MGMT Boston

Welcome Christopher Harris, CRO at Blitzy on this episode of 🔥The Lantern 🔥 Christopher is the Chief Revenue Officer at Blitzy, having the privilege of working with co-founders Sid Pardeshi and Brian Elliott for almost 3 years. Chris was a sales coach at Harvard Business School and Brian was one of his students (before he was a believer in this company!) Chris and his revenue team at Blitzy are helping major enterprises, fast growing startups, and Fortune 500 companies increase development velocity at scale and create an Agentic SDLC. 🚀 How is Blitzy accelerating AI development velocity for its customers? 🚀 First, traditional SDLC’s and co-pilots or IDE tools (think GitHub, Cursor, Codex, etc.) help increase productivity. With Blitzy, you batch build 80-90% of the work for an entire project beforehand and then use your IDE for the smaller, more specific tasks to bring it to completion. Blitzy helps companies with large scale modernization projects, steady state new feature additions, and the company valuation impact bucket - helping fulfill strategic board driven goals to increase the value of the company. 🔍 What are some recent wins for Blitzy and how have they helped institute AI and accelerate velocity within enterprises? 🔎 Two major financial service providers came to Blitzy with a board driven initiative to walk..and then run fast! Traditionally these projects take 1-2 years to complete, but with Blitzy they were able to get it done in 4-5 months working alongside their C-suite. These projects drove tens of millions of dollars in savings and a seven figure engagement for Blitzy. And there are examples of this happening at different levels all across their customer base!   📈 What is the GTM opportunity at Blitzy that you would share with the community? 📈 Chris and his team are looking for folks who strive for excellence. True consultants. Their team is proactive, constantly bringing value, and strategic thinkers. Everyone knows the opportunity with AI, but no one knows who to align with or who to use for it. The Biltzy team has to be excellence driven individuals who can consult and advise C-level executive from the biggest companies in the world. For people who can do that and thrive in a high energy, hardworking environment, you’re going to fit right in at Blitzy! 📣 For those who want to learn more, join us the evening of Wed, Dec 3rd for an event at the Blitzy office in Kendall Square to learn how they’re building their team for Blitz-scale! 📣 More from Blitzy over the next month at MGMT Boston, one of our leading AI startups here in Boston!

It was great spending time with Matt Crane for MGMT Boston to talk about J2 Ventures latest fund raise! Boston was, is, and always will be a great place to build world changing companies and that’s why we moved here to found J2. We could not be more excited for what’s to come! #build617 #dualuse #venture

Welcome Brian Benedict, Co-Founder at Eliza on this episode of 🔥The Lantern 🔥 Eliza is a first AI consultancy and platform that really focuses on the people, helping people be enabled with AI platforms like OpenAI, and upskilling their knowledge base so they can build their own workflows and agentic systems on their own. 🔍 What’s going on inside Eliza heading into 2026? 🔎 Eliza just launched! Their team built a platform that helps segment users from power users who can already build workflows to..the rest of the organization who needs to be upskilled and taught to use these tools. Their startup is working with private equity firms and large technology companies with enterprise AI licenses that need more hands on keyboard utilizing these tools. Insurance and financial services too.   🤔 What has Brian learned from his startup career & building Eliza? 🤔 Constant pivoting! Being attuned to the market, listening to customers and doing more. Also taking practical AI use cases and applying them successfully vertically is a great strategy. Practicality helps in adoption 🤝 How can we help grow? 🤝 Eliza is hiring across the board! Forward deployed engineers, product leaders, and also sales & marketing who want to join a small handful of people building something great! The Lantern is brought to you by MGMT Boston, Rho, & Invest Northern Ireland – Americas this month

