Kevin Leland is an entrepreneur, growth marketer and innovation executive with more than 15 years of experience at venture-backed startups and global agencies, including IDEO, Edelman and the Wall Street Journal. He has been published or quoted in The New York Times, Forbes, Fast Company, AllThingD (now Re/Code), NBC and The Boston Globe. For startups across a range of industries, Kevin has led both B2B and B2C marketing, scaling them from product/market fit to fundraises of $10 million or more.
Six months after launching a new mid-tier sales division for the Wall Street Journal, Leland was recruited by Eric Lefkofsky, founder of four publicly traded companies including Groupon, to join his new venture capital firm Lightbank as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence and one of its first four employees. In that role, Leland co-founded and let marketing for a number of tech startups, including Pawngo, the first online pawn shop (collateralized lending up to $1 million) and BodyShopBids, a mobile app for repair estimates. He played a key role in pivoting the company from a consumer app to a white label app called Snapsheet that has now raised over $30 million in venture capital and has more than 200 employees.
He then joined GreenSky, a point-of-sale financing technology solution for home improvement, as the first senior marketing leader. Within 12 months, Leland helped double the client base resulting in a $50 million fundraise valuing the company at $3.6 billion. Currently, Leland heads up marketing and business development for Storyhunter, a venture-backed startup with a marketplace of 15,000 video creators across 183 countries. He is also Managing Parter at Argyle, an advisory firm specializing in startups and corporate innovation.
Currently Kevin Leland leads marketing and business development for Storyhunter, a global marketplace of 15,000 video creators across 183 countries that counts global media companies and brands as clients, including The New York Times, Gates Foundation, Facebook, Airbnb, Duke University, Conde Nast and The Ad Council. He is also Managing Parter at Argyle, an advisory firm specializing in early-stage startups and corporate innovation.
Leland holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, an MS in Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.