Inside OpenView's corporate relocation program
By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist
While a partner at Insight (a Manhattan-based firm), Maxwell brought three companies — Astaro, Imceda Software, and Acronis — to Burlington from Germany, Australia and Russia, respectively. Intronis, a cloud-based back-up service that started life in New Jersey, is now operating out of OpenView's Fort Point Channel office, and Zmags, an online merchandising company founded in Denmark, is now headquartered in the same neighborhood. Two other companies, Exinda and Open-e, have established headquarters in Boston after raising money from OpenView.
Most of the companies are still relatively small; all told, they account for perhaps 250 jobs in the state, according to OpenView's figures. "Boston is just the best place to set these companies up," Maxwell says. Often, they start by using space in OpenView's offices.
"It's really difficult to grow a company in Silicon Valley," he continues. "There's too much competition for hiring, the costs are high, and people in Massachusetts work a lot harder. For business-to-business companies, the labor pool is incredible here, and there are plenty of salespeople. And I say all that as a California native."
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Jeff Sutherland has been Senior Advisor to Openview Venture Partners since 2006 where he started up Scrum Inc. onsite and began working with portfolio companies to implement Scrum. He has recently moved to the Cambridge Innovation Center as the Scrum Inc. team has expanded.
Openview uses Scrum everywhere for venture group operations. About 14 portfolio companies implement Scrum in software development and many of them use Scrum in sales, marketing, finance, admin, and even for the senior management teams.
For the next ScrumMaster training at Openview see scrumfoundation.com.
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