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 actively runs Silicon Alley Sports, home to the Silicon Alley Golf and Tennis Invitational, used to raise money for charities. He has created ~$50,000,000 in EBITDA for the companies he’s founded and has had three successful exits in his career so far (as founder or cofounder).
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. He currently resides in Westchester County, NY with his wife and two children.
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 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 $25,000-50,000. As of October 2016, I'm not considering any new investments.
What is important to me is the team and the expertise in the area that you are innovating. Traction helps too, but I can help with customer development.
No current advisory or board positions at this time. If you are interested in talking about having me help, please contact.
From time to time, I create side projects that stretch my entrepreneurial bug. Listed here are some recent projects that I’ve worked on.
Books
2013: kbs+ Publishing, Creative Entrepreneurship. 254 pages. Frameworks on innovation, venture capital, and entrepreneurship.
2011: Sellers Publishing, Creating a Bu$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