ProQuo’s Founding CEO Takes a Sabbatical to Teach at Cornell

Steven Gal, who founded San Diego-based ProQuo to help consumers control their personal information and reduce their junk mail, bid a fond farewell in an e-mail blast this afternoon.

“I can’t say I saw this economic nuclear winter coming last year when I decided to take a sabbatical from tech startups and return to teaching after 13 years away,” Gal wrote. “It has been a roller coaster transition, but I am pleased that ProQuo’s new leader, Bob Nascenzi (former COO of TargusInfo) is now well on board. Today is my last day as CEO of ProQuo, and I will be remaining on the Board of Directors.”

Gal says he’ll be teaching entrepreneurship at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management in Ithaca, NY. But he plans to return to San Diego in a year.

Before he started ProQuo in 2007, Gal was a co-founder of San Diego’s ID Analytics, which analyzes consumer transactions for telltale signs of fraud. He worked there in various executive capacities.

ProQuo’s free online service enables consumers to review various mass-market mailing lists (for coupons, credit cards, catalogs, etc.) and decide with a click of the mouse what junk mail they really want to receive. In effect, it gives consumers a way to selectively customize their mailing list so they only get the catalogs they want, which also happens to make each list a more targeted—and valuable—marketing tool. ProQuo, which makes money by selling the customized lists, says consumers can reduce their unwanted junk mail by 50 to 90 percent within a few months. The startup has received a total of $15 million in venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson of Menlo Park, CA, San Diego’s Mission Ventures, and Western Technology Investment, a venture lender in San Jose, CA.

Gal says he’s excited about the change of scenery, and so is his family.

“My family and I are excited about our upcoming adventure,” Gal writes. “It is a privilege on so many levels—to return to my undergrad alma mater to teach, to get the opportunity to think, work and study with students and faculty again during the very interesting times in which we live—and to introduce my kids who don’t own long pants to a real winter.”

What he doesn’t say is whether he’s told his shorts-only kids that snowfall in Ithaca averages 120 inches a year.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.