Seán Crotty

Visit to SynthaSite South Africa

We had a very productive three weeks in Cape Town.

I got to facilitate five straight days of strategy, branding, and product planning sessions. We covered everything about the company, within our Exec Team level and with everyone in the company. It was one of the most satisfying corporate exercises I’ve ever done – mainly because we came out of it with a crisp statement of company objectives, specific product feature priorities, and clearly defined quarterly goals – which everyone had participated in and agreed to.

It was my first time in South Africa, and only my second time on that continent. Besides lots of concentrated work, Vinny & crew showed me and the other recent American hire, Randy Almond, a great time. You can see pictures of the trip at http://travelswithvinny.synthasite.com/Cape_Town.php. They are on a website I made with our free web design tool, SynthaSite (of course). The up-close pictures of the Rhinoceros are the wildest.

Encountering SynthaSite

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.

New job

Excited to announce that I’ve taken a position with Art.com as their Senior Manager of Affiliate Programs.  I’m running the affiliate programs for all of their properties:  Art.com, AllPosters.com, Poster.de, and others in the works.

I really enjoyed working at eBay and was there from July 2004 through May 2006.    The people were awesome and the company mission something to devote yourself to.  Being in the heart of the rapidly evolving world of e-commerce, internet marketing, and user-generated content is a rush.

As the first Manager of eBay’s Affiliate Platform, I got to create cool tech tools & features for affiliates:  Affiliate-tagged RSS feed, GetPopularKeywords API call,  XML-to-HTML Transform, and others.  I increased the number of my affiliate developers from 20 to 1,700, and brought in a big jump in revenue (even by eBay standards).

An added bonus is that I got to take vacation for a few weeks between jobs for some fun travel.

Went to my Wharton reunion, networked and reunited.  Ended up at Jim’s Cheesesteaks at 2 a.m. with a crew of friends, all still in our suits & cocktail attire from the Ritz Carlton dinner & dancing event.

Survived a four-day party in Vegas for my brother …

Had a wonderful family visit back home in Maine, with lobsters, friends, & favorite places.

Went to my Yale reunion, wandered the campus and caught up with a ton of friends.  Tossed some frisbee on Cross Campus, closed the Anchor Bar, sang Scottish rigdam ballads, visited the Fencing room on the 7th floor of the gym, and heard the Whiffs in an acoustically exquisite gothic archway.

Happy New Year

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year everyone!

Just back from some R&R&R (rest, relaxation, and rustication) with family in Maine.  Great to see everyone and spend time with friends.  Several large dinners - big clan affairs.  Shovelled a little snow; missed the torrential rains in California.

Etymological Note:  My use of rustication comes from my high school english teacher, Mr. Foster.  He'd say that when he was going "up country" to spend some time in the woods.  I use it in the same sense, but looking it up now in the Wiktionary (the wiki-based open-content dictionary, which is an adjunct to the wiki-based open-content encyclopedia, Wikipedia), I discovered that there was a hidden meaning in his comments.

The British use the term to politely refer to temporarily suspending a student from school.  A student would be "rusticated", sent to spend some time in the country.  I'm sure Foster knew the subleties of the word and was hinting when he used it.  His knowing smirk and sharp quips were always ready -- amusing, castigating, and inspiring his students.