On today's episode, Seth speaks to Bill Bice, Founding Partner in the Verge Fund & Founder of boomtime , Bill Bice has always been an entrepreneur, starting his first company at age 14, putting on road races with corporate sponsors. At 18, he started ProLaw Software, the first integrated ERP for law firms. After selling the company to Thomson Reuters, Bill became a VC as a founding partner in the Verge Fund, investing in high tech, high growth companies in the Southwest.

One of the core things that Bill has learned in building and investing in companies is that the go-to-market is always the hardest part of growing a business. He got so frustrated in trying to get great marketing for his companies that he decided to tackle the problem. A programmer at heart, Bill founded boomtime, tackling marketing as a technology problem. It turns out that when you follow the data, really good things happen. That's why boomtime built the world's first marketing-as-a-service platform: fuse. boomtime’s marketing strategists follow the data: they already know what will work. Instead of reinventing the wheel, boomtime applies proven marketing techniques at scale.

In this episodes, you'll hear about things like...
- How Bill became an entrepreneur at 14
- Why the go-to-market strategy is the most difficult part for most startups
- Where small companies struggle to compete with larger businesses
- What the biggest personal lesson Bill learned was on his path

As a freshman at UNM, Bill founded his second company, ProLaw Software. Under Bill’s leadership as President and CEO, ProLaw achieved an average compound annual growth rate of 78% during the last 5 years as an independent company.

ProLaw appeared on the Inc. 500 ranking of the fastest growing companies in the country three years in a row. In 2001, Bill and his team sold ProLaw to West Group, the foremost provider of integrated information solutions to the legal market and a division of what is now Thomson Reuters.

Thomson Reuters built a 64,000 sf building for the ProLaw division on Masthead St. in the Jefferson corridor.During Bill’s tenure, ProLaw created 160 jobs almost entirely in Albuquerque, and the division’s primary focus of operations continues to be Albuquerque.

During his tenure at West, Bill served on the executive committee, during which time he completed the Thomson School of General Management. Bill created the West km business unit, which combines ProLaw technology with West content to create legal-specific knowledge management solutions. For his accomplishments in the creation of the West km business, Bill was co-recipient of Thomson Legal & Regulatory’s President’s Award for innovation. Bill was on the executive team which completed the acquisition of Elite Information Group, a former competitor to ProLaw Software, and led the product strategy team during the integration transition which combined Elite and ProLaw to create the Thomson Elite business unit. Bill continued in a consulting role with the Thomson Corporation as Chief Strategist, Practice Management Products until 2004.

Joining the founding team at Verge was Bill’s route to return to startups.

Bill focuses on helping founding teams build successful companies. Bill is on the founding team and Chairman at boomtime, SportXast and attachedapps, and on the board of Nuvita, Nuvita Pro and Slipstream, all Verge II.5 portfolio companies.

Learn more about Bill here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/billbice