A Nantucket Entrepreneurial Success Story

Philip Beauregard, CEO of Objective Logistics, came to the Nantucket Conference for the first time in 2011. His company was founded in New Bedford, but now also has a Boston office. Objective Logistics sells a SaaS product that helps restaurants and retail businesses get better performance from their workforce; last November, the company raised $1.5 million from Atlas Venture, Google Ventures, NextView Ventures, and Canary Ventures.

We asked Phil how attending Nantucket helped build his company's momentum. Here's what he said...

- Objective Logistics can be viewed as a bit of a Nantucket "Cinderella" story I suppose. We were heads down in the Southcoast of Massachusetts, not really paying attention to any startup 'ecosystem' for a good two years while we built our product. We saw everything else as a distraction. 

- After being courted by VCs and 'shareholders' alike for some time, we still deferred going to any events, dinners, etc. 

- That was until we saw the speaker and participant lineup for the Nantucket Conference. We were blown away. We literally couldn't justify not going. 

- So we went. 

- I've never been to an event where I met so many people with which I have carried on a relationship, before or since. The signal-to-noise ratio was and still is the best I've ever seen, by leaps and bounds really. 

- It was all quality investors, thought leaders, and brethren entrepreneurs. If events could have a 'Klout score,' Nantucket would be 100. 

- The event was the best I've ever been to. 

- We went, introduced ourselves in a bit of a debutante way (our first exposure to what are now lasting relationships), and ended up moving to Boston in November after we closed our seed round with Google and Atlas. I met Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR at the event, he introduced me to Rich Miner of Google Ventures, and the rest was history. 

- I got to know Fred Destin from Atlas Ventures at the event as well, which no doubt moved along our admiration of the guys over there (at Atlas). 

- Two of our strategic investors, Jeremy Hitchcock and Alex Goldberg of Canary Ventures, were both guys I met at the same dinner on Saturday night. 

- If you get invited to Nantucket, and you don't go, for shame.