James Lantos
In 1994, a year after the internet had gone commercial, 5 years after the invention of the World Wide Web, I had access to a Sun SPARC terminal at a job I worked at the National Institutes of Health. With that I had a connection to the internet few outside a university could reach. I built a restaurant guide to Washington DC with another researcher. It was a list of things, described well enough that a stranger could find the one they wanted. I have been doing some version of that ever since.
In 2001, at the height of the dot-com bust, several months before 9/11, I started an internet business with a credit card for capital and no plan, except to help pay the rent. I sold $10K in month one, and did 6 figures in the first year. For 2 years I worked out of my living room, 7 days a week. This was the same way eBay and others started. I went on to find business with the U.S. Capitol, the White House, Harvard, HBO and the Metropolitan Museum, hundreds of institutional clients as well as tens of thousands of internet customers (including someone in Greenland). Not one came from a structured marketing campaign. They came from 300,000 images and metadata cataloged carefully enough that somebody looking for exactly one of them could find it.
The analytics came last, and not by choice. For 20 years I was too busy shipping to look at what the shipping was telling me. That is now the most common thing I see in small businesses. What changed is that the tools and the science arrived. I put thousands of orders through AI and analytics software and got back patterns I had no way of seeing before. I have run consumer behavior analysis on my own business, and on others, and I see things I never thought about previously.
I went on to take apart the industry I sold into, home furnishings and decor, and then the platforms everybody now depends on. How Amazon decides which listing wins a search. How Google decides what a page is about. I sold on those platforms for years before I ever applied data science to how they work.
Two decades of running a business, the online economy taken apart, and the training to do it properly. That is what I bring when I look at your company.
By the numbers
What 25 years produced.
cataloged and curated
across marketplaces
Library of Congress data
or under contract
across 12 domains
803 modules
and managed
and businesses
More about the record, in 6 short parts. Start anywhere.
1 of 6 · 1 minute read
Institutional and wholesale clients.
Twenty-five years selling historical imagery into museums, libraries, universities, government agencies and independent retail.
Read this part →2 of 6 · 2 minute read
What the buyers said.
“It’s their high quality, high resolution printing process that makes each reproduction look like a true original.
Read this part →3 of 6 · 2 minute read
From publishers, colleagues and faculty.
“Jim brings much passion and expertise to this enterprise.
Read this part →4 of 6 · 1 minute read
Six things, and they overlap.
Each one came out of doing the work rather than studying it. Together they are what a client is actually hiring.
Read this part →5 of 6 · 1 minute read
A long line of innovators working to democratize nostalgia.
“Established institutions like the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, websites like eBay and Ancestry, and initiatives like the Digital Library Program and the Google Books Library Project are all striving to preserve…
Read this part →6 of 6 · 1 minute read
Where the work has gone.
The Halloween Library, six volumes. The Pictorial America series, sixteen volumes. A memoir from twelve years of rideshare journals.
Read this part →
I build knowledge, systems and businesses that preserve the past, solve real problems, and create value for the future.