Darren Herman leads and inspires the white space that exists between marketing, advertising, content, and technology. Herman has held senior leadership positions at private and public companies based in Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley and in 2016, joined Bain Capital and is a Managing Director. In his spare time, he actively chairs Silicon Alley Sports, home to the Silicon Alley Golf, Tennis, and Pickleball Invitational, used to raise money for charities.

He’s been known to attend a Dave Matthews Band concert or two, active on the tennis court and ski mountain, and watches many NBA games. He currently resides just outside of Boston, MA with his wife, two children, and three dogs.

Back in 2004, Darren started publicly blogging but it has since migrated to a newsletter. You can sign up to receive the Operating Partner here.

Awards and Honors
• Power List:  Designers and Brand Geniuses (Gotham Magazine)
• Top 100 Global Corporate Investors (Global Corporate Venturing)
• MediaPost Top Agency 2012 (Media Magazine)
• Best Agency for Integrated Media 2012 (iMedia Connection)
• 2012 New York Early Stage Angel 100 (Business Insider)
• #36 on 2011 Silicon Alley 100 (Business Insider)
• 2011 OMMA Magazine All Stars (MediaPost)
• iMedia Class of 2010 Marketing Innovators
• BusinessWeek’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs
• AlwaysOn Top Media Company
• Avenue-A|Razorfish Breakthrough Company of the Year
• Sony’s #1 Wired Student in North America

Press
Herman has been featured prominently in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The FT, BusinessWeek, CNBC, Bloomberg, Advertising Age, AdWeek, MediaPost, Business Insider, Digiday, and many other publications.

My in­-depth experience in both selling to advertising agencies/marketers and running various Madison Avenue agencies allows me to have a broad network of clients and partners that I've built up over the years.  Coupled with building content and ad product at Silicon Valley technology companies, I bring a unique perspective. 

My investment philosophy is to strategically focus on the white­space between advertising, marketing, content, and technology and back early-stage companies (pre-Seed, Seed, occasional Series A) with a personal investment of $10-25,000.

As of 2020, I have also been focusing on the collectibles market and investing in the infrastructure layer (e.g. marketplaces, research, grading, tokenization, content & commerce, etc).

What is important to me is the team and the expertise in the area that you are innovating.  Traction helps too, but I can help with customer development.

From time to time, I create side projects that stretch my entrepreneurial bug. Listed here are some recent projects that I’ve worked on.

Books
2013:  kbs+ Publishing, Creative Entrepreneurship.  254 pages. Frameworks on innovation, venture capital, and entrepreneurship.
2011:  Sellers Publishing, Creating a Bu$iness You’ll Love.  Contributed a chapter on the topic of raising [venture] capital.
2008:  Self Published, Coloring Outside the Lines.   142 pages.  Topics ranging from starting a company, technology, and digital media.

Mozilla: Mobile Operating Systems @ the IAB

ThisWeekinMarketing: Darren Herman

Digiday: Rise of the Indies

 Innovation Day: User Intent

IAB Innovation Day: Display Trends

CNBC: Media & Money Darren Herman, Miles Nadal

Featured Articles

More

Rise of the Independent Agencies

Tech is F#cked, So Let’s Talk about Services

Your Attention Please

We Are Three Clicks Away From An Oh Shit Moment For the Web

1:1 Marketing thru Machine Intelligent Conversations

Dear Abby: I Don’t Mind Advertising but I Do Mind Tracking, What Do I Do?

Darren Herman