When Dave, Lee, and I made the decision to start our own firm, we were relatively quiet at first as our plans needed time to crystallize. 

When we did decide to share the news within the entrepreneurial community, the first two people that we spoke to were David Cancel and Brian Shin.  In addition to being friends and terrific entrepreneurs, we really believed that they shared our ethos and desire to build more ambitious companies in our region. 

Shortly after, we firmed up the concept of a NextView “Venture Advisor” and were pleased to have Mike Baker, Nabeel Hyatt, and Niraj and Steven join us in this capacity as well.  

We selected these six entrepreneurs because they are equipped and motivated to help NextView be a great firm and help our portfolio companies to win.  We chose entrepreneurs who are active and engaged in the startup community and can give us honest feedback on how we can better work with the founders we back.  This group also represents deep experience in some of the areas that we are most excited about:

• Ecommerce: Niraj and Steven are founders of CSN stores, a profitable, $300M+ ecommerce business that is a top 3 online retailer of home and office goods.  It’s an exciting and quickly growing company that incidentally, never raised any outside capital. 
• Gaming: Nabeel Hyatt is the founder of Conduit Labs, a social gaming company recently acquired by Zynga.  Nabeel currently serves as the GM of Zynga’s rapidly growing Boston Studio. He is a multi-time entrepreneur and also organizes and hosts the Open Coffee Meetup in Cambridge. 
• Ad Tech & Mobile: Mike Baker is the CEO of Dataxu, a leading real-time ad optimization platform.  Mike was also the CEO of Enpocket, a mobile advertising firm that was successfully acquired by Nokia. Mike has also been an active angel in the ad-tech space and has also sat on the other side of the table as a Partner at Grand Banks Capital. 
• New Media Analytics and Optimization: Brian Shin is the founder and CEO of Visible Measures, the leading online video measurement solution for advertisers and publishers.  Founded in 2005, the company is creating a new standard for measuring the efficacy and reach of this rapidly evolving space. We typically like “picks and shovels” businesses in emerging mediums. 
• Marketing Services: David Cancel is the founder and CEO of Performable, and was previously the Founder and CTO of Compete and a number of other companies. Few folks know more about marketing services than David, and few folks also give as generously of their time to the local startup eco-system. 

It’s really an honor to be working with these entrepreneurs.  We benefit as a firm from these relationships by having an expanded network for finding startups and additional expertise to help us evaluate investment opportunities. The companies we work with benefit as well by having access to additional horsepower from entrepreneurs who have done it before and have unique insight into these important sectors. 

It’s still early days for us at NextView, but we’re excited to have our venture advisors working beside us and have already benefited so much from their help and support.  Being a founder of anything is a challenging and lonely endeavor, and it is a huge help to be doing it with friends you like and deeply respect.