Let’s start winding down this nutty year – really two nutty years – on a happy note, with a giant tip of the hat to a still-young guy who got his start in digital signage and place-based media, but left the business to start a company that just got sold at a value of $2.3 billion. Yes, billion.
Kyle Porter, back in 2009, started a little business deploying digital gaming machines & place-based advertising to restaurants, sports bars, and pubs. He did that for about 18 months, before joining an early-stage NanoLumens as a sales guy, marketing the Atlanta company’s flexible, skinny and lightweight LEDs at a time when that display technology was still little known or understood in the digital signage sector.
I got to know Kyle a little in those days on the trade show and conference circuit, and was impressed as hell – thinking if I ever started a company that needed business development talent, he was my first targeted hire. Fortunately for him that never happened, but things worked out just fine for Porter.
He left Nano in Sept. 2011 and started work on what became SalesLoft – self-described as the “#1 Sales Engagement platform for creating better buying experiences and closing more revenue.” The Atlanta-based company has more than 750 employees, according to Linkedin, and has the budget to do things like company off-sites at luxury resorts.
Salesloft counts IBM, Shopify and Cisco among its customers, as well as signage industry companies such as Signagelive and STRATACACHE. Another ex-NanoLumens guy that many digital signage industry people will know – Nathan Remmes – is an EVP at SalesLoft.
Porter’s company recently announced a big private equity company has taken a majority stake in his firm, with the deal valuing SalesLoft at $2.3 billion.
So Porter will have made a couple of bucks, and maybe now has a different Tesla in the driveway for every day of the week. I don’t think that would have happened if he stayed in digital signage. I can think of maybe one company in this sector – setting aside the big multi-national hardware guys – who might be in the same time zone as this kind of valuation.
Congratulations, Kyle!!!
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