NomadX Entrepreneur in Residence: Genevieve Bos
I prefer to be moving.
Between running her own company, serving on multiple boards, investing in early stage startups, public speaking, and guest lecturing, Genevieve Bos stays busy. She says that, “Time is the one commodity everyone has, it’s how you manage it.” She knows a thing or two about how to manage her time.
The key to her productivity and secret to making it work is simple: Bos uses the best tools for the job, creates a process, then optimizes that process. She doesn’t tolerate inefficiency, she cuts to the chase, and she now runs a full-service global consultancy called Thought Capital that helps others maximize value and increase their bottom lines.
Currently, she’s focusing deeply on customer needs delivering sales and marketing strategies plus implementation in the e-commerce space to sell more online directly to consumers and generate B2B leads. They also help clients figure out the best way to more fully leverage Amazon. Bos insists on committing herself to constant education and swears that it’s all about the people around you: “If you surround yourself with people who are uber curious, very smart, and always adding value, anything is possible.”
In fact, that’s exactly what launched her entrepreneurial career while hanging out with friends at Georgia Tech. By spending time in the labs on campus, Bos made friends with technologists, programmers, and future innovators. When her friends had a great idea and technology but no distribution, Genevieve stepped up.
From Europe to Asia to the Middle East, Bos built international sales & marketing teams around the world for Infographix. She cut a major deal with Xerox to brand their software and achieved 85% market share outside the USA in the printing and publishing industry in only 36 months.
Over the next 17 years, Genevieve founded, built, and sold companies in the media and technology sectors that were both venture-backed and privately held. Along the way, she has worked with and sold to hundreds of global companies at the C-Suite and senior executive roles at Dell, FedEx, Ford, UPS, Delta, Johnson & Johnson, and Intel. In 2014, IdeaString exclusively sold a global license of its platform to GE after 3 years of growing the SaaS platform that mass curates inputs from large employee groups to accelerate process optimization, cost-out and innovation. GE renamed the platform Campfire and leverages it for internal use across the globe and with its enterprise customers.
She finds inspiration from following what’s interesting to her, and that’s why she’s done so many things across a variety of industries. When she set her mind to empowering female entrepreneurs and executives, she built PINK magazine. After taking over as the publisher — in just two years — she grew the readership base to 650,000 in what was a “Fortune meets Oprah” publication.
Estimates show that she’s impacted more than 10 million women through PINK alone, not to mention her public speaking engagements, involvement with EO Atlanta (EOnetwork.org), and guest lectures at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. She’s also appeared in Forbes, NBC, CNN, and CBS Good Morning as a source of inspiration for females executives who are ready to move the career needle or start a company.
Yet among all of her accomplishments, Bos says one of her biggest successes and the one that has helped her have so many others: marrying her husband. “Sometimes business is great, and sometimes business is not so great.” Genevieve’s partner, Remco, also a successful entrepreneur, has supported, loved, and cheered for her at every step of the entrepreneurial journey. “My success is his success and vice versa. Picking the right life partner makes all the bumps in the road a lot easier to manage and the highs so much sweeter.”
To better understand the emotional & structural challenges entrepreneurs experience, Bos recommends reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. In fact, she says that every startup and founder should read it as early as possible since it helps with anticipating change, getting real about capabilities, scaling up, and finding inspiration anywhere. “I sent Ben a love note right after I read the book telling him how helpful it was to me and he wrote me back. That was cool.”
Over the next five years, Genevieve and Remco are looking to make sure they have the people and processes in place to work from anywhere. They’re ready to travel, and Portugal is next up on the itinerary. Why? She’s never been before; it’s a new adventure. “We’ve been going to Europe every year for 20 years now yet never been. It’s sort of off the beaten track and not one of the usual suspects. Further, it seems to be the next hot place — every time I turn around I keep reading about Portugal!”
While working remotely in Portugal and not meeting with startups or advising founders, she’s going to sit on the beach and drink a little local port. Bos is available to meet with local entrepreneurs, plus she’s a judge for the Pitch Competition at Second Home on August 23.
In the meantime, check her out on LinkedIn, or sign up to pitch her your business idea.
Lisbon’s coming-to-life startup scene will perfectly match Genevieve’s tenacity, enthusiasm, and desire to be around uber curious people. Rather than sitting still, she’ll be making great things happen and adding value in any way possible. We can’t wait to see what happens!
ABOUT NOMADX
NOMADX is a real estate technology platform developed to meet the needs of the rapidly growing global community of location-independent remote workers, or “Digital Nomads”.
As Digital Nomads ourselves, we know what the market is looking for: trusted, affordable accommodations in highly-attractive locations worldwide at 45% less than AirBNB. We also offer educational masterclasses to help master the lifestyle as well as community events to help foster new friendships.
Please join our community of Digital Nomads and remote workers from around the world:
Instagram: nomadx.experience
Facebook Group: Support Community for Remote Workers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave Williams is the CEO and Co-founder of NOMADX with his base in Lisbon, Portugal. Dave is a US pioneer in the digital marketing, advertising, and ad tech industries as a serial digital entrepreneur over the past 20+ years with multiple exits in the early formative stages of the search engine marketing, social media, and ad tech industries.
