I first met Eric Vreeland in 2010 when he was a student at Princeton University. He was writing his senior thesis on syndication in the venture capital business and what effect it had on investment opportunities and deal flow. I was struck by the topic and agreed to chat with him as I saw it from the point of view of AOL Ventures and my prior role at Virgin Group on the investing side. We talked on and off about the business and what he was after and it is almost amusing to look back and think about what I must have told him then relative to where I am at today. I never did get a copy of the thesis like he said, but we agreed to keep in touch.
Eric went on after graduation to work at Hubspot, where he was a part of the infamous team that generates over 60,000 leads per month for the company. For those that have heard Mike Volpe or Mark Roberge speak, this is a critical component of their growth and many have argued they are simply the best in the business at lead generation and demand creation. I’m sure the knowledge wore off on other folks as Eric was then recruited to work at Yext where he helped implement and deploy the same framework to grow and nurture leads.
In late 2013 we reached out to some friends and told them we were hiring another Analyst to Bowery Capital and Eric’s name kept coming up. I remembered that I never got my copy of his thesis and we agreed to bring him in. Throughout the interview process we were really impressed with his ability to synthesize a company’s value proposition and think about ways to build the lead funnel and pipeline. Maybe it comes second nature at this point, but it was exciting to us and we knew he was the best person for the job.
So today we are very pleased to welcome Eric Vreeland to the Bowery Capital team. In his short 3 years since graduation Eric has gotten a ground up view at two great companies and learned a ton about how to grow early customers and generate a strong pipeline of leads. In his role for us he will focus on exactly this with our portfolio companies which fits nicely with our goals of helping solely with early revenue and customer scale. You can take a look at some of Eric’s blog posts for Hubspot and you can follow him on Twitter. Oh and his thesis is here. I finally got it!