Welcome Emily Knight, President & CEO at The Engine from Tough Tech Week on this episode of 🔥The Lantern 🔥 The Engine is an incubator and accelerator built to accelerate the pathway for Tough Tech from discovery to deployment. Their team is trying to help incredible technologies, that will change the world, have an impact. Making connections for startups and stakeholders is a top priority so convening people for Tough Tech Week is the fastest, most effective way to accomplish that goal! 🛠️ What is Tough Tech Week? 🛠️ Tough Tech Week is a celebration of what’s going on in Massachusetts with 100+ official events. It’s a community gathering of cross cutting technologies across multiple verticals. The Engine is not just holding the torch, but giving it to all of the people doing the work and solving hard problems together. ✅ What are the goals for Tough Tech Week? ✅ Better awareness. Tough Tech is bringing awareness to the technology being built in the physical world touching infrastructure, biology, climate, manufacturing, and much more. Highlighting the work, catalyzing conversations, and accelerating progress is how Tough Tech moves forward! 🛫 How does Tough Tech Week propel The Engine into 2026? 🛫 The Engine is a real institution for building, learning, and housing this information. For all of those people building, including future founders, Tough Tech Week helps get people excited about what we can do when we work together. 🤝 How can we help the Tough Tech ecosystem grow? 🤝 Be curious! Read about companies in your community, learn about your electricity bill, and the food you’re buying. This stuff affects all of our lives, so get involved! The Lantern is brought to you by MGMT Boston, Rho, & Invest Northern Ireland – Americas this month

Welcome Connor Farrell, VP of Sales at OnRamp on this episode of 🔥The Lantern 🔥 OnRamp is a customer onboarding platform helping customers create digital, scalable onboarding solutions to better engage their customers during the most critical part of the customer journey: onboarding. The first 30/60/90 days are critical! 🔍 What’s going on inside OnRamp in 2025? 🔎 OnRamp is hiring across customer success, marketing, engineering & sales! On the Sales side they’re looking for awesome SDRs, AEs (commercial + mid market). OnRamp is looking for the best and brightest to help them grow! 🤔 What has Connor learned from his startup career & building OnRamp? 🤔 Getting in the office, in person, is one of the most important things you can do from a revenue organization to help you and your team grow. Learning through osmosis, riffing, learning from people that have done this before is super critical! 🤝 How can we help? 🤝 If you know awesome people that want to join a fast growing startup in Boston, Connor & OnRamp would love to talk! And if you know any awesome companies looking to scale their efforts - CS Leaders, Operations Leaders, and CROs - OnRamp is the tool to make it happen! The Lantern is brought to you by MGMT Boston, Rho, & Invest Northern Ireland – Americas this month

Welcome Brent Willess, Early Stage AI Investor at Innospark Ventures on this episode of 🔥The Lantern 🔥 Innospark Ventures is an early stage venture fund based in Boston. Their team invests in early stage startups and technical founders building and using AI across enterprise, physical, real world to healthcare & life sciences. The Innospark team is a group of former founders, operators, scientists, and engineers turned investors working closely with founders building incredible companies and reshaping industries. 🔍 What’s going on inside Innospark in 2025? 🔎 The team is focused on doubling down on technical expertise. Their Technical Residence Program pairs research talent at the universities with Innospark to help them better understand & evaluate companies as these builders think about starting their own companies. Leaning into Boston’s tough tech roots is another focus area, leveraging the incredible ecosystem from Boston Dynamics to Kiva (Amazon Robotics), Formlabs, Desktop Metal, iRobot, and more. They’ll be doing more events and meeting more teams in tough tech, so if you’re building in that area reach out! 🤔 What has Brent learned from his startup career & investing at Innospark? 🤔 Brent helped scale Uber for 6 years, launching and scaling operations & product across the U.S. and Canada, before joining Founder Collective for 5 years as an investor after business school. 🛑 🏃 For early stage founders, don’t chase themes! 🏃♀️➡️ 🛑 By the time something is a theme, companies have already raised massive rounds and are now the hot companies of today. If you’re building in themes, you’re (at least) a couple years behind! Focus on the problems you’re passionate about and uniquely suited to solve. 🤝 Use Cases > Market Size 🤝 Investors are terrible at estimating market sizes.. TAM is always too low or too far above reality. Simplify. Focus on building an MVP and find a customer who’s obsessed with it and wants to pay you for it. From there you can scale!  Uber replacing taxi cabs? Early riders weren’t using cabs, they were replacing car rides or public transit. It was WAY bigger than just the taxi industry. 🎯 Design for what matters most 🎯 Simple over complexity every day of the week. The Uber rider app was redesigned so many times over 15 years. But ultimately what mattered and still matters is ETA and price. The basics are always most important. 🤝 How can we help? 🤝 There are so many great companies building in different categories here in Boston. Investors need to help connect dots > find co-founders, find first employees, find customers, and even connect to other investors. Also, investors need to help companies amplify their stories for the future success of the company, fundraising, etc. And if you’re building in Enterprise AI and physical world AI, reach out to Brent too! The Lantern is brought to you by MGMT Boston, Rho, & Invest Northern Ireland – Americas this month

