Our Team

Nicolas Darveau-Garneau, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

A veteran technology industry entrepreneur and investor, Nicolas Darveau-Garneau founded BigDeal.com. As the CEO, Mr. Darveau-Garneau is leading the company's overall growth strategy, product development and fundraising efforts. Nick Darveau-Garneau most recently was a Managing Director at The Green Lake Group, a San Francisco-based advisory firm that specializes in business development, fund raising, and corporate development for Internet companies. Previously Nick was a Senior Equity Research Analyst for Internet and Software companies at Sanford C. Bernstein. Nick was the Co-Founder and President of imix.com, a leading online music company. He has also held executive positions at Microsoft and McKinsey & Company. Nick graduated from Harvard Business School with a Masters of Business Administration degree.

Nick has traveled to over 65 countries and has eaten some of the strangest foods in the world. He is a New York Yankees and Montreal Canadiens fans and once dreamed of being a professional hockey goalie. Unfortunately, his dreams were dashed when he discovered he couldn't stop a puck if his life depended on it.

Brandon Ramsey, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer

Brandon Ramsey designed the innovative auction platform that powers BigDeal.com, and he leads all the company’s technical efforts. Prior to BigDeal.com, Brandon was the former Head of Engineering for Yahoo! Shopping, the #1 shopping search engine on the Web. Brandon also led the launch team for a related site, Yahoo! Deals, and spent three earlier years on Yahoo! Search and Travel teams. Brandon began his engineering career with Farechase.com, the pioneering travel aggregator that was acquired by Yahoo! in 2004. He is a 2003 graduate of Auburn University.

In his spare time Brandon can be found trimming his rhododendrons into the shapes of animals, biking everest, repairing and modernizing ancient Assyrian looms or tending to his extensive ABBA memorabilia collection.

George Leimer, Co-Founder and Vice President of Operations

George Leimer is a co-founder of BigDeal.com and serves as the vice president of operations, heading up the company’s day-to-day business operations and customer service efforts. Mr. Leimer is an experienced technology executive, and has played key roles at both eBay and the Apple Online Store. Most recently George was a senior manager of online store merchandising for Apple, where he lead the multi-billion dollar Mac, iPod and iPhone businesses on the Apple Online Store in the Americas. He managed three main lines of business, with broad responsibilities including assortment planning, sourcing, business analytics, forecasting, strategic planning and initiative implementation. Previously, George was a senior director of customer support technology at eBay, managed the media categories for eBay’s Marketplaces business and was on the management team of Half.com where he served as Vice President, Operations, at Half.com. He also has held executive positions at Coretech and Softmart, Inc. George graduated with a B.S. in Management from Widener University in Pennsylvania. A long-suffering Philadelphia sports fan, George’s life will be complete when the Eagles win a Superbowl championship. Until then, he can be found yelling at his television on Sunday afternoons in the fall.

Joe Lazarus, Vice President of Marketing

Joe Lazarus oversees marketing at BigDeal.com. His professional background is in ecommerce marketing, product development, and business strategy. Before BigDeal.com, Joe worked for a number of popular websites including Yahoo!, eBay, Walmart.com, and JCrew.com. For two years prior to joining BigDeal.com, Joe ran his own consulting business, managing various projects for some Bay Area companies including OpenTable, LinkedIn, The Gap, and a number of early-stage startups.

Originally from Northern Virginia, Joe went to undergrad at Colgate University and received his masters at UT Austin. He currently lives in the Mission District of San Francisco. Joe's interests include music, the outdoors, art, food, travel, and taking bad pictures and videos with his overpriced camera. One of the Beatles once told Joe he was cool, though truth be told, the Beatle had been drinking. You can follow Joe on Twitter or through his blog at JoeLaz.com.

Tom Gordon, Chief Architect

As Chief Architect, Tom is responsible for making sure that the website works and grows properly. A dot com veteran, Tom is an expert at building fast and reliable large websites, having gained valuable experience at Yahoo and other companies since 1994. BigDeal.com is Tom's seventh startup :-o Tom recently worked as Platform Chief Architect at High Gear Media, and as Principal Architect at Yahoo. Tom has also worked at Nortel Networks, Bay Networks, Farechase, ACTV, WindWire, Netsation, and IBM.

Tom lives in beautiful Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he enjoys watching UNC Basketball (even though he graduated from NC State!) with his wife, twin daughters, and son. Tom learned how to program in 1978 on an Ohio Scientific computer with 4 Kilobytes of RAM (Thanks Dad!).

Jesse Proulx, Software Engineer

Jesse Proulx was one of LiveJournal.com's first employees, where he worked on feature development and human interface design. He left his position as Technical Product Manager to work as a software engineer for Dogster, a social network for pet owners, and later became a frontend developer at Jaxtr, a voice-based social networking service.

Jesse lives in the East Bay with his wife and their two dogs. He is an avid musician, and spends entirely too much of his free time playing video games.