SurfMerchants LLC is a Boston-based internet development firm founded in 1998 by Tony Felos, John Hsu and Greg Ansin.
We were partners in Prophet Media Group (started in 1988), a business that specialized in studio recording, CD replication, and … well … going out of business! From that delightful, heartwarming and soul-crushing experience we developed our tight focus on real world results and productivity that matters.
We’re not the company to go to for trendy tech, hipster artwork and visionary business concepts like UberTinderKittens.com. We’re not staffed with designers who hallucinate in five dimensions or programmer-monks who can kill entire civilizations with four lines of code.
We ARE the company to go to if you need technology to handle a business problem, to automate a tedious process … or just make your life easier. We’re staffed with decent, funny, fiercely hardworking people with decades of experience and a driving need to get stuff done.
We use open source tools because we want full control of our work. We only use our own people (no outsourcing to other countries) because we’ve seen that having a staff fully committed to our goals and our way of doing things (as it evolves over time) is the path to our best work.
Finally, we believe that a company can be fiercely competitive, demanding, and deeply practical while still being compassionate, accepting and as fun as a bucket full of caffeinated monkeys armed with silly string … and we try every day to be that company.*
Thanks for being interested enough to find out a little more about us!
Best wishes,
Tony Felos and John Hsu
Managing Partners,
SurfMerchants LLC
* Well, minus the monkeys … that would get old pretty fast
