Sector: Technology

Founders Diaries: The stories keep getting better….

We have been enthralled with the response of the Boston start-up community.

We are hosting our next Founders Diaries event on Monday Feb 10 with Jeremy Allaire of Allaire Corp/Brightcove/Circle fame – we would love to see you there! Register to attend here.

How time flies….

It has been 3 years (!) since we launched the Founders Diaries event series, and we have been enthralled with the response of the Boston start-up community. What started as a single inspirational talk by Robin Chase from Zipcar and a data-heavy blog post from our team has become a much larger tradition, and one we have been fortunate to share with 1,000+ attendees to date.

Accomplished start-up leaders like Michael Simon from LogMeIn, Steve Papa from Endeca, Paul Sagan from Akamai, David Cancel from Drift, and a multitude of others have been extraordinarily generous in sharing their trials, tribulations, and victories on the way to building foundational Boston companies. Those gathered have shared in laughs, heart-wrenching stories (Akamai losing a co-founder to tragedy on 9/11, whose memory inspired the team for years to come), ‘wows’ (LogMeIn’s picture-perfect early growth #s in spite of early rejection from investors), and tales of culture reigning supreme (Datto’s Austin McChord wins the award for most creative in-office competitions/races). We are deeply appreciative of not only our speakers but those who come to listen, ask questions, and share their own stories over apps and drinks.

Up Next: Good things come in 3’s…

Our next distinguished speaker, Jeremy Allaire, earns the unique commendation of having started 3 (3!!) successful start-ups, displaying a relentless determination to build products, hire teams, and close customers across decades.

Jeremy started his entrepreneurial journey as Co-Founder/CTO of Allaire Corporation, where he led the company’s product and GTM strategy and helped grow the business to 1M customers, $120M+ revenue, and a sale to Macromedia in late 2000. After serving as CTO of Macromedia, he then moved into online video distribution as Founder/CEO of Brightcove (from inception through the IPO), building a $130M+ revenue company that today powers video on ~25% of the top 10k websites worldwide and receives 250M+ unique visits per month. In his latest act (we won’t dare call it final at this point!), Jeremy co-founded and serves as CEO of Circle, a crypto finance company that makes it possible for people everywhere to create and share value in a way that is affordable, open and empowering.

From web application servers to online video to crypto, Jeremy has identified and harnessed trends in a way that few can.

Empowering the next generation….

When first examining the data on ‘large exits’ ($400M+) in Boston from the past 25 years, what stood out most is how certain companies serve as fertile ground for successive entrepreneurial endeavors, similar to the ‘Paypal mafia’. The initial assessment (including valuable crowdsourced additions) highlighted Akamai (40+ alumni start-ups), Genzyme (28), and Hubspot (28) as launchpoints for entrepreneurial leaders. Jeremy’s companies similarly stand out. Allaire Corp, Brightcove, and Circle have collectively produced 33 alumni start-ups from their employee ranks (counting founders/early start-up CEOs).

A few fun facts about these alumni adventures (listed here – contributions welcome!):

-8 multiple-time entrepreneurs on the list

-6 alumni companies had 2 or more co-founders from the Allaire Corp/Brightcove/Circle mafia (‘no new friends’, as they say)

-JJ Allaire (Jeremy’s brother) co-founded Allaire Corp and has founded three subsequent companies: Onfolio, FitNow, and R-Studio

-Notable outcomes include EqualLogic ($1.4B to Dell; co-founded by Paula Long) and Imprivata (IPO then $544M sale to Thoma Bravo; Patrick Morley led as early President/CEO); both are Allaire Corp alums (Paula in engineering, Patrick on the business side)

-The group also includes a few high-potential, high-growth companies including Mux ($32M raised from YC, Accel), RStudio (millions of users, the default IDE for R, recently became a public benefit corp), Vested (an early-stage company re-imagining employee stock options), and Hummingbird (taking a new approach to RegTech, an area near/dear close to our heart)

-David Orfao served as President/CEO of Allaire Corp through its sale to Macromedia before co-founding General Catalyst, a leading VC firm; General Catalyst has funded at least 7 of the Allaire-related alumni start-ups (here’s to paying it forward!)

Alumni Start-ups: Notable Exits

 Alumni Start-ups to Watch

 

Despite all the entrepreneurial activity and success to date, we are sure to see even more in the future from those in the ‘Allaire’ mafia (we are watching you, Circle alumni, for great things)!

Join us….

We hope you’ll join us on Monday February 10th to hear Jeremy’s wisdom, and maybe even cross paths with an alumni founder! Please sign up here to attend – see you there and at future gatherings!

– Team F-Prime

Kudos to Nisha Rangarajan for key research and analysis in support of this post.

Sources: LinkedIn, Pitchbook, Crunchbase, and VentureFizz.

Retooling the Lab-Software Stack

Day-to-day software used by scientists remains stuck in the dark ages.

While great strides have been made in biomedical research over the past decade with breakthrough technologies like CRISPR and gene therapy, the day-to-day software used by scientists remains stuck in the dark ages.

