On Monday September 21st, I'm hosting Andy Sparks, COO and co-founder of Mattermark at OneEleven for a fireside chat and Q&A with entrepreneurs and investment professionals. The event starts at 6PM and runs til 8:30PM.When Andy found out he will be in Waterloo the week-end prior, as one of the judges in the famous Hack the North event, he contacted me. I suggested he stops in Toronto so we can run another event for the Toronto startup ecosystem.Previously, Andy was a Technology Editor at Referly, co-Founder and CRO at LaunchGram (acquired by Referly), and Director of Product Development at Duet Health.My relationship with Mattermark goes back to their early days in 2013, when they had 6 employees and were fresh from a Referly pivot, as Danielle Morrill impressed me with her early investment analysis work on startups. Then I helped them curate the first few versions of the Mattermark Daily, and fill some gaps in Canadian data. In 2014, I became an angel investor in Mattermark, about 6 months prior to their $6.5 million investment by Foundry Group. Today, Mattermark has about 40 employees, and their daily newsletter is a must read to over 30,000 readers.Mattermark's software helps deal makers (investors, sales teams, M&A professionals) source, research, and track the fastest growing private companies. They leverage machine learning, web crawlers, primary sources, and natural language processing to extract data from millions of news articles and websites daily. Used by hundreds of venture capital & private equity firms, hedge funds, investment banks, Mattermark filters through the noise to identify opportunities to invest in, partner with, and sell to some of the most promising companies in the world.Mattermark has been growing aggressively, and Andy will talk about their sales process, growth metrics, his job, sales leads, their product and big data. We chose these topics to make them interesting to a variety of entrepreneurs:
- Mattermark's sales strategy and culture
- Best practices in growing their SaaS related metrics
- What does a startup COO actually do, and how the role evolves with growth
- How to use Mattermark for leads generation (for any B2B company) or deal sourcing
- Big Data - how Mattermark uses natural language processing on massive data sets
This event is organized by Startup Management and hosted at OneEleven. Startup Management doesn't make any money from this event. All proceeds from ticket sales are used to pay for the event's organization and logistics, with the aim of providing a top quality experience to attendees.