Roster Capital is a buyout firm focused on purchasing and operating long standing profitable businesses. The founding partners, Mike Shehan and Steve Swoboda, are successful serial entrepreneurs having started, operated and sold multiple ad tech businesses, including SpotX, a global video ad s…
Roster Capital is a buyout firm focused on purchasing and operating long standing profitable businesses. The founding partners, Mike Shehan and Steve Swoboda, are successful serial entrepreneurs having started, operated and sold multiple ad tech businesses, including SpotX, a global video ad serving platform sold for $1.2B in March, 2021. The founding partners will leverage their deep expertise in operating large, multi-national, fast growing organizations when evaluating and operating the acquired businesses.
Who we are
Empowered teams are not just an element of business success; they’re its essence. At Roster, we invest with the goal of empowering already-strong teams to do their best work in a collaborative, transparent, fair, and politics-free environment.
Our employee-centric philosophy, combined with our founding partners’ deep expertise in launching and successfully operating fast-growing organizations, creates a unique opportunity for business owners seeking to sell their companies while setting their teams, colleagues, and customers up for enduring success.
Mike Shehan
Mike is a long time entrepreneur having started several tech companies since the mid ‘90s. He most recently served as the CEO of SpotX, the leading video advertising platform used by nearly all major OTT media owners in the US, including Discovery, Disney, Roku, Samsung and Viacom.
In 2006, Mike co-founded SpotX (formerly SpotXchange) as a division of Booyah Networks, which he also co-founded in 2001 as a self-service paid search network. Together with partner Steve Swoboda, Mike led the sale of SpotX in 2021 to Magnite for $1.2B.
Mike’s additional career highlights also include serving as CEO of Ereo, Inc., a venture-backed image search technology company. Before Ereo, he co-founded LOGEX International, LLC, an e-commerce solutions provider for the retail and catalog industries which was ultimately acquired by AppNet and taken public in 1999.
Mike is an active investor and advisor, currently serving on the TextUs and Flytedesk boards. He previously served on the Videoamp, Clypd (acquired by AT&T/Xandr) and Vemba (acquired by Frankly) boards. In 2013, Mike was honored by Ernst & Young as one of the Entrepreneurs of the Year.
Mike grew up in Baltimore and graduated from Vanderbilt with a degree in biology. After a short stint in Alaska and Vail, he began his business career in Washington, DC in the mid 90s at the beginning of the dot com boom. Mike and his wife, Kristie, have lived in Boulder for more than two decades. They have four children, three dogs, and one sailboat (in the Caribbean).
Steve Swoboda
Steve is an accomplished entrepreneur and operations and finance executive who co-founded two successful companies in the Denver metro area: Booyah Advertising, a digital advertising agency founded in 2001, and SpotX, the leading global video ad serving platform founded in 2007.
Steve served as Chief Operating and Financial Officer at SpotX and led the company to grow to over 450 employees in six countries serving video ads to more than 600 million people in over 100 countries. In April 2021, Steve and SpotX co-founder Mike Shehan managed a sale process which resulted in the sale of SpotX for $1.2B.
Steve is currently an advisor, investor and board member for several growth-stage companies and non-profit organizations, and is a member of the Economic Club of Colorado. In 2013, Steve was honored by Ernst & Young as one of the Entrepreneurs of the Year.
Steve grew up in Fort Collins and graduated from CU Boulder in 1986 with a BS in Business. He’s spent most of his life and career in Colorado with the exception of a 6 year period in the 90s working for PwC in Budapest and then New York. He currently lives in Denver with his wife, Sara, and their two children, Sally Rae and Charlie. His proudest professional accomplishment is the jobs created by the companies he co-founded and led to success in his home state of Colorado.
