About Jonathan Goodman

Hi, welcome to my personal Lifestream. This site is dedicated to pulling together everything I do and say online. It’s a one stop shopping for all my social media. This site pulls in my Ustream feed, YouTube videos, Tweets, Slideshare Presentatons, and more.

Scratching your head and wondering who I am? Let me introduce myself. My name is:

JONATHAN GOODMAN

I was born in Queens, New York on November 7^th, 1970. I stayed there until I moved to Hartsdale, NY and then moved to New City, NY just before high school. Yeah, I moved around a lot. It’s not the greatest experience but it could have been worse.

After high school I went off to Ringling School of Art and Design, which is now called Ringling College of Art and Design. I majored in Graphic Design with a minor in Photography. I came back to New York immediately after graduating and got a graphic design job at CGI, which was bought by IBM several years later. Doing research for this page it looks like CGI might be out from under IBM’s wing now.

From there I moved to Connecticut to take a job with MicroWarehouse, which my research also shows has since been bought up by CDW. At MicroWarehouse I was involved with the team that built the first dynamically generated e-commerce site. Remember this was back in 1996, even before the Dot.com boom and bust.

A year and a half into my work at MicroWarehouse, I realized I wanted to live in New York City.

My pursuit of a job based in New York City had me interviewing with several startups. I landed at Earthweb for the sole reason the Senior Vice President, Bill Gollan had previously been in a dispute with the owner of MicroWarehouse and was itching for any opportunity to disrupt his business. Bill continues to be a tremendous influence to me both personally and professionally. Out of all my corporate experience, my time at Earthweb was by far the most entertaining and enlightening.

By the time the Dot.com fell and I had seen hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock washed away, I was again ready for a change. I put my resume online and within hours received a call from a recruiter looking to place an E-commerce manager at Suburban Propane. I thanked him but explained that I wasn’t interested in working for 100 year old company whose focus wasn’t Internet related. He was persistent and after calling every couple of days finally got me to come in for an interview.

I can’t honestly say that I fitted into that company. I spent five years building up the e-commerce division of their retail subsidiary HomeTown Hearth and Grill. I brought it from a previous loss of four hundred thousand dollars prior to my arrival to top line annual sales of one and quarter million dollars. Unfortunately, my initial fears caught up to me. Despite the growth in the e-commerce division, the overall subsidiary was failing. They had rapidly expanded to over thirteen retail locations and had poorly staffed their upper management positions. Today, the subsidiary is hobbling along with just two stores remaining. Except for the arrogance of the Suburban Propane executive team, the plug should have been pulled years ago.

When they came to me in the summer of 2006 with a severance package and orders to shut down the site I negotiated a change within my non-compete allowing me to build my own e-business using the relationships I had with their current distributors. The rest as they say is history.

Jonathan’s entrepreneurial adventure continues in the E-commerce section of this site.