Our entire team at NextView is very pleased to announce that Ginny Mineo will be joining us as Director of Platform. Ginny comes to us from HubSpot, where she had a tremendous impact on the company in a variety of ways. Most recently, she led the team responsible for growing their successful podcast audience and expanding the company’s presence on emerging channels like Medium.  Although Ginny is new to the team, she has many connections to the NextView family, as she started her career at our portfolio company Shareaholic, and worked closely with both Jay Acunzo (our first head of platform) and Joe Chernov (the VP of Marketing at our portfolio company Insight Squared).  Needless to say, she received rave reviews from everyone we spoke to about her.

Additionally, Jay will be transitioning over to a new role with us as a Creative In Residence. In this role, he will continue to produce and manage our successful, 5-star podcast Traction as well as continue to push our thinking around our own creative and digital strategy at NextView.  We are excited for Jay to also continue to focus more time on some of his own projects, which you can check out here.

This is also an opportunity to take a step back and think about what the Platform role means for us overall.  When Jay joined our team back in 2014, we were the first early-stage VC in Boston to have a dedicated head of platform and one of the first handful in the country to do so.  This meant that the role was a complete blank slate and one that our team could really shape from scratch.

In that time, we’ve found that the role of Platform is to multiply the impact of our investment dollars and the human capital of the firm for the benefit of our portfolio companies and the broader entrepreneurial community.  For us, this has meant externally facing and internally facing projects and initiatives.

Externally facing projects are intended to share our network’s knowledge and know-how to founders all over the world to help them find initial traction on all facets of their business.  This includes our own blogs and social content, but also a range of events that we’ve hosted over the years and evergreen entrepreneurial assets and resources that have been shared hundreds of thousands of times.  Our seed stage board deck templates, Hitchhiker’s Guides to the tech communities in Boston and New York, and our startup job guide are some of our most well received projects, and you can check them all out here.

Internally to our portfolio, platform means developing “products” to help our portfolio companies get from zero to one on their most critical seed stage priorities.  There is obviously a lot that goes into building an early stage company.  But in our view, most seed stage founders really only care about four things.

1. Establishing an excellent early team.

2. Building a product people love.

3. Getting lots of customers in a profitable way.

4. Not running out of money.

We support these priorities through a variety of existing initiatives like our talent exchange, but most aren’t broadly publicized.  There is a lot more to be done for sure, but we are encouraged by the first three years of our platform and are excited for the future.  We have plenty of our own ideas about what to do next, but we are also confident that Ginny will help us find completely new and unexpected ways to focus our efforts in service of the founders we work with every day.  Ginny will be joining us towards the end of this month, and I’m sure that you’ll hear a lot more from her soon.  In the meantime, feel free to drop her a line or follow her at @ginnymineo.  I’m sure she’d love to hear from you!