Andrew Carton

                               

Have Brain.  Will Travel.

Andrew Carton is an entrepreneur, futurist and change agent.  He started his first venture in Venezuela some 11 years ago and he has to date founded three businesses.  He was most recently the managing director of one of the largest online advertising networks in the UK.  Previous to this he was an Internet strategy consultant, co-founder & CEO of an online beverage startup in the US and co-founder & managing director of a promotional marketing firm in Caracas.

EPIPHANY 4:  Buys a TiVo and pauses live television for the first time.  Recovers.  Goes into digital recording frenzy and begins to think about technology ramifications.  Soon hits upon digital entertainment convergence.  Accumulates electronic gadgets on an alarming basis and his overall consumption of the web, films, television, radio, music, pictures, videos and games reaches overdrive.

Andrew launches his latest venture, alteraxion, in late 2001 with the mission to “Explore, Discover & Exploit the Next Big Thing”.  Following a great many failed experiments he eventually leverages his fanatical interest in personal video recorders such as TiVo to develop an ambitious proposal for a next generation gaming console, completes the business plan for an online DVD and games rental company, explores the relaunch of TiVo in the UK, other hardware and software PVR solutions as well as negotiating the acquisition of an EPG software developer.  None of these take off in a meaningful way but the combined learnings soon become priceless.  After repeatedly being told that his ideas were too far ahead of the curve, digital entertainment convergence finally hits the front pages and investors get serious.

EPIPHANY 3:  Dials-up to the Internet on his Apple Duo 270c for the first time.  Goes to bed with his connected Duo every night for the next week.  Bookmarks over 4,000 websites in the following months.  Begins writing Internet business plans on the back of napkins on a regular basis.  Quest to help build a better world and create a billion dollar company emerges.

In early 2000, Andrew joins ad pepper media as UK Managing Director which he starts with a team of 3 people and a shoestring budget to become one of the top 5 players against entrenched and much better funded competitors such as DoubleClick and 24/7.  He led the company as it entered the dramatic online advertising downturn and during this time introduced the first pay-for-performance permission-based data capture solution which resulted in a complete sales transformation and a 50% margin improvement.  Today the company is the only profitable online advertising network in Europe.

Previous to this, Andrew was the Internet Strategies consultant at Icon Medialab London where he directed every senior client engagement and led the multidisciplinary team that successfully acquired the company’s first pan-European business of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.  Sony soon became one of the company’s top 5 clients worldwide.  Web development stocks crash shortly thereafter.

In 1998, Andrew was the co-founder and CEO of Fountains a proposed online beverage delivery service based in Florida.  After raising some seed funding and developing the business plan for this venture he secures funding of $1.0 million from a group of private investors but the investment is ultimately canceled.  He decides to return to the UK where Internet opportunities are just getting started.

EPIPHANY 2:  Canon salesperson in Hong Kong demonstrates digital colour laser printing transfer technology for applying photographic images to textiles.  This seeds idea for his first business.  Simultaneously reads William Gibson’s “Count Zero”, Eric Drexler’s “Engines of Creation” and Stewart Brand’s “The Media Lab”.  First serious thoughts about envisioning the future are born.

A summer holiday in Venezuela in 1993 was transformed into a 5 year entrepreneurial journey that saw Andrew staying there and launching a very successful garage startup called Count Zero as a promotional marketing firm.  After making every possible mistake managing the business and battling through a banking crisis as well as exchange rate controls he wins pitch for one of the largest consumer promotions to date for Pepsi – a $15 million project which was unexpectedly brought to a halt after Coca-Cola, in a corporate coup, purchased Pepsi’s local bottler in a $1.5 billion transaction.  First big lesson about preparing for the unimaginable is learned.  Moves to the US to start his own beverage venture.  

EPIPHANY 1:  Reading of Umberto Eco’s book “Foucault’s Pendulum” teaches him that there’s a lot more to life than money.  He abandons desire to study economics at LSE and enters the Architectural Association in London instead.  Discovers principles of creativity and innovation and learns to learn.

PERSONAL QUESTIONS

Where are you from?
If I was born in Spain, raised speaking French with a German mother and a British father and I’ve lived in ten countries on four continents… please, you tell me!  I hold a British passport though I am often reminded that this doesn’t by extension make me British…

So where’s ‘home’ for you?
Wherever my two feet happen to be planted.  Without wanting to sound arrogant about this I really do consider the world to be my oyster.

Then you must speak quite a few languages?
I am fluent in English, Spanish and French and I can read and speak German pretty well.  I also have an embryonic knowledge of Italian, Portuguese and Dutch (basically I can understand them but it doesn't always work the other way around…).

So you must know a thing or two about change and learning to adapt?
You could say that again!  I’ve changed countries, languages, schools, friends, homes, businesses, industries, specialities so often that I should have a doctorate in change management by now…

So what do you do for fun?
At the risk of sounding boring, I get my greatest kicks out of my work – I absolutely 100% love it.  It’s my passion, it’s my life.  I do however make space for some avid running and when I can also mountain hiking.  I enjoy travelling as frequently as possible and I am considered to be a pretty decent cook (Italian cuisine being my latest specialty).  Finally, as you may have noticed, I have become somewhat hooked on blogging and maintain a business one (blog.alteraxion.com) as well as an experimental bloguide dedicated to the Treo smartphone (treonauts.com) and more recently also a Photoblog (photoblog.be/acarton).

Let me see if I get it.  You’re a global Latin-British polyglot traveller who has gone through change more often than nappies on a baby’s bottom, who works incessantly and runs while cooking and blogging in a big oyster?
You got it!
 
 
You can contact Andrew by email or by phone on +44 777 580 0169.  Alternatively also via Skype|acarton.