David Cancel is an American

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...

, investor, and founder of several software companies. He is the CEO and founder of Drift, a

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...

-based company which creates messaging software for businesses.

Education

Cancel attended Queens College and dropped out before attaining a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Accounting.

Career

Cancel was Chief Product Officer at Internet marketing company

HubSpot HubSpot is an American developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006. Its products and services aim to provide tools for customer ...

from 2011 and 2014. He joined HubSpot after the acquisition of his previous company Performable for $20 million. While at HubSpot, Cancel hired most of the HubSpot engineering team, growing from 20 to 100 engineers. HubSpot CEO and co-founder

Brian Halligan Brian Halligan is an American executive and author. He is the co-founder oPropeller a venture capital fund targeting climate change through investment in the earth's most precious resource, its oceans. He is the co-founder and executive chairman ...

has called Cancel a “visionary product development leader” and at the time of the Performable acquisition, said “we now have the best product development team in B2B software.” Prior to Performable, Cancel was the co-founder and CTO of Lookery, the founder and CTO of Compete.com, which was acquired by WPP for $150 million, and the CTO of BuyerZone, which was acquired by

Reed Elsevier RELX plc (pronounced "Rel-ex") is a British multinational information and analytics company headquartered in London, England. Its businesses provide scientific, technical and medical information and analytics; legal information and analytics; ...

. Cancel is also the founder of

Ghostery Ghostery is a free and open-source privacy and security-related browser extension and mobile browser application. Since February 2017, it has been owned by the German company Cliqz International GmbH (formerly owned by Evidon, Inc., which wa ...

, a global marketing technology company that provides online transparency and control to individuals and businesses. Ghostery has been used by over 40 million consumers to control how they are tracked online, and Ghostery now also is a dominant provider of privacy governance services, powering compliance for more than $2 billion of advertising and e-commerce transactions annually. In 2014, Cancel left HubSpot to start Drift and raised a $15 million Series A from venture capital firms

Charles River Ventures Charles River Ventures (CRV) is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in technology. The firm was founded in 1970 to commercialize research that came out of MIT. Its name comes from the Charles River. History The firm has ra ...

General Catalyst General Catalyst, formerly General Catalyst Partners (GCP), is an American venture capital firm focused on early stage and growth investments. The firm was founded in 2000 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also has offices in San Francisco, Palo A ...

, NextView Ventures, Founder Collective, and angel investors including Brian Shin, Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, and others. In 2016, Cancel named one of Boston Tech 30 by

Boston Magazine ''Boston'' is a monthly magazine concerning life in the Greater Boston area and has been in publication since 1805. History and profile ''Boston'' magazine was started in 1805. Metrocorp, Inc. bought the magazine in 1970. The company also owns ...

. In 2017, Harvard Business School named Cancel an

Entrepreneur in Residence An Entrepreneur in residence, or Executive in residence (EIR), is a position most often held by successful entrepreneurs in venture capital firms, private equity firms, startup accelerators, law firms or business schools. The EIR typically lea ...

at the School’s Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cancel, David Living people American Internet company founders Year of birth missing (living people) Queens College, City University of New York alumni