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ALUMNI PROFILE
“Internaut” Herron Enables
E-commerce
By Laura
Butchy
Christine Herron ’91 has earned a place on
AltaVista’s “Women in Technology Power 20” for
her career spent developing new applications for Internet
technologies. To mark the April release on AltaVista’s
website of a special report on Women in Technology, its editors
produced a list of the industry’s most prominent and
influential women.
Herron is founder and CEO of Mercury2, a San Francisco-based
start-up that helps companies doing international commerce
understand the tariffs, taxes and regulations that are unique to
each country.
“Our vision is to eliminate the conflict that has arisen
between the open nature of the Internet and the regulation of the
real world,” Herron said.
Despite the dramatic recent growth of e-commerce, regulatory
borders remain between buyers and sellers. Conflicting policies,
rules, and regional patchwork regulations are obstacles to the
emerging online economy.
“Mercury2 is an enthusiastic participant in industry
efforts to identify solutions for a true global economy, and we
aggressively pursue supporting technical solutions,” Herron
said. “We watch the rules of international trade so the
players can play. We are the new Internauts.”
After graduating from Columbia, where she was a dean’s
list student majoring in English as well as captain of the
school’s cheerleaders, Herron received an M.B.A. from
Stanford. A dancer-turned-snowboarder, Herron worked at NetObjects,
Microsoft, eSchwab and Hearst New Media before founding
Mercury2.
She
worked out the initial plans for Mercury2 across her dining room
table with industry friends and advisers, and kick-started the
company with about $100,000 in personal credit-card debt. Now
Mercury2 is growing, with 17 full-time employees and about as many
contractors.
“We’re building something with enough inherent
value that the risk of real failure is pretty low,” Herron
says, even if it “ends up that it was just a great job,
instead of building the next Microsoft or Cisco.”
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