While I was at the Affiliate Summit conference in Vegas in February, I ran into Vinny & Charlene Lingham.
This happens a few times a year, ever since I was running eBay’s Affiliate API Program. Vinny & Charlene’s business, Clicks2Customers, was consistently one of my best-performing affiliates – in the top 0.5 % every week. Vinny’s and my number skills also came in handy during one fondly-remembered winning night at the Wynn casino, where we both walked away from our private Blackjack table with a good amount of the House’s money. :D
Way back when, Vinny had presented a web design tool, targeted at affiliates, which was a side project of his company. I signed up for the early, early Beta program and checked it out. Over the last 3 ½ years, Vinny and I had discussed various ways of working together. When we happened upon each other during a party at the Tao nightclub in the Venetian, he told me he’d spun out the tool into it’s own company, SynthaSite, and recently gotten first-round funding of $5 million.
He said: “Come be our VP of Product Development!” in his trademark boisterous, spontaneous way. After an early morning group interview and several more rounds (where I was impressed with the progress from the first version, and the quality of the team he’d already assembled), I said “Sure.”. Thirty days from the encounter at the party in Vegas, I was on a plane to South Africa to meet the rest of the engineers, as a newly-minted member of the SynthaSite team.
