Francois Gossieaux is a remarkably together human being for someone who grew up speaking French at home, Dutch in school, and English in his professional life. The Belgium-born entrepreneur, blogger and marketing guru extraordinaire, came to the U.S. some 27-years-ago and worked for a few years in marketing for a couple of large and mid-sized companies before catching the startup bug.
My last “real” job was at eRoom Technology – where I spent five years leading marketing,” he says. “I joined the company a couple of months after they started shipping product and stayed through the acquisition by Documentum. We grew the business to profitability in very tough market conditions and went out with a bang (the acquisition was the 5th largest software M&A transaction in 2002), and we mostly had fun doing it.”
His involvement in what we now call social media dates back to April 1996 when he organized InterAct with Time Magazine and Infoworld, the first large scale virtual conference on the web, with 20 exhibitors in VRML worlds (including Microsoft, Netwscape, DEC, etc.), and 100+ presenters (including Eric Schmidt, Esther Dyson, and many others.)
He started a company called Synopia in early 2003, leveraging the components of social media (i.e., tagging, blogging, wikis) to create a solution for the fuzzy front end of product innovation.
“The market was just starting to come out of the Internet bust, and although companies were starting to buy software again, they were not ready to buy a new category product such as ours,” he says. “While I got a term sheet from a VC and interest from a large strategic investor, we closed down the company after two years for lack of sales.
“As a result of that experience though, I developed a real passion for these new collaborative tools. I love that they democratize content by making anyone a producer, archivist, contributor, or commenter. I started blogging myself and eventually invested in Corante, one of the first social media-based media companies, which produces well-known blogs such as FastForward.
In June 2007 he created a separate consulting company, MarketHum which merged with Foghound to form Beeline Labs in Jan 2008. He spearheaded Beeline’s involvement in a research study with Deloitte called the Tribalization of Business He is a senior fellow and board member at the Society for New Communications Research.
And, if that’s not enough, he is also the maitre d' of a terrific community site called Marketing 2.0. All of which is a piece of cake for a guy who can think in three languages.
Photo by Chris Heuer on Flickr