Bruce Haymes is founder and Managing Director of Stage18, Inc., a strategic consultancy and advisor to private equity and their portfolio companies, as well as to higher education administrators. He is also chairman of the board of directors of Toluna Corporation (Europe), a global digital insights company serving the tech, retail and food industry. He is also an executive-in-residence at Progress Partners, a venture capital fund and investment advisory firm based in Boston, Massachusetts.
Bruce has had an eclectic career representative of his liberal arts education at Tufts University.
After graduating Tufts in 1986 with a B.A. in economics, he directly enrolled in law school, graduating from George Washington University Law School in 1989 with honors.
He started his career at the boutique Wall Street law firm of Emmet, Marvin and Martin, representing money-center banks on financial transactions. From there, he worked as an associate in several other New York City law firms including Shea & Gould and Morrison & Forester. He realized that private practice law was not energizing him so at his last rotation at Chadbourne & Parke, he requested to be placed on high technology client deals with a view towards moving in-house. He received his request and began representing PanAmSat Corporation. PanAmSat was the first privately owned satellite company in the world. Prior to PanAmSat, all satellites and related services were controlled by the ITU, Intelsat or a combination of NGOs. PanAmSat’s backstory was rich with entrepreneurial and groundbreaking actions. It was started by an Italian immigrant that was a tailgunner during World War II. His broadcasting company had been a customer of the NGOs that ran the satellite industry in the 1980s and he felt that they provided a non competitive and expensive service. After exiting his broadcasting business he teamed up with the wealthy Azcarraga family from Mexico, the owners of Televisa. With this backing, he had his own satellite constructed and launched. The ITU and the United States objected to its licensing, and a series of lawsuits and congressional hearings followed. PanAmSat’s founder even hired the author of the old Beetle Bailey cartoons to draw him his own mascot, Spot the Dog, a scrappy dog that is used to being kicked around but gets the job done. After taking out full page ads in the New York Times and a multitude of congressional hearings, PanAmSat was granted its license to occupy a geostationary orbit in space. It was the first private company to ever achieve this objective. Without PanAmSat there would be no SpaceX or Starlink or DirecTV.
Bruce joined PanAmSat in 1997 as its corporate lawyer and quickly became its head of strategy and corporate development. He crafted numerous global partnerships and acquisitions including a sale of a damaged in-orbit satellite to Arabsat, the consortium of Arab nations jointly operating over the Middle East. He originated and managed an extensive partnership with Pegaso Communications, a Mexican wireless carrier started by other members of the Azcarraga family. He also negotiated a partnership with JSAT, the largest satellite company in Japan. He ended his career at PanAmSat by helping to lead a management buyout with private equity funds KKR, Carlye and Providence that was quickly followed by an IPO and a buyout by Intelsat, its recently privatized arch-enemy. PanAmSat had grown from that single satellite to more than 30 satellites covering 97% of the world’s population. It was the largest satellite company in the world.
After PanAmSat, Bruce had a brief stint at Time Warner and then jumped to Nielsen in 2008, the TV ratings and retail measurement company now owned by KKR. His objective was to try to deliver similar growth to the giant of consumer behavior measurement. He was recruited to Nielsen to build and launch a new audience measurement system for an emerging segment of the internet economy - streaming video. This was during the early days of YouTube, before it was even purchased by Google. Unfortunately both streaming and the measurement system were not ready for scale, so he left this role within a year and moved into a newly created leadership role as senior vice president in corporate development and M&A. In this role, Bruce sourced, structured, negotiated and closed dozens of partnerships and acquisitions. These included the acquisitions of AGB (a 13-country audience measurement platform based in Europe), MEMRB (Middle East consumer behavior data) and Arbitron (the largest radio measurement platform in the United States). He completed dozens of deals and partnerships throughout the world including Mexico, Brazil, Israel, Japan, Singapore, China and across Europe.
