Niel Robertson

Niel Robertson

CEO of Trada (trada.com, @Trada) Director, Viglink (viglink.com,@viglink) Director, Kibits (kibits.com, @kibits) Founder, Crowdsortium (crowdsortium.org,@crowdsortium)

Website: http://parallax.blogs.com/
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Accredited investor
Member since November 07, 2011
Quote
I'm a builder. Quote_down
  • About
Investor interests
Type of investor Angel
Typical investment size $25,000 - $50,000
Typical investments in a year 1
Categories of interest
Credentials Accredited Investor
Education
1996 MIT , BS , Computer Science

I am a(n):

Entrepreneur

If you're an entrepreneur or corporate innovator, why?

I like to build

My favorite startups:

Trada, Kiva, HubSpot

What's the No. 1 mistake entrepreneurs/innovators make?

Don't do research on their product/market/customer before they start the company.

What are the top three lessons you've learned as an entrepreneur?

Hire the right team (and fire the ones you were wrong about)
The CEO or their closest partner should be product centric
Few teams make it through all the scale transitions in a business

Full bio

Niel Robertson is founder and CEO of Trada, the world’s first crowdsourced paid search marketplace. Trada’s community of more than 1,000 paid search experts are paid on their performance while running PPC campaigns on Google, Yahoo and Bing on behalf of advertisers.

Niel is also founder of the Crowdsortium, a nonprofit trade organization designed to advance the crowdsourcing industry through best practices, education, data collection and public dialog.

A serial entrepreneur, Niel is formerly founder and CTO of Newmerix, a software company specializing in testing and change management tools for packaged applications; co-founder and CTO of Service Metrics, a web site performance monitoring company; a CTO in residence at Mobius Venture Capital and a venture partner with Fidelity Ventures in Boston.

Niel is also a regular speaker at conferences on the topics of entrepreneurship, crowdsourcing and digital advertising, sits on a number of technology company boards, serves as a mentor for the TechStars investment program and has broadly invested in technology startups as an angel financier. Previously, Niel has spoken at LAUNCH, Creative Company Conference, SMX, SES, This Week in Startups, Defrag, the Crowdsortium Symposium, Metrics Marketing Bootcamp and TedX Boulder.

Niel holds a B.S. in Computer Science from M.I.T.