Recently, we surveyed our Boston-based NextView portfolio Founder/CEOs asking them about which service provider firms they’ve been using. The goal was to assemble data in order to share it back to our portfolio companies (especially the newer ones) so that they didn’t have to recreate the wheel in determining a short-list of firms to talk to when evaluating new options. Although these startups are very diverse businesses themselves, they face similar requirements (especially in that they’re currently all in the seed to Series B range of company stage). Plus, my partners and I saw entrepreneurs repeatedly starting from square-one each time, which just didn’t seem efficient if we could help in some small way.

And the results were pretty interesting, especially as they clustered with meaningful overlap among companies. But rather than just keep the info internal, wouldn’t it be more productive to publicly publish the aggregate results for the whole community?  When we took the poll itself, one founder said: “This is a great idea. We would have loved to have it when we were getting started.”  The following, then, is the list of service providers in Boston which are popular within the early-stage startups in our NextView Ventures portfolio:

CORPORATE LEGAL COUNSEL

• Tie for most popular: Mick Bain at WilmerHale
• Tie for most popular: John Chory at Latham Watkins
• David Broadwin and Gil Arie at FoleyHoag
• Jon Gworek at MBBP
• Jeff Engerman at Gunderson Dettmer
• Bill Schnoor at Goodwin Proctor
  
• Michelle Basil at Nutter McClennen & Fish

RECRUITERS

• Vito Chesky at ICONSTAFF
• Keith Cline & Eric Trickett at Dissero
• Jon Swanson

HANDLING VARIOUS FINANCIAL MATTERS: OUTSOURCED BOOKKEEPING / (TAX) ACCOUNTING  / CFO-FOR-HIRE

• Calvin Wilder at SmartBooks
• Supporting Strategies
• Boston Finex Group
• Eric Collard
• Tom Trometer
• Scott Goodwin at Wolf & Co.
• Andrew Goloboy
• KLR

PAYROLL & BENEFITS

• Most popular: ADP
• TriNet
• EMSI
• Bruce Crohn

OTHER COMPLETELY UNPROMPTED MULTIPLE PROACTIVE SHOUT-OUTS

• Silicon Valley Bank for banking was most popular by far
  
• Bruce McDougall at WGA and EBS Capstone for insurance
• Scalar Analytics and SVB for 409a valuations

HUGE DISCLAIMER. While informative, this data is merely a reflection of only the firms who our portfolio companies work with directly as shared in a non-exhaustive quick four-question survey… so of course there is meaningful selection bias and missing data-points here. It’s by no means inclusive of all of the options available in the local ecosystem (i.e. there are many high-quality people and firms who aren’t on this list), and by no means was it intended to be comprehensive. Moreover, we at NextView Ventures certainly ourselves don’t make any decisions on who our portfolio companies use… each and every one them evaluates their options individually.