Jeffery: Welcome to the Supporters Fund Ask An Angel. I’m your host, Jeffery Potvin and today we want to welcome Erik Bullen. Thank you very much for joining us today Erik. i’m super excited to chat with you today because i’ve been watching lots of videos on you, lots of content. There’s a lot of great things out there and there’s a few things that I really want to dive into but the best way for us to start is if you can give us a little bit of a background on yourself, kind of where you’ve come from. and there is a long list of amazing startups, businesses all along the way, so I would love to learn more about that. and then one thing about you that nobody would know.
Erik: Okay, sounds good. Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here, Jeffery. I’ve been in the startup and corporate innovation space my entire career. I was employed number one at a startup back in the early 90s. Those were back in the nineties when you could actually take components of PCs and sell them, the days of Dell and so on. and we went up against Dell, Apple, CompuServe and others. We sold it to colleges, university students, because everybody at that point needed computers, both typical desktops these days and then eventually laptops as well. so i was employee number one. I saw an ad for an associate essentially at my fraternity. Long story short, I took a 10-mile bike trip in the middle of, which was about 100-degree days, in Virginia. I went to William Mary to go for my interview with the founder, and wore the only seat I had. and i had a beaten-up bike and it went about 10 miles. Eventually, I had the interview and walked into Lee’s office who’s the co-founder and the first thing he said was, ‘hey.’ He looked like he needed a beer. so he goes to this full bridge, and his office is a typical startup founder office. it’s messy and it’s chaotic and so on. So I ended up joining the company. I really loved it. Italy Scruggs and I are still best friends to this day. He’s been my mentor for many years. we see each other usually non-covid years once a year, at least or twice a year, and we’ve been best friends since that time. so that really started me on the journey of really loving to build things and working for startups. For a number of reasons, I did eventually end up leaving the company and moving to the North Virginia, Washington DC area. For family reasons, I needed to move there. I worked for a while as a software engineer with Verizon. I really didn’t care about the corporate environment then. I ended up at a startup, in this case an agency startup, and then three months after joining, I went over to Amsterdam as the first employee to open up the Dutch office. I spent time there. and this is during the height of the internet agencies and eventually we ended up being acquired with 12 other companies with a PE supported company and went public as well. about a year later, I joined another startup in Amsterdam which was the US company based in Boston called Norvar, DNA of McKinsey Accenture, and then some startups as well to really focus on what’s kind of the precursor to design thinking to help companies to innovate. and whether it’s large companies or startups, it joined the company to grow the Dutch office and eventually the internet crash happened. and that’s how i ended up in Boston where i am today. so we went up to HQ and continued to build the company. Although we did close on the European side and then continued working with startups and corporate ventures as part of Norvar, which was eventually acquired by another company, we went through a second acquisition at that point. so fast forward through our career, subsequent to that, I’ve been a founder. I’ve been a board member, offending advisor for a number of different startups. and then also, a few years ago, was the CEO of a digital marketing staff startup. i exited that in august 2018 and then at that point for a number of reasons, including personal, my daughter at that point turned five. I said okay, I want to spend less time on the road. I was a consultant for a while as well. so i spent a lot of time going from Boston to scale and back and forth for about a year. So I also work for a company called Breitcov, which is an online video provider like global services there. So I was responsible globally for APAC in Europe and the US. so i was on the road a lot. and at that point in 2018, i said look, i want to spend more time with my daughter and my family. at the same time, spend more of a portfolio approach to things. Right now, I spend time early on three things. One is, I give back to the community. I mentor at TechStars Mass Challenge and several other accelerators as well. I’m also on the board of directors for an organization called Vent Capital. We provide venture capital training to minorities and women to find entry-level jobs into the VC world. I’m also on the board of advisors for an organization called the Capital Network which provides fundraising training for all founders but also specifically focused on female founders as well. and we have a program running right now. the second bucket of work that i do, i advise pre-seed stage complex directly and occasionally scale-ups as well, either as an advisor or focus on product operations and scaling and customer success. I, also on occasion, play fractional co. so i’m currently a fractional co for two companies. one is “Guidely” which is a marketplace for coaches, mentors and therapists. and also Bit Hoop which is a next-generation search language for b2b. and the third bucket is on the investing side which i think part of what