardworking, collaborative. So, I feel very lucky to be part of the organization. And I have to plug this we are hiring for a lot of positions right now. So, definitely reach out if you’re interested.

Episode 428 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Mike Pappas, CEO & Co-Founder of Modulate. 

Is Boston the best place to build a voice AI company?  Based on its rich history in this category, I would have to say 1000%.

From the early days of ScanSoft and Dragon to SpeechWorks and Vlingo—all of which eventually fell under the voice juggernaut Nuance, which worked on the early days of Siri and was acquired by Microsoft—the pedigree in this city is unmatched. Add in players like Bose, Vivox, and the sizable presence of Amazon Alexa in the area, and it’s clear: Boston is the voice capital of the world.

Mike Pappas and his co-founder Carter Huffman are adding a massive new chapter to that legacy and that is Modulate, a venture-backed voice intelligence company building AI models and APIs designed to understand real-world conversational audio at scale.

Modulate is the company behind ToxMod, the world’s most advanced proactive voice moderation platform. If you’ve played Call of Duty lately, you’ve likely interacted with their tech. And, the company recently launched a new product called Velma, the leading AI-platform for real-world voice intelligence.

In this episode of our podcast, we cover:

• Mike’s perspective on the shift from license-based to usage-based pricing models.
• Mike’s background story—from his physics studies at MIT to his early career at Bridgewater Associates.
• Entering “startup land” at Lola and the critical hiring lessons he learned while working alongside Paul English.
• The founding of Modulate and the pivotal moment when they realized the tech they built was actually the solution to a massive safety problem in gaming which led to a relationship with Activision.
• All the details about ToxMod and Velma, including customer examples and use cases.
• Why their dataset is a “moat” that makes their technology uniquely defensible in the age of generic LLMs.
• Mike’s advice for first-time founders on raising capital and building a high-performance culture.
• Plus, so much more!

This podcast is brought to you by one of the strongest longtime supporters of the local startup ecosystem, Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. With more than 1,500 bankers and relationship advisors and $44B in loans as of Q4 2025 – SVB delivers expert guidance, specialized products and a team that knows the innovation economy inside and out. Learn more at SVB.com.