Professional Journey
Updated: January 2024
Early Career
I started scratching my entrepreneurial itch during my college years at Indiana University, where I teamed up with a good friend to help launch his magazine on campus—a trendier version of the student newspaper. We got the most prominent name at the time, Antwaan Randle El, featured on the cover of the inaugural issue and got support from local businesses. I graduated from Indiana University's undergraduate business program in 2000, at the peak of the dot-com boom. My friends either went to work for an investment bank or jumped into the day trading frenzy. I held out for