TNL News Update: Leaving Boo

Many of you have asked me what I was up to lately so I’m using this mail­ing list to give you a quick update on the new projects brew­ing here at TNL.net central.

Bye Bye Boo!

You may have heard the rumors so let me con­firm my depar­ture from Boo after less than six months. The call was as to whether I wanted to work exclu­sively out of the UK or stay in the US. When pre­sented with such a sce­nario, I decided that I would be bet­ter off work­ing in the US only and, as a result, have left Boo. It wasn’t an easy deci­sion as I enjoyed work­ing with the folks at Boo but didn’t feel that it would be right for me to move to the UK for a cou­ple of rea­sons: first of all, I like New York a lot more than I do Lon­don. This is a purely per­sonal judg­ment call but after hav­ing spent sev­eral months in Lon­don, I know that it’s not a city I want to live in. Sec­ond, I have spent a lot of time estab­lish­ing a ground base in the US. As many of you know, I’m French and have bumped around the world for quite a few years before finally set­tling down in New York. Since I did not intend to uproot myself again, there was not much choice. And last but not least, I think Boo has chal­lenges to address that top man­age­ment is unwill­ing to address. So I left.

Now you’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing what I’m up to next, so here goes…

A new com­pany: Move­able Media

In late 1999, an idea started brew­ing in my mind about the poten­tial to form a B2B and E-commerce con­sult­ing com­pany around new con­cepts that pulls from my expe­ri­ence. While I can’t give more details right now, let me just say that I’m start­ing my own com­pany. It’s called Move­able Media and will be very dif­fer­ent from the cur­rent offer­ings out there on the Internet.

How­ever, the busi­ness plan is quite strong and I already have had dis­cus­sions with par­ties inter­ested in back­ing me finan­cially. As a result, I am now mak­ing the jump that so many have made before and start­ing my own com­pany, which will launch its first offer­ing this year (in 2000).

While the com­pany is still in its embry­onic state, I am look­ing to fill a few posi­tions, includ­ing that of CTO so if you know any­one that might be inter­ested in join­ing a dynamic, New York based start up headed by an Inter­net vet­eran (yes, folks, I have now offi­cially landed that title, hav­ing been in the indus­try for 7 years), send them my way.

Many of the peo­ple I con­sulted about this have been ask­ing me why it took me so long to make the jump back into entre­pre­neur­dom. Well, the rea­son is really quite sim­ple: I needed to get some expe­ri­ence. Hav­ing worked around C-level peo­ple for the bet­ter part of the last decade, I now feel that I’ve learned enough to build a rea­son­ably suc­cess­ful company.

The TNL.net newsletter

You may have noticed a small change of direc­tion in terms of the TNL.net newslet­ter. Instead of just cov­er­ing new appli­ca­tions, I’ve recently sent out dis­patches on indus­try events such as the AOL-Time Warner merger and the Trans­meta announce­ment. In a way, this is more of a return to my ana­lyt­i­cal roots. As a result, I will send out more ana­lyt­i­cal pieces along with the reg­u­lar offer­ing of cool new tech­nolo­gies I uncover.

You may also have noticed that the fre­quency of this newslet­ter seems to have increased a lit­tle, with this already being the third dis­patch this year (whereas last year saw about a dis­patch a month). This is part of my effort to offer you some­thing more cur­rent and I will try to make sure that you get bet­ter updates in gen­eral. So enjoy it and feel free to tell me whether I’m right or wrong in my approach with this. After all, it’s all about learning.