I’m excited to announce that we have promoted Jay Acunzo to Vice President of Platform at NextView.

When we hired Jay to be Boston’s first VC head of platform, we were super excited about what we thought he could do for the NextView portfolio and broader tech community. That said, it was an amorphous role for everyone, and an exploration as a team about what Platform ought to mean for a high-conviction hands-on seed investor like ourselves.

Jay hit the ground running. He has not only multiplied our activities and effort, he has helped us craft a focused strategy about the mission of our platform with a maniacal focus on results.  Rather than just throw a bunch of people in a room for random networking purposes, Jay has embraced our ethos here at NextView to be authentic contributors to the community and to be systematic in these efforts. He’s done a terrific job working to “productize” many of the efforts that we’ve been doing on an ad-hoc basis, like The Boston Tech Guide, Growth Guides and other data driven studies, as well as some important internal initiatives outside of the public eye.

Because of this, we’ve been getting some really nice unsolicited feedback from folks within our portfolio (and folks outside our portfolio that benefit some of these initiatives). Stuff like:

“You guys are terrific. Most involved vc of the bunch really appreciate it! Want to get you back out at some point to talk more about our go to market efforts”   – Portfolio Company CEO (email to Jay)

“I was reminded to reach out because Nextview has come up a few times recently — once with a company we’ve been talking to recently (where the NextView Platform was mentioned) and another time through a forwarded Nextview Blog post (from one of our Portfolio companies).                   – VC Coinvestor

“As a guy who just spent way too much of his life (2-3 weeks) creating a pitch deck, I owe you a big, big thank you. Not only was your timing impeccable, the decks you put together were FAR more thoughtful, comprehensive, and helpful than anything else.”
– Entrepreneur (not a NextView portfolio company)

On top of all this, Jay has fit really nicely into our team and shares our common ethos.  Dave, Lee, and I have all really enjoyed our collaboration with him, and have become only more excited about what we can do programmatically to help seed stage founders give their companies the best possible start.

Congrats Jay!  We look forward to continuing to build this firm and our platform together.