Welcome Mikey Shulman, Co-Founder & CEO at Suno on this episode of 🔥The Lantern 🔥 Suno is building a world where music is more valuable and a bigger part of the lives of billions of people. Their team believes in a future where music is in a central place as the most culturally relevant form of media. 🔍 Where is Suno focused on heading into 2026? 🔎 They definitely have an aggressive roadmap for 2025 and 2026. Zooming out, you’ll see the Suno team try to make music more engaging and more social to connect people through music. The team is also working on new "power tools" to give users increased control over music creation as well as new engaging experiences where you can explore music and discover things that you’d never thought possible! Moving into 2026, they’re thinking about the next 100 million people who will use Suno. What can they build for them? How will those people want to use the platform? And how can they make them fall in love with music? 🎵 How is Suno changing the music industry? How are they building for consumers and artists? 🎵 Suno is changing how music gets made (technology has always done this!). They’re changing who gets to make music, expanding the pie and growing the number of people making music. The team is also changing the speed with which music evolves and pushing music forward. Having it reflect culture faster, discovering new genres, new forms, and things people haven’t event thought of before. 🔍 What have been Mikey’s key learnings scaling this startup? 🔎 Everything is downstream from who you get to work with. That includes the velocity with which you can ship products, the success of the company, and also the personal enjoyment of coming into work every day super energized. Mikey cares as ton about who’s on the ship and steering them toward their goals. 🎙️ How can we learn more about Suno? 🎙️ Come find Suno in Cambridge, New York, and LA (Venice). Check them out on the web - Suno.com. They’re on the app stores on mobile, too! Or shoot them a note at hello@suno.com. This is Suno from MGMT Boston in September, one of our leading AI startups here in Boston!

Episode 15 of the Fall Coworking Chronicles has us traveling to Link Ventures, Part 1… We caught up with Daniel Blundin from Link Ventures, Brian Elliott from Blitzy, and Joel Rosen & Alek Loconzolo from BindIQ on this segment… Link Ventures is out to build the #1 venture capital firm in the Boston area for AI and technology companies. If you’re working on hardware or AI, they’re recruiting some of the brightest minds in the city to come work on these problems. Daniel Blundin, Venture Developer at Link Ventures shares… Talent really differentiates Boston. It’s the densest talent cluster in the world and working with really bright founders is his favorite part of the role. Their office, located in the heart of Kendall Square, is centralized between all the best schools in the city. Daniel is excited about the immediate impact of AI within the Enterprise. Consumer is coming (beyond ChatGPT)! And a huge shout out to EverQuote (former Link Ventures portfolio company) for being a helpful consultant as their companies grow. Brian Elliott, Co-Founder & CEO at Blitzy shares… Blitzy is an enterprise grade autonomous code generation platform. A lot of the SDLC (software development) AI platforms help developers become more productive, but Blitzy brings AI across the entire development lifecycle, doing large batch scale development across large enterprise codebases (think 20M lines of code!). Kendall is one of the most innovative square miles in the world. From Akamai to Google, there are incredible partnerships in walking distance. Startups? We should also pay homage to the past and the people who have made Boston a great startup city - Dharmesh Shah at HubSpot, Robert Blumofe at Akamai Technologies - who have set such a strong foundation. Now it’s our turn to build the next generation of anchor companies! Joel Rosen & Alek Loconzolo, Co-Founders at BindIQ share… BindIQ is building conversational Voice AI for the insurance space, streamlining the data collection process in call intake. Customer service agents spend a lot of time and money doing repetitive call intake with data collection. Bind IQ assistants can streamline that process and escalate to human agents when needed, working with initial design partners. Check out Prim AI in the Voice AI enterprise space and Soshi, another Northeastern alumni company! The fall tour continues with MGMT Boston. Thanks to Rho and Will Panarello for supporting this series!