Today we’d like to introduce you to Bryan Pirtle.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I got into technology and engineering at a deep level in undergraduate, where I attended California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. I studied electrical engineering and was exposed to a wide variety of very cool technology and career options.
Growing up, I lived in the central valley of California (Modesto area) and was fortunate enough to lock down an internship at the E&J Gallo Winery there for each summer as I went through college. After graduation, I turned down several other job offers to be able to start a career at the winery as a control systems and electrical engineer specializing in industrial machinery and processes.
During my ten year career at the winery, I was able to have a hand in building and rebuilding nearly every system they had there as business needs changed. These were wine processing and packaging systems that were capable of producing over a million salable bottles of wine per day! My teams and I built systems to process wine from the grape crush all the way through processing and into the bottles and cases for shipment globally. I had a great time working on lots of advanced technology, including robots, machinery that could move at blinding speed yet produce exacting results, and the servers and real-time data systems that would collect billions of data points from the factory floor so that management could analyze and understand what was going on every day.
After a while, however, I really wanted to further my education and so was fortunate enough to be accepted into the System Design and Management program at MIT. As a hybrid program incorporating both engineering and management, it was the exact type of further education I was looking for. I thoroughly enjoyed the program, and as a result of my experience there I was inspired to become an entrepreneur. About this time, my long-time friend Will was graduating from Harvard Business School and had similar aspirations to start a business. We decided that because we both had extensive experience in software and believed that this was the future, we’d start a tech. startup in the San Francisco bay area.
We tried several different businesses between 2012-2015 and learned valuables lessons in each, but they all inevitably failed. Luckily for us, we were able to use the learnings from these failures as well as our extensive networks to start Nova, the business that is still a going concern today.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It has definitely not been a smooth road! I once saw a very interesting graphic that I felt illustrated the entrepreneurial experience well. It showed a line that was curving in on itself, going up, down, left, right, but if you looked at it holistically, it was always going up and to the right in the final analysis. While it feels like you’re going backward a lot, you end up making a lot of progress in the end.
One of our major hurdles was coming to the realization that the enterprise software consumer is now very savvy. We sell to enterprises, so they have very high expectations of uptime (Never going down!) and robustness (No bugs!). Even one visible bug can cause customers to lose faith in your product and spell the loss of major accounts. Being able to build software that is robust enough to be “Always on and bug free” has been a difficult but important transition for us. Its one thing to build a powerful product that solves a real need for real customers, but it’s something else entirely to do that as a baked and mature product that doesn’t ever corrupt user data, have a poor user experience, or have downtime.
Another challenge was being able to properly market and sell a premium, complex software product. Sometimes we joke that we suffer from the “curse of knowledge” and that because we know so much about our product it makes it difficult to distill its essential components into a concise pitch to customers. As we’ve gotten ever better at this, though, it has paid off in dramatic traction and revenue growth.
As is to be expected, I imagine, we also have had many people challenges. It’s very difficult to attract extremely talented and committed folks to a fledgling startup with very little security. Also, as setbacks inevitably amount, it’s easy for once-committed employees to lose faith and want out or simply not be up to the daily and relentless challenges presented by a startup environment. Some find the environment invigorating, but most find it crushing, so finding the few that are up for the challenge in the long haul has proven very difficult!
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Nova – what should we know?
Nova is an enterprise software company that uses artificial intelligence to accelerate the sales process. Our product is a SaaS (Software as a service) sales platform that sales people in many different industries use to coordinate most of their daily activities, such as writing emails, calling prospects, and managing the deal cycles. It can be thought of as the core engine that sales people use every day as they sell their products and services.
We are known for and specialize in email personalization, as this was the original differentiated use case that our product performed. The platform’s AI is actually able to pull in data from many public data sources about the prospect that a salesperson is going to email, and then it actually writes the email content tailored to that prospect at a deep level so it’s very engaging. It also attempts to build a bridge between the salesperson using shared interests, etc. and weaves that information into the emails it writes. Writing a personal email to a single prospect with all of the research required usually takes 30 minutes or so, but Nova’s AI can do it in 30 seconds.
We are most proud of our AI technology and the plethora of data we’ve been able to amass on behalf of our clients. On the data side, we’ve pieced together millions of people profiles from disparate data sources using sophisticated persona resolution technology such as facial recognition to determine if “this Bill Brown profile is the same Bill Brown as the one from another profile on some other social media site” which can be a very difficult problem indeed. On the AI side, we are proud of our email-writing AI, as well as our AI that is able to “read” an email and determine what it’s about so we can use detailed sentiment and intent analytics to train and evolve more sophisticated AI models about what messaging works (i.e. – Does this passage in this message to this prospect lead to greater sales conversion?)
No one else in the sales space is working as deeply on AI technology as we are, and we firmly believe that we use a rich set of data in a cohesive way in the product unlike any others. We feel that data, analytics, and AI are the future of sales, and so these are the ongoing focus areas of our research and technology development as we grow Nova.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
I’ve always felt that luck has played an integral role in both my life and in my business dealings. I definitely believe that if you are always working to prepare yourself, that when the moment of opportunity comes (The luck) then you’ll be ready to seize the opportunity and make amazing things happen! I believe that we all get many opportunities throughout our lives to do great things, but that extensive preparation and hard work along the way is what allows us to turn those lucky opportunities into great things, so we should always be preparing as best we can.
We’ve definitely had our share of bad luck, too. For example, we lost a huge deal once because of a series of product bugs that cascaded in a way that we thought would never happen. The customer saw some ugly results that were exceedingly unlikely, but events conspired in such a way that led to that outcome quite unexpectedly.
Despite having some bouts with bad luck, we do feel that lady luck has smiled upon us more often than not, and that some chance encounters have definitely made our business what it is today. For example, we were able to secure funding at a critical juncture in the company’s history due to an acquaintance “going out on a limb” and recommending us to some investors even though he really didn’t know us very well. We definitely did not expect or foresee this, and it led to a critical investment.
In my life, similar lucky circumstances have shaped the direction of my career and life. For example, the winery experience was a big growth and development phase in my life, and I was very lucky to have gotten it at all. The first step of the process to land the internship there was to submit a personal essay in high school to the selection committee. I wrote the essay, but mistakenly left it inside my school counselor’s office and forgot to submit it before the deadline! He had my back, however, and I was lucky that he took the time to make sure personally that it was submitted on time. Without such a lucky intervention I never would have had that experience at all and things would certainly have turned out very differently.
Contact Info:
- Address: 149 Natoma Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA - Website: https://www.nova.ai
- Phone: 2094851059
- Email: bryan@nova.ai
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bryan.pirtle.1
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bpirtle
Getting in touch: BostonVoyager is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
