Ready for the Next Chapter — Booom.
Today is a special day. Like an “I’m pumped for what’s next” kind of special day. After leaving Mosaik, I did what had to be done. Which in this case was a jump down to Bali for some good old me-time to figure out what’s next. It’s been almost two months now, and although I thought I would need more time, most of you probably aren’t surprised to find out that wasn’t the case. It’s not a secret that I have a hard time sitting still... I’ve quickly found excitement in a new project.
Now the radio silence is over, I am ready to come back. And I have a strong drive to start creating something again. And man you better bet — I fucking missed this feeling! So without further ado, I couldn’t be more excited to announce: I’m joining my friends at Lab.Coop to launch Booom., to create digital products for startup-minded people like us. Straight out of Budapest.
Chain.Reaction goes Booom.
If you know Lab.Coop, you might ask, what’s the difference anyway? These guys have already been running an agency business. You are right, so let me explain the background story. In a nutshell, promise.
I met the founders of Lab.Coop, Petak, and Egg back in 2013, when I was working for iCatapult, a seed investment firm. We invested in their content discovery startup, called Brickflow. We were impressed by their team and their attitude towards building the company. Although Brickflow failed, it turns out we were right about the team. They stuck together and launched Lab.Coop, one of the most interesting ventures I know.
Lab.Coop was started as a dev shop. Nothing particularly noteworthy about that — yet. But that wasn’t even the interlude to the whole story. First, they created a unique, employee-owned company structure, which makes every person in the company an owner. They don’t have employees, they have partners. So entrepreneurial, isn’t it? This led to the evolution of the company culture of dreams, based on radical transparency, flat organization and autonomous decision-making processes governed by holacracy. Seriously, pinch me. The resulting environment attracted some of the sharpest professionals from Budapest’s most well-known tech companies. And at this point, they had my curiosity. And you should be curious too.
Second, Lab.Coop took steps to become much more than an outsourcing firm. It became a venture builder. Beside their core agency business which was running under the brand Chain.Reaction, they co-founded Green Fox Academy, a market leading coding school introducing hundreds of new programmers to the job market every year. Next came SmartWareTech, an early stage VC firm, focusing on IoT and hardware startups.
Because of their increasing business lines Lab.Coop decided to spin-off Chain.Reaction and set up a new management team to run the show.
Luckily, David Gauquelin came on board to do just that. Brief snapshot of David G: he worked at Frog, one of the most well-known design firms in the world, before becoming Director of Design at Prezi, and building up their design team from scratch. Wow! Such track record! David has a vast vision on how to renew the agency, its brand, and services. As a Co-Founder and Design Lead, he is pioneering the path to make Chain.Reaction go Booom.
This effort is more than just a re-branding. Booom. is going to be a new company, and I am thrilled to join David and the team as a Co-Founder and CEO to take responsibility on running the business and sales side of the venture.
What do I have to know about Booom.?
Booom. helps startups and innovative companies build and grow amazing digital products and experiences. Or epic ones, if that’s what you prefer. We’re staffed by a bunch of enthusiastic people who have built startups and worked for successful tech companies in the past. And that’s interesting here, because it means we’ve ‘been there and done that’ enough to help new ventures and high-risk projects have a [much much] higher chance of succeeding.
We’re a full-service agency, delivering code, design, and strategy in perfect synergy. On a philosophical level we keep it simple. No post-it bullshit. We make things that work, we’re straightforward, we refuse waste and blah-blah. We are bold enough to think big, and we move fast, but we prefer to go forward in small steps. Ok, this might sound a bit like blah-blah… But really, we do. Long story short, we know our shit.
We hate agencies, that’s why we’re launching one. We believe there is a fundamental conflict of interest between outsourcing and startups, and we aim to fix that.
Think about it. Agencies exist to make money by serving multiple clients and running as many projects as possible. They are keen to lay down a well-defined specification, avoid changes along the way, finish the work, invoice the client and find the next project.
Startups exist to learn, find Product-Market Fit and get traction. By definition they operate under conditions of high uncertainty, so they use rapid experiments and iterate quickly, trying to reduce waste and use as few resources to achieve validated learning as possible.
With Booom. we are keen to do things differently and address these challenges. We are decidedly not a typical agency. Besides doing “client work”, we are planning to roll-out our own products, partner up with amazing teams to launch joint ventures and introduce unique services like Hiring Support to help startups grow. To be completely honest, we are just figuring out the details and soon we will share much more about how we’re different.
Closing thoughts about the new beginning
You are still reading. That’s great; now you know a lot about what we’re planning to set up with Booom. I want to elaborate a little more on the personal reasons why I am so excited about this new gig.
I actually believe that we are in an excellent position to make something remarkable and carry on the legacy of Prezi, Ustream, LogMeIn, NNG, Bitrise, etc., proving that it’s possible to build great stuff from Budapest. We are determined to grow Booom. into the best product studio Europe has ever seen.
We inherit invaluable assets from Lab.Coop / Chain.Reaction, including a top-notch team, culture, processes, customer base and references. Also, we will stay in the family, under the same roof, which means that we can rely on their support and coaching in operations, HR, org dev, etc… which makes it much easier to kick-off.
Last but not least, I am thrilled to have David as a Co-Founder. His excitement and vision were a major factor behind my decision to jump in. During a few coffee meetings and dinners, it quickly became apparent that although we are bringing very different, and complementary skills to the table, we are 100% aligned with the values and the vision, how we imagine creating the perfect workplace, that makes employees and customers happy and satisfied.
We are still pre-launch, but if you are interested in learning more, please get in touch with us by dropping me an email! Also, stay tuned because we will soon start to spread the word about our epic launch party!
ps: Thanks reka forgach for helping me to craft this blogpost!
