James Carey Chief Technology Officer, Bordeaux Index

Company

Bordeaux Index is the largest seller of fine wine and whisky globally with offices in London, Bordeaux, Los Angeles, Singapore, Miami, Beijing, and Hong Kong. LiveTrade, their proprietary wine trading platform, is the largest of its kind and essentially a market maker, ensuring constant two-way pricing such that the producers, wholesalers, merchants, collectors, and investors who converge on the platform can have confidence around their ability to buy or sell a given wine. As a pioneer bringing transparency and innovation to a historically opaque, underserved and traditionalist market, they have been enjoying significant YoY growth with revenues reaching £145M in 2022.

Search Background

In light of aforementioned growth, propelled in no small part by LiveTrade, Bordeaux Index identified the need for an experienced CTO to build an in-house engineering team and complete an ERP transformation, while ensuring the platform is fit for continued, rapid scaling.

Requirements

The required candidate needed solid experience building distributed and scalable platforms, combined with an appreciation for good UX and empathy with end users, who in this case tend to be highly discerning consumers. Crucially, they would need to combine this with a more strategic and commercial point of view to identify areas where technology could be leveraged to unlock further growth, and then align a range of technical and non-technical stakeholders behind the vision. Direct sector experience was not a requirement, since Bordeaux Index is already the leader in its market, but in lieu of this, a track record of learning quickly and showing dexterity across different sectors, business models, and stages of development was strongly preferred.

Result

After a UK-wide search, Bordeaux Index appointed James Carey who had been serving as VP Engineering for Paradine. James is a dynamic technology leader with unusual commercial acumen, and a track record of driving rapid revenue growth via technology in a range of both start-up and corporate businesses in multiple market segments. His experience in building the exchanges at Betfair and Paddy Power Betfair was highly relevant, and James has been an exciting addition to the team.