Sim Simeonov

Simeon (Sim) Simeonov is the founder and CEO of FastIgnite, where he helps entrepreneurs shape promising ideas, raise capital, build teams, and execute across all stages of the startup lifecycle. Sim is also co-founder of San Francisco-based Thing Labs and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the MIT E-Center. Sim blogs at blog.simeonov.com, tweets as @simeons and lives in the Greater Boston area with his wife, son, and an adopted dog named Tye.

Prior to starting FastIgnite, Sim spent seven years as technology partner at Polaris Venture Partners, where he made investments in the online, enterprise, and mobile sectors and helped start four companies that Polaris invested in. Prior to joining Polaris, Sim was vice president of emerging technologies and chief architect at Macromedia (now Adobe). Earlier, Sim was a founding member and chief architect at Allaire, one of the first large Internet platform companies. Sim’s expertise covers the gamut from startup creation and financing to strategy definition and positioning to R&D execution to go-to-market and alliances development. He has played a key role in more than twenty v1.0s and M&A and spinout transactions.

Sim’s past investments include 8th Ring (a consumer mobile company he co-founded), Allurent, Archivas (a digital archiving company he helped create which was sold to Hitachi Data Systems), Meridio (sold to Autonomy), and Veracode (a SaaS application security spin-out from Symantec he helped create). He serves on the board of directors of the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX), and on the advisory boards of DubMeNow and the Nantucket Conference.

Sim has a master's degree in computer science from Boston University and bachelor degrees in computer science, economics, and mathematics from Macalester College. His research interests have ranged from microcode simulation to soft artificial intelligence to shared multi-user virtual environments to economic modeling of Russian privatization. He was named one of Technology Review's young innovators.