Dana Wensberg wasn’t just looking for a job. He was looking to learn from leaders that were making disruptive products and driving innovation forward. As one of Paperless Parts’ first full time employees and early Software Engineers, Dana is a builder who found a tribe that’s laser focused on making manufacturing better with the help of software. Maybe he’ll even help us get to Mars.
In an alternate universe Dana might have grown up in Boston in the late 90s working as a janitor at MIT scribbling never before solved math formulas on a chalkboard. But we’re in this reality, not that one. Dana is a typical kid from the Northeast, he tells me. He grew up in Connecticut and has an older sister. His sister is the right leaning brain to his left. She’s social, interpersonal, a writer, and today works on the GTM side of the house at an NYC startup. He went to public school and played town sports. After that he did a year of prep school. He landed close to home for his undergraduate studies at Trinity on an academic scholarship. His parents went & met there so it kind of made sense to continue the family affair.
Dana’s learned a lot from his parents. His dad is an entrepreneur who is a jack of all trades with experience in advertising, sports tech, and most recently is working on a venture in the cannabis industry. His mom is a sales ninja who’s been blowing her quota out of the water since she graduated from college. Dana gets his moxie from her he’s sure to add. “She can sell paper to a tree” and was working from home long before it was cool juggling a family life and her career. Dana thinks he picked up some of her subtle ways of articulation, communication, and storytelling a room away listening to those calls.
It was at Trinity where Dana really found his calling. He discovered the engineering department his freshman year and never looked back. Computer science and robotics were this whole new world he’d never been exposed to and he got lost in it, double majoring in Mechanical Engineering & Physics.
Dana credits his fantastic professors who were really engaging practitioners and made learning a lot of fun. He thought he wanted to be an aerospace engineer and it became his initial true north. But as he progressed he realized that writing code was a lot more fun than the idea of pursuing a PhD. All it took was one fateful summer to realize that building software was all he ever wanted to do. A career was launched.
Dana was referred to an internship at Addaero, a defense & manufacturing company, by Paperless Parts’ Founder Jason Ray. Jason was a fellow Trinity grad and knew the Wensbergs through the alumni network. Dana was hired at Addaero to help create scripts so they could automate their quoting process. Interesting… Jason seemingly helped place Dana at one of his future prospects. Pretty solid chess move right there, good sir.
The next summer, after impressing his bosses at Addaero, Dana went over to Paperless Parts as their first intern. He reported to their CTO & Co-Founder, Scott Sawyer. Dana showed up for his first day of work with a severed flexor tendon in his right hand, an injury he suffered doing..college things..one week prior. So he started a little bit on the backfoot. No foul play, just an overzealous accident of the formative years. You know the type. Dana had to have reconstructive surgery and wear a splint that made his right arm almost useless for a couple months.
A software engineer showing up for a summer internship with just one hand ready to type? He had to rig a contraption to help him peck at the keyboard with a mechanical pencil. He couldn’t wait to shake Scott’s and Jason’s hands..in August when the cast came off.
Dana lived in the Fenway neighborhood, commuting into the office downtown. He would spend the night at the office a couple days per week, lost in the problems he was trying to solve. His first project was to build the foundations of a 3D part viewer by solving deep geometry programming challenges. It’s a problem where you can get sucked in. Dana said to me “you know when it’s 2pm and then you look back at the clock and it’s 2am?” No Dana, most of us do not!
Over that summer he worked on three or four major projects, taking on a lot more responsibility than most coffee making or printer championing interns. That’s startup life! He built Paperless Parts’ first “part viewer” that helps end users visualize the parts they are quoting. He didn’t have mocks or designers sitting next to him so he just built what he thought would be cool. Even today, the part viewer is a central feature of Paperless Parts’ platform.
It’s fair to say he went and totally redeemed himself! How do you like them apples?
