Kyle Porter Getting TechStars Love In Boulder
July 20, 2012 by Dave Haynes
When Kyle Porter left his business development gig at Nanolumens last fall I thought that was too bad on a couple of counts.
He was leaving a company I thought was about to hit a major growth spurt (that took no particular brilliance to see). And he was leaving the sector, which was unfortunate because I thought he was one of the young guys who’d leave a real mark.
He is doing just fine, having started a sales intelligence company called SalesLoft, and finding his way into the elite start-up accelerator program TechStars.
Founders Porter (second from left in pic, if you don’t recognize him) and Chris Beauregard have picked up the little Atlanta company and moved for the summer to Boulder, Colorado for an intense three month summer program with a small group of other TechStar companies, VCs, mentors, and staff.
Over 1,400 hundred companies applied to TechStars Boulder and 12 were selected to participate in the 13-week high impact accelerator program, which is harder to get into than Harvard or Yale, Porter suggests in a blog post.
It sounds very cool – with access to top people and perks that include a small seed funding check, a bigger convertible note, and more than $150K worth of perks like PR and legal.
So what is SalesLoft?
SalesLoft provides sales intelligence software enabling sales reps to close more deals and speed up their sales cycles. Our offering includes a comprehensive portfolio of sales intelligence features all targeted for each significant step in the sales process. These sales intelligence tools include: prospect rankings, job change alerts, technology scrapers, company spend prediction, keyword operators, company news tracking, and more.
Our cloud-based solution produces an easy to integrate platform which plugs-in with your existing CRM. Approved by salesforce.com’s AppExchange, SalesLoft’s sales intelligence is secure, simple, and reliable. Sales intelligence software is a perfect compliment to your CRM and/or marketing automation solution and will dramatically increase your team’s sales effectiveness.
Not something I’d ever use but I suspect there are lots of companies in the sector that could use any tool that makes the sales process more efficient.
Good to see a sharp young guy thriving.
The only digital signage-ish company involved in TechStars, to my knowledge, has been NY-based Immersive Labs.
Very kind of you to write this Dave. While sad to no longer be directly in the digital signage business, I’m happy to say that NanoLumens is doing awesome & we’re really making great inroads to a very large market with SalesLoft. One other TechStars company to watch in this space is AdStruc. they are a digital marketplace to buy and sell OOH. Thanks again and best wishes!