Francois Gossieaux
Currently serving as co-founder and partner in Beeline Labs, a boutique marketing innovation firm, I enjoy helping organizations make sense of the changes afoot and come up with innovative approaches to capitalize on the anti-fad that social media really is.
In fact I am so passionate about what I do that McGraw Hill agreed to publish a book that I am co-authoring with Ed Moran from Deloitte on the Hyper-Social Organization.
After being awarded the Individual 2007 Excellence in New Communications Research Award by the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), I joined them as a Senior Fellow and Board Member.
I am also the co-founder and co-lead for the Tribalization of Business Study, a yearly study in partnership with Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research, in which we surveyed and analyzed how 500+ companies leverage communities and social media as part of their business processes.
Prior to Beeline Labs, I was a marketing executive and co-founder at a number of startups, including eRoom Technology – where I spent 5 years leading marketing. I joined the company a couple of months after they started shipping product and stayed through the acquisition by Documentum. We created a category (twice), we started a successful ASP business alongside our enterprise offering, we grew the business to profitability in very tough market conditions, we went out with a bang (the acquisition was the 5th largest software M&A transaction in 2002), and we mostly had fun doing it! A ton of lessons learned there…
After eRoom I started another startup – Synopia. The company focused on delivering solutions to help new product developers with the front end of the product lifecycle, known as the product definition phase. We self-funded the company for 2 years, built a team around it and got one paying customer along the way. Even though we did receive a term sheet from a prominent Boston VC firm, we were never able to syndicate the deal and ran out of oxygen – so we closed down the company. Another great set of experiences – some learned the hard way.
Before that I held a variety of marketing, sales and business development positions at Stratus Computers, Agfa-Compugraphic and Barco.
It was while I was at Stratus that I came up with this concept of organizing the first large scale virtual event – with a full speaker conference as well as a virtual exhibit hall. The event was planned in 1995 and held in early 1996 – mind you, with Netscape 1.0 with Java in beta. InfoWorld and Time Magazine teamed up with us and we ended up with 100+ speakers (the who’s who of the web 1.0 world at the time), 30+ exhibitors, and 45,000 attendees!
That was fun and gave me a taste for just how powerful the impact of that first internet wave was on the way we work, the way we meet, the way we interact with one another, and on the way we recruit…
We are clearly on the cusp of a second transformational wave and I consider myself very lucky to be part of it again!