Dana looks back with a lot of pride on the early days of Paperless Parts working alongside Scott & Jason in a small co-working space in the financial district. When Dana returned to college for his senior year he continued to work at Paperless Parts around his academic schedule. He juggled class a couple days per week and went heads down on deep geometry problems the rest of his spare time. His full time offer was contingent on him bringing back some new Trinity interns the following summer too. He succeeded and a couple still work there today, like Luke Duros, a Paperless Parts Engineering Lead.
Upon graduation he moved to Boston to work with the team in person. No more electives on the side. Dana loved his move up to Boston. He enjoys playing pond hockey on the Public Garden during the winters, often with Paperless colleagues. He loves going to Bova’s and maintains that it’s the best bakery in town. He’s a big Bruins fan too. Having TD Garden right down the street is a huge win, especially this year, and attending games are one of his favorite pastimes. Last, he thinks it’s pretty cool there’s so many startups here in Boston with a great talent pool. He feels like there’s a great startup community around us to learn from.
It’s been a pretty wild ride ever since. Over Dana’s first three years working in Engineering at Paperless Parts the company grew from 10 people to more than 35. Today the company has almost 160 employees! During the journey he learned how to be a full stack engineer – from the front end all the way to back end database work. He really enjoyed onboarding newer colleagues like Luke and finds mentorship super rewarding. The foundations of the systems he helped build in the earliest days of the company are still up and running today, a pretty cool accomplishment.
After almost four years in Engineering, Dana transitioned to the Product org as their first Product Manager. Dana was interested in learning more about the business side of things and read “all the books” to prepare for his new role – Inspired, The Lean Startup, Escaping the Build Trap, User Story Mapping, and more
Dana saw the opportunity to build something new and grabbed it. The company needed someone to help serve as a general product voice for the company and he stayed on for 2 years in that capacity. The first PM hire at a startup can be pretty hectic so he acted as a translator between customers and engineering through a period of rapid growth until the company hired Beau Blinder in January of 2022 to officially build out their product infrastructure & processes. Jason & the leadership team were really supportive and Dana enjoyed spinning up new mission critical company product initiatives.
Over time he realized he was ready to get back to what he loved doing, writing software. He stepped back into Engineering this past month to help build out a new line of products, focused on making it easier for customers to interact with vendors and procure consumables, like raw materials, specialized tooling, or purchased components, for their manufacturing businesses. This set of tools should make the whole process of “who you buy parts from” much easier.
Here are three things Dana shared with me about what he’s learned scaling Paperless Parts’ technical infrastructure, product function and company the entirety of his career:
Storytelling is Everything: “It doesn’t matter what position you’re in. If you can’t tell a compelling story you’re really not going to get what you want in any way. Storytelling is important.” Can’t argue with that!
Start With Why: “It’s important to remember the mission. If it’s not something that can constantly remind me of the ‘why’ it’s a strong indicator that I should start looking for something else.” The work the team does at Paperless Parts helps real people. Dana’s reminded of that constantly and that keeps him motivated to build on behalf of their inspiring customer base and tight knit employee community
People > Problem > Job: “For your first set of jobs, some advice that my Dad gave me, is you should pick a boss for your first job more so than picking a job. If you can’t pick a boss, pick a problem you’re passionate about. If you can’t pick that, then pick a job.” Dana’s a jack of all trades and likes to do a number of things so finding inspiring leaders like Jason & Scott who he respected and could learn from was a big contributor to his early career success
Paperless Parts is Dana’s pride & joy and a huge part of who he is today. He’s an entrepreneur at heart and he loves these initial stages of company building. He thinks he’s eventually destined to start his own company or be a co-founder at some point in his life. It runs in the family, but it will definitely be much later after this journey has run its course.
To learn more about Dana, check him out on LinkedIn, at a local pond when the weather’s cold enough, or head down writing software on State Street to help drive innovation forward. Thanks for sharing. We’ll see your work in an upcoming Paperless Parts product feature release soon enough!