Scott Miller
Venture Partner at Next Coast Ventures
Scott Miller
Venture Partner at Next Coast Ventures
Austin, Texas
Overview
Work Experience
Venture Partner
2021 - Current
Helping to find, fund, and support great entrepreneurs and companies in Next Coast Markets. Areas of focus include B2B SaaS and information marketplaces.
Entrepreneur in Residence
2021 - 2023
• Evaluated investment opportunities with the General Partnership, with a focus on B2B SaaS • Explored entrepreneurial ideas and opportunities, culminating in the founding of Incepto
Co-Founder and Board Member
2013
As a Co-Founder, I've served in multiple roles at TrustRadius since its inception, and I continue to serve on the Board of Directors. TrustRadius operates a B2B customer voice platform: • For technology buyers (site visitors), www.trustradius.com is a free resource for discovering, comparing, and evaluating B2B technology solutions across hundreds of categories. • For technology vendors (our customers), TrustRadius provides a customer voice platform (TrustQuotes) for gathering, curating, and syndicating permissioned customer quotes to accelerate their sales and marketing efforts with social proof. Additionally, we provide market, customer, and prospect analytics (intent data and lead development) to optimize our customers' go-to-market efforts.
Vice President of Products
2014 - 2019
Led all aspects of TrustRadius' product strategy, prioritization, and execution through company's growth from from 4 to 65 employees, and from 0 to 120+ paying customers including IBM, Oracle, SAP, Tibco, and Marketo. See reviews of our work : www.trustradius.com/products/trustradius-vendors. • Led invention, definition, design, and implementation of four product lines through multiple iterations : trustradius.com, TrustQuotes for Web, TrustQuotes for Sales, and TrueIntent • Established roadmap prioritization process with organization-wide input, weekly internal updates, and quarterly external customer updates • Grew new review acquisition from 0 to 1,500+ per month through tools, process, and optimization • Grew site traffic via SEO from 0 to 750K monthly visitors via technical, content, and backlink strategies • Achieved NPS of 57 and Net Revenue Retention of 115%+ in partnership with Customer Success • Led GDPR compliance efforts (product, legal, employee training) as company’s Data Protection Officer • Recruited and led team of 10 across Product Management, UX / UI Design, and SEO Techniques : User-Centered Design, A/B Testing, Conversion Optimization, SEO Tools : Aha!, inVision, Figma, Confluence, Pendo, UserTesting.com, semrush, moz, Google Analytics, Grafana, MongoDB, Excel, Postgres, SQL
Vice President of Engineering
2014 - 2018
• Recruited and led early engineering team of six across engineering, design, and quality assurance • Implemented agile (Kanban) development process with CI/CD supporting multiple daily releases • Achieved 99.9%+ uptime and site availability • Recruited full-time CTO / VP Engineering as we scaled the business Techniques : Agile, Kanban, Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery, Cloud Tools : Jira, Confluence, Codeship, Node.js, Redis, MongoDB, PostgresDB, ElasticSearch, Heroku
Vice President Of Finance And Operations
2013 - 2017
Led all aspects of company's Finance, Operations, and HR functions: • Created financial plan, model, and budgeting process and reconciled plan to actuals monthly • Achieved 10 day monthly closes • Managed legal matters including employment, customer and vendor contracts • Managed due-diligence through three rounds of equity funding totaling $12MM • Secured $2MM venture debt line with Silicon Valley Bank • Drove formalization of company culture as senior representative on employee-led culture committee • Recruited full-time Vice President of Finance as we scaled the business Tools : Quickbooks Online, Bill.com, Carta, Box.com, Excel, Google Sheets
Founder and CEO
2023 - 2024
Incepto provided a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform, targeted at mid-market (50-500 employee) company CFOs to help them become strategic partners to their CEOs and Boards, via robust financial and operating model building capabilities and unique guided analyses, combining the traceability of spreadsheets with the reportbility of databases. • Conducted early market research and validation with target CFO prospects • Raised Seed round of $2.7 million • Recruited early team of 5, including CTO, Head of Design, and software engineers • Defined and managed development of three major iterations of the platform
Chief Operating Officer
2010 - 2011
