Former Biogen HR executive Kenneth "Ken" DiPietro first heard about Boston-based startup Entromy in a pitch from the company's CEO, Jan Jamrich, while discussing talent assessment.
"I was intrigued by Entromy," DiPietro said. "And also, Jan and I shared a heritage of working at Microsoft at one point. We agreed to meet as a subsequent follow-up... and the rest is history."
"The rest," as DiPietro put it, is that he's joining the advisory board of Entromy, as BostInno learned exclusively.
Launched in February 2016, Entromy is an early-stage Boston startup that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to gather employee feedback within organizations, generating insights that go beyond simply collecting responses through surveys. Its nine-person board of advisors also includes Yoav Shapira, a serial entrepreneur and engineering manager at Facebook Boston. Entromy's team of seven people work remotely, but get together in downtown Boston once every two or three weeks.
DiPietro, a 60-year-old upstate New York native and Boston's Seaport District resident, is a former HR executive at companies such as Cambridge-based Biogen, Microsoft, Lenovo, Dell and PepsiCo.
At that time of the first meeting with Entromy CEO, DiPietro was working with PE firm Oak Hill Capital as operating partner on talent—his main area of expertise. After leaving Oak Hill in fall last year, DiPietro is now a full-time advisor to early-stage biotech companies.
I chatted with DiPietro about his new appointment with Entromy:
What is it about Entromy that caught your attention?
I often say that the first friend of a CEO is the truth; it's hard to get it, because when you're an executive, it's often hard to find out what's going on. So, companies do a lot of work in this area - surveys, organizational climate surveys, health surveys - and I've always been frustrated by it, because in my experience these different tools generate enormous amount of data, but not enough information and insights... I figured out really quickly that [Entromy's product] is a pretty powerful tool. It makes the work 'Finding out what's going on' easier and faster and cheaper.
Was there a specific moment when you thought, "Ok, I want to be an advisor for Entromy?"
No, I mean, I like [Jan]. We had a meeting with Jan and several of the other team members, and I liked them. They're diverse, they come from different backgrounds: technology, software, consulting, marketing.
What is the unique expertise that you will bring to the table?
I don't think of myself as unique. I've worked in five industries. I spent a long part of my career in consumer products... I moved form consumer to hardware when I went to work for Dell... And then I went to software with Microsoft.
In 2017, you were among several top execs who left Biogen. Why did you leave and what was going on?
It was time. I'd been there for about five and a half years, I'd done a lot of work. I went to work at Biogen because I believed deeply in what the CEO had recruited me to do. He was stepping down, and I believe that those are good times to leave.
If you had Entromy's software while working at Biogen, Microsoft and Lenovo, how would it have changed your workday?
I remember the first time I was using survey feedback at Biogen. I was in the company maybe four months... less, three months. They had completed their annual organization survey... I laid all these documents on the floor, because I could not understand, I wasn't seeing anything. I had tons of data, but no information... If I had known that Entromy existed, 'speed to facts' would have been compressed, real insights could have been generated, actions could have been taken way faster and a lot cheaper than we were doing.
What’s your advice for building culture for early-stage startups?
Building quality culture is deliberate, it's not accidental. Places that are successful at it work on it every day... as important as raising money, as executing science, as executing engineering, they place importance on it.
