Tristan Goes to Boo.com

I have resigned from my posi­tion as VP of mar­ket­ing and strat­egy at Net Quo­tient to join a new com­pany called Boo.com. I will be senior adviser to the CEO there. Let me answer a few ques­tions that may be going through your mind.

What is Boo.com ?

Boo.com is aim­ing to build a global e-commerce plat­form that will allow to trade in mul­ti­ple lan­guage and mul­ti­ple coun­tries. Based out of Lon­don, Boo.com will ini­tially sell wares in the United States and in Europe.

For those of you who may be inter­ested, the ad cam­paign is start­ing this month with print ad already being avail­able in Details, GQ, ESPN mag­a­zine, Vogue, and Elle (those are the only ones I’ve heard about so far but I’m sure there’s more)

What will you do there?

As senior adviser to the CEO (a con­sult­ing gig for now), I will be help­ing the com­pany build its back­end infra­struc­ture. On a day to day basis, it means I will run a team that will build a world-class E-commerce sys­tem (I hope). Once we have built the sys­tem, I will most prob­a­bly start focus­ing on inter­nal appli­ca­tions and gen­eral strat­egy (I fig­ure that will be in about a cou­ple of years as build­ing the infra­struc­ture will most assuredly be a long term project).

Does that mean you think Net Quo­tient has no future?

NOT AT ALL. Since I started here, I’ve seen the com­pany change hands, helped it being split up and acquired, and helped trans­form it from a do-anything-to-pay-the-bills (hasn’t that been the case with every startup that boot­strapped?) shop to a sta­ble project imple­men­tor. I would rec­om­mend it to any­one who’s look­ing for pro­fes­sional Inter­net sys­tems inte­gra­tion work to be done and will prob­a­bly use it myself in the future.

If you like Net Quo­tient so much, why the move?

If some­one had come to you with a job that pulls not only from your Inter­net expe­ri­ence but also from other back­ground stuff (like my knowl­edge of Euro­pean cul­ture), would you turn it down? If you could get a chance to build a multi-country, multi-currencies sys­tem, some­thing that hasn’t been done before, would you do it?

In my case, those were the main issues. I have to admit that it is tough leav­ing Net Quo­tient behind but this oppor­tu­nity ended up being too good to pass up. I’ll get to spend time in Europe, and I’ll get my hands back into back-end cod­ing, which I really enjoy.

The company’s based in Lon­don. Does that mean you’re moving?

Nope. While I ini­tially will be spend­ing a lot of time in Lon­don, I will be work­ing out of our New York office. Even­tu­ally, I’ll be back in NYC full-time only going to Lon­don a week every months.

So when is this official?

I am leav­ing Net Quo­tient on August 13th and will start at Boo.com on the 16th of August.

Q: So where do we reach you now?

You can always use my per­sonal email address or check my web site for most recent con­tact info. I will have my new work con­tact info on there as soon as possible.

Q: Any­thing else?

Yes, as I cus­tom­ar­ily do when I leave a com­pany, I’d like to rec­og­nize a few peo­ple that have def­i­nitely made my leav­ing Net Quo­tient a very dif­fi­cult task. I have made some very close friends here and I hope I will remain so with them for many years to come.

First of all, I would like to thank Jonathan Wal­lace, Net Quotient’s pres­i­dent. I’ve learned a lot from Jonathan in my stay here, most of which is how to tem­per­ate myself. For those of you who’ve met me face to face in the past, you might remem­ber an overly agi­tated kid who was going in a bil­lion direc­tions at once. Jonathan helped me focus more and for that, I will be for­ever thank­ful. Fur­ther­more, he’s a big movie buff and we spent count­less hours chat­ting about the lat­est flick.

Jon Davis, NQ’s big man in New York, is another friend I will regret no longer work­ing with. He often was there as a cheer­leader when, exhausted by hours of work, I would flinch and worry that I was doing it all wrong.

Harry Kap­sales, one of our sys­tems archi­tects, was a close smok­ing and then non-smoking part­ner. Together, we man­age to kick that nasty habit and became good friends along the way, trad­ing jokes and views on the industry.

The rest of NQ’s man­age­ment We went through two acqui­si­tions together and, as is the case in such crazy times, ended up bond­ing in the process. From Chett Ruben­stein (New York sales) who brought me up on all the lat­est sales the­o­ries, to Andy Galewsky (the Austin boss) and his Texan one-liners, I want to make sure that, if we’re ever in a war, I’ve got the whole man­age­ment team of NQ in my foxhole!

The rest of the NQ New York office. There’s a lit­tle tra­di­tion here that we all go out at lunchtime to grab food, and bring it back to the office where we talk about news, movies, music, etc… as well as joke around (inter­est­ingly enough, the talk of sports is fairly lim­ited). This com­bined with the office happy hour on Thurs­days made for a very fun atmos­phere and I will miss them all.

Any­way, I’ll miss work­ing with those guys but con­sid­er­ing how small our indus­try is, I’m sure it’s only a mat­ter of time before our paths cross again.