David Cancel is an American

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...

, 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. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...

-based company which creates messaging software for businesses.

Education

Cancel attended

Queens College Queens College (QC) is a public college in the New York City borough of Queens. Part of the City University of New York system, Queens College occupies an campus primarily located in Flushing. Queens College was established in 1937 and offe ...

and dropped out before attaining a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Accounting.

Career

Cancel was Chief Product Officer at

Internet marketing The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, publ ...

company

HubSpot HubSpot, Inc. is a US-based developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. Its products and services are meant to provide tools for customer relationship management, social media marketing, conten ...

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 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 Compete.com was a web traffic analysis service. The company was founded in 2000, and ceased operations in December 2016. Services Compete.com provided two categories of information: *Site Analytics, a free service, where the user can enter a ...

, 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, 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 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 Boston area Charles River. History The firm has raised over $4.3 ...

, General Catalyst, 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'' (also called "''Boston'' magazine" or referred to by the nickname "BoMag") is a regional monthly magazine concerning life in the Greater Boston area, which has been in publication since 1962. History Metrocorp Publishing, a Philade ...

. In 2017,

Harvard Business School Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate school, graduate business school of Harvard University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university. Located in Allston, Massachusetts, HBS owns Harvard Business Publishing, which p ...

named Cancel an Entrepreneur in Residence 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