Midway through his tenure at Nielsen, observing the growing importance of data and data analytics, Bruce became interested in technology focused startups. He had recently been on a solidarity tour of Israel and remembered Israel’s reputation as “The Startup Nation.” With his colleagues he secured funding for a new Israeli technology incubator and venture capital fund from Nielsen, Ronald Lauder (Estee Lauder), Richard Parsons (Time Warner and Citi) and several Israeli investors. With his Israeli partner, Esther Barak Landes (daughter of the well-known Chief Justice Aharon Barak of Israel’s supreme court), they secured the first foreign license to operate a technological incubator from Israel’s Office of the Chief Scientist. This license contained millions of dollars of financial benefits. The fund and innovation platform, Nielsen Innovate, invested in over 30 Israeli startups, created more than 200 new jobs and to date has achieved six exits (sales) of portfolio companies. Many other multinationals followed Nielsen Innovate’s playbook when launching innovation platforms in Israel, including Verizon, Pepsico and WPP.
Running Nielsen Innovate remotely required Bruce to travel significantly to Israel. He set up an office in Caesarea and traveled to Israel at least eight times per year. He held an apartment in the Kerem Hateimanim (the Yemenite Quarter) of Tel Aviv and tried to be as much a native as possible.
In 2018 he was recruited to join the president’s office and senior leadership team (SLT) of Northeastern University as its first chief partnership officer. He had always been interested in teaching and education, and believed that Northeastern’s innovative co-op program would be a great place to be creative in higher education. Upon joining, he was greatly dismayed with the degree of rigidity and bureaucracy present at Northeastern. He spent three years at the university making several tech investments and partnerships but was otherwise dissatisfied. He left the university in 2021 with a plan to provide strategic advisory services to university presidents.
He started Coleytown Advisors in 2021 as a higher education consulting firm. He gained several marquee clients. He also was recruited to be the chairman of the board of directors of Europe-based Toluna Holdings, one of the largest digital market research firms in the world. Bruce had negotiated a deal with Nielsen and the company’s CEO eight years earlier and they maintained a collegial relationship years after his exit from Nielsen.
In 2023 his Coleytown business had gotten too large for one person so he joined with two former Nielsen colleagues to form Stage18 which offers the same services as Coleytown but expanding to work with private equity funds active in the data, media and advertising industry.
Today, Bruce is managing director and founder of Stage18, Inc. and Chairman of Toluna Holdings, Ltd.
He also served on the advisory board of Sweetwood Capital (Fund I - Europe/Israel) and served as an advisor to The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). He is a mentor at Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA) in New York and has been a guest lecturer of corporate finance and M&A at Cornell Tech’s MBA program in New York. He was named a Frost and Sullivan “Thought Leader,” and to the Cablefax Publications “Digital Hot List.”
He has always enjoyed traveling, learning and reading - much of this stems from his four years at Tufts. He has traveled to most parts of the world; some of the more ambitious adventures have been Papua New Guinea (backpacking in 1989), Tanzania (1992), Cambodia (2003), Cyprus, Jordan, Israel, Central America, French Guiana (to witness a satellite launch on Arianespace from its Korou launchpad), etc.
He lives in Westport, Connecticut with his wife Jill. He has three boys, all in their 20s and all University of Michigan students or graduates. One of his sons is with hedge fund giant Cerberus (but awaiting decisions from MBA programs), the other is a consultant with Oliver Wyman and his youngest son is a junior at The Ford School of Public Policy at Michigan.
His hobbies include hiking, music, scuba diving, e-bikes and fiddling with technology. In the past he was a skier, marathon runner and tennis player.
Entering Bruce is a fun moment for me as I am meeting a Tufts undergraduate from 1885-86 who I had not been conscious of until our conversation. He remembered our first symposium at Tufts on International Terrorism. He bought a ticket and attended. It was the first time that the concept of a weekend symposium was ever entertained at Tufts. I once did a check of the archives at Tufts Daily to make this claim. I was the special advisor to ACOIL (Advisory Committee on Intellectual Life), created by the Experimental College when I created this symposium, and was subsequently named Special Advisor for Undergraduate Intellectual Life. After the symposium made all major networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and the New York Times, Bruce was recommended by Amir Grinstein, for whom he was an advisor for Amir's 50:50 Initiative. I will be working with Bruce on an initiative with Joshua Weiss and Brian Abrahams of the Harvard Project on negotiation on the concept of a Marshall Plan for Gaza.