Vivint Co-Founder Focusing On Social Analytics Platform

Keith Nellesen, who left Vivint in 2009, is working to scale NUVI before handing over daily operations to his team.

SALT LAKE CITY – Vivint Co-Founder Keith Nellesen, who left the alarm company in 2009, has lately been working on the development of NUVI, a social media command center platform.

The platform provides insights into social conversations happening in real-time and then allows customers to jump in via NUVI’s social bubble stream, without leaving the app, SiliconSlopes.com reports.

The NUVI software started as a one-time project at Salt Lake City-based advertising agency Struck for their client Gatorade. The drink company wanted NUVI to be their mission control social command center. After spinning the Gatorade project out into its own business, NUVI began growing and attracting new customers such as BusinessWire and Uber, according to SiliconSlopes.

Today, the company looks to Nellesen – formerly president of Vivint which was acquired by Blackstone Group LP in 2012 for $2 billion – to scale the business as their new CEO. Nellesen replaced David Oldham as CEO in May.

“The SaaS business and the alarm business are actually very similar,” Nellesen told SiliconSlopes. “There is a recurring revenue model. Running it requires three key things: how fast can you grow it, how much does it cost you to attain a customer and what’s your attrition on those customers. It’s fairly simple math.”

After leaving Vivint in 2009, Nellesen started an investment firm and invested in MoneyReef, which later sold to MoneyDesktop, according to SiliconSlopes.

From Vivint “I left and started trying to figure out what I wanted to do next in life,” Nellesen said. “I like being part of team. I like building businesses from the beginning.”

His next investment was NUVI, where he became the major and only investor, SiliconSlopes reports.

The idea and team seemed interesting from the beginning, Nellesen said. His original plan was to invest and be involved from a distance.

However, in order to truly scale the company the team knew they needed someone with Nellesen’s experience at the helm.

“The team asked me to be CEO,” Nellesen said. “I know how to help put systems in places, I know how to put teams together, I have experience in scaling and have some good credibility in raising capital.”

The company employs 40 people in its Lindon, Utah, office, with about five working remotely. The company plans to hire another 20 sales people, 10 engineers and 4 more account managers by the end of the year, Nellesen said.

Currently, NUVI is focused on growing through their inside sales group and figuring out what their model is and who their target clients are, Nellesen told SiliconSlopes. Once that is done and the metrics have been figured out, they will begin raising Series A funding.

Nellesen views his role in NUVI as an important one, but not a permanent one.

“I will be here as long as I need to be here,” Nellesen said. “My goal is to develop a team that operates independent of me. My duties are to get everyone around the same vision, getting the teams working together, helping create the processes and systems so we can scale this thing, helping to hire the people to do that, raising the capital and getting out of their way.”

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