Fueling Deals

Niles Heron is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Popdog, a technology and services company focused on fixing core problems in the esports and live streaming industry. He firmly believes that entrepreneurship is about building good systems (solving problems at scale). Niles left esports in late 2007, and worked for the better part of 10 years across corporate, creative, and entrepreneurial settings helping design and implement systems to drive growth, productivity, and value. This work took him from Detroit to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and back to Detroit with companies in BioTech, Automotive, Aerospace, Technology, and Entertainment.He’s been a part of a number of startups — a few exits, a few exciting failures — and has invested heavily in trying to make paths like the one he took more accessible to the under- represented spaces he came from. He’s taught and mentored at incubators and accelerators (TechStars, Gener8tor, Detroit’s TechTown), spoken across the country at events about the value of