On a product-level, legacy lab-software is often difficult to deploy (anyone heard of SaaS?), terrible to integrate (API still means Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient) and shockingly bad from a UI/ UX perspective (think Pong from 1972). On a functional level, it’s often unfit for modern data-types/ data-volumes and lacking in embedded intelligence (i.e. AI/ML). Software may be eating the world in other industries, but it only ever nibbled at the R&D lab.

Thankfully, over the last few years we’ve seen a new breed of start-up emerge looking to overhaul the lab-software stack. These companies are built on modern tech foundations and tend to be product-led with freemium, self-serve versions that delight users not dissuade them. Several F-Prime portfolio companies exemplify these traits: Benchling has thoroughly modernized what a Lab Operating System should look, feel and function like; Owkin is empowering scientists to create predictive models for drug efficacy; and BenchSci (our newest investment) has mapped the world’s biomedical research to improve the efficiency of reagent selection and experiment design.

The DNA of this new breed of start-ups is also fundamentally different. They’re demographically younger (born in the web). They’re educational ‘dual-citizens’ (fluent in Biological Sciences and Computer Science). And they bring a healthy disregard for incumbent vendors in the R&D market (they’re “in the world, but not of it”).

The challenge of commercializing biomedical research is well understood by everyone involved (e.g., high profile clinical failures, experimental irreproducibility and escalating costs of drug development). While better lab software is clearly not THE answer, it is AN answer. It’s an exciting time to be building a company in this vertical and if you’re doing so, we’d love to hear from you.

BenchSci

BenchSci is a software platform that maps disease biology using machine learning models trained on 20+ million scientific publications. Its proprietary ASCEND™ platform helps scientists design better experiments, uncover novel insights, and identify safety and efficacy risks earlier in the discovery process.

Funnel

Funnel’s product is a Data Core used by 800 forward-thinking organizations across a wide set of industry verticals to automatically import marketing data and make it Business-Ready. The Swedish Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company was founded by Fredrik Skantze and Per Made in 2014. Funnel has 140 employees and offices in Stockholm and Boston.

Snapdocs

Founded in 2013, Snapdocs is the industry’s leading digital closing platform. With its patented AI technology, Snapdocs is on a mission to perfect mortgage closings and transform a $2 trillion pillar of the U.S. economy. Powering over 750,000 closings a year, Snapdocs is leading the charge to modernize, streamline, and improve the mortgage process for lenders, borrowers, and settlement. Snapdocs is the only solution with a proven track record of creating a single, scalable process for every closing, whether wet, hybrid, or digital. Every day, over 50,000 mortgage professionals rely on Snapdocs’ technology to automate manual work and digitize paper processes that plague the industry. Snapdocs is a rapidly growing San Francisco based real estate technology company backed by prestigious Silicon Valley blue-chip venture capital funds, like Y Combinator, SV Angel, Sequoia Capital, and F-Prime.

Vendr

Vendr is an end-to-end SaaS purchasing & renewal management platform. They manage your software purchases and renewals, so you can manage your business.

Logixboard

Logixboard is the digital partner for freight forwarders to succeed in today’s highly competitive market. Our web-based platform empowers freight forwarders to do their work more efficiently, increasing customer satisfaction, and unlock the power of their data. Logixboard is a recent graduate of Techstars and is based in Seattle with offices in Bogota, Colombia.

Sam Bisbee

Sam Bisbee is a Venture Partner at F-Prime with a background in technology, cybersecurity, and operations. He is also the Chief Security Officer at Threat Stack where he’s responsible for the company’s security and compliance programs, in addition to providing security services to Threat Stack’s Cloud SecOps Program customers.

Sam joined Threat Stack in 2014 to build and help bring the product to market. Previously Sam was a member of the Cloudant team (acquired by IBM).

Sandor Palfy

Sandor is a Venture Partner at F-Prime, focusing on enterprise technology and cybersecurity. Previously he served as the CTO of LogMeIn where he drove the technology vision and development of the Identity and Remote Management portfolio (LastPass, LogMeIn Central, LogMeIn Pro, and GoToMyPC) and led the corporate IT and Security teams, navigating through many acquisitions and the merger with Citrix Online.

Sandor earned his master’s degree in Computer Science at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and spent the early part of his career at Digital Equipment.

RiskLens

RiskLens is the leading provider of quantitative cyber risk management software. Its platform is recognized as a mission-critical business application for cybersecurity and risk teams across the Fortune 1,000. RiskLens empowers large enterprises and government organizations to manage cyber risk from the business perspective by quantifying that risk in monetary terms. Clients depend on RiskLens solutions to better understand and communicate their cyber risk exposure in financial terms, prioritize their risk mitigations, measure the ROI of their security investments, and meet regulatory demands calling for the quantification of cyber risk. RiskLens is the only cyber risk quantification software purpose-built on FAIR, the standard quantification model for information security and operational risk. RiskLens was acquired by Safe Security in 2023.