Like everybody else I knew in Boston, I always looked forward to the ferry trip to Ptown. It was the best way to ease into the environment, to go from meetings and phone calls and traffic to the (relative) calm of Commercial Street and Herring Cove. But I’m the kind of guy who’s always thinking about business, too. It never really leaves. I don’t turn my phone off when I go on vacation. Maybe I should—my husband says I should!—but I don’t.
Anyway here we were on the ferry to Ptown, we had a condo there, still do, and pretty much spent the summer going back and forth to Boston as needed for work, and I’m sitting there working on my laptop and David was getting something to eat when this French guy comes and sits next to me. He watches me for a while and I kind of ignore him, I’m there with my husband, I’m not looking for any action, you know? But finally he asks me a question about my business (sorry, I don’t really want to be more specific than that), and we get to talking, and it turns out that he’s from Paris and is looking for some opportunities to expand some American businesses over there. And, long story short, we became business partners and still are to this day. And yeah, maybe we’d have met anyway and made that connection, but the fact is we did it on the ferry.