i had a good phone interview with an auckland based startup tonight – company h. they are looking for a senior project manager to manage some projects and help them mature their project process. i spoke with their hr consultant and their “operations manager” – their equivalent to a director of engineering.
the company is a self funded startup that is profitable, currently at 30 and expecting to grow to about 60 in the next year or so. they provide the mojo to enable mobile advertising campaigns for big companies like coke, toyota and the like. they usually get brought in by one of the big advertising agencies to work on part of a larger campaign. given that the budget for many of these campaigns is well into the millions i think this is a fantastic area to focus. just a tiny piece of that is still big money and you have someone else doing the work to establish the relationship with the target company. for a tiny company they have won an impressive list of advertising industry awards and have small offices in nyc, la and hong kong in addition to their nz base. the founders and the operations mgr are all around 30 so that raises an eyebrow, but hard to question their success.
wrapping up the ops mgr said that he thought there was a match and next step would be to connect with their ceo who is based in the states.