Vast.com (acquired by Vroom.com) operated a white-label internet platform in the automotive and real estate verticals. Partnering with brands such as KBB, USAA, Vehix, Yahoo! Autos and others, Vast served 10MM+ monthly visitors with real-time vehicle information, charging auto dealers on a pay-for-performance basis. • Established and ran weekly operational and financial planning, forecasting, and estimating process • Collaborated with publisher partners on joint revenue and operating plans, pre- and post-implementation • Improved daily site metrics processing from 18 to 3 hours, while reducing required headcount from 6 to 3 • Co-authored spec and drove implementation of data warehouse utilizing Hadoop, Postgres, Tableau • Instituted and managed quarterly financial planning and budgeting process ($15MM annual budget) • Prepared and presented quarterly financial actuals, forecasts, and analyses to Board of Directors • Managed due-diligence process and transactions for two rounds of equity funding totaling $12.5MM
Senior Director of Strategic Planning
2009 - 2010
• Created worldwide sales and marketing planning and forecasting process with high accuracy (<2% error) • Drove incremental $3MM+ quarterly revenue quarter by improving sales pipeline management process • Improved marketing ROI by creating attribution and lifetime value calculations for freemium offerings • Assisted in post-merger integration planning and execution for $20+MM TekTools acquisition • Evaluated potential acquisition targets with CFO
Director of Operations, Asia-Pacific
2008 - 2009
• Established and managed Singapore (APAC) office and operations during 18 month expat assignment • Grew and led a team from 0 to 20 across sales, marketing, support, and operations • Grew APAC sales from $500K to $8MM annual revenue • Signed and managed distribution partnerships, and rationalized existing APAC channel infrastructure • Diversified region revenue from 100% ANZ to APAC-wide (ANZ, ASEAN, India, Greater China, Japan) • Recommended product enhancements for better market fit
Director of Corporate Development
2007 - 2008
• Assisted CEO and senior leadership team in evaluating several acquisition targets • Optimized paid marketing spend efficiency across SEM and affiliate networks • Developed plan for international expansion to Asia-Pacific region
Senior Associate
2004 - 2007
• Assisted General Partnership across the full venture lifecycle from sourcing through liquidity events and full company lifecycles from pre-product seed investments through IPO / M&A • Championed $5MM investment in BuildForge (DevOps pioneer), acquired by IBM for 3.5X return • Sourced $8MM investment in Innography (IP management), acquired by CPA Global for 4X return • Managed diligence and execution of investments in Sailpoint (NYSE: SAIL), Spiceworks (acq: Ziff-Davis), BreakingPoint systems (acq: IXIA), Ignite Technologies (acq: ESW) • Board Member for NetBotz (acq: APC), Surgient (acq: Quest Software), Reactivity (acq: Cisco), and SoloMio (acq: OpenWave) • Board Observer for Lombardi Software (acq: IBM), Sailpoint, Spiceworks, BreakingPoint, and Ignite
Summer Associate
2003 - 2003
• Assisted on strategy study for CEO and CFO of Solectron, a $12BB electronics manufacturer (EMS) • Built financial model and scenario analyses of proposed strategic divestitures and operational changes • Proposed simplified process to ensure sales quotes and accepted orders met ROIC targets
Technology Strategy Consultant
2001 - 2002
• Advised CIOs of clients McDonald’s and Infinity Pharmaceuticals on information technology strategies including enterprise system architectures, data integration strategies and implementation project plans
Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer
1999 - 2001
Contextual (formerly AllMyStuff) was a marketing automation services pioneer enabling durable goods companies to maximize customer lifetime value by delivering timely, targeted cross-sell and upsell messages. • Worked with CEO and other executives to craft overall company strategy • Hired and led Engineering and IT / Operations staff of 10 through two major software releases • Ensured on-time production deployments for early customers Dell, 3Com, and Casio • Assisted in enterprise sales and solution architecture for early customers • Raised $11MM in equity financing from Dell Ventures, TL Ventures, and Austin Ventures
Various
1996 - 1999
pcOrder.com was an early SaaS and ecommerce pioneer, providing both hosted software and data to the computer industry (manufacturers, distributors, resellers, and retailers). The company grew to over $50MM in annual revenue and an IPO 1999 (NASD: PCOR) before being taken private by parent company Trilogy in 2001. Roles from hiring as 25th employee through IPO included: • Director of Technology Strategy – Analyst relations, RosettaNet consortium company representative, 3rd party technology licensing (NLP, search, transaction providers) • Director of Sales Engineering – Recruited and led team of 6 sales engineers. Star award winner. • Product Manager – Specified and built PC configurator deployed on ibm.com, hp.com and compaq.com • Sales Engineer – Supported over $90MM in enterprise sales to Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Ingram Micro, Tech Data, CompUSA, eBay, and 20+ other industry leaders
Education
MBA
2002 - 2004
SB, M.Eng.
1992 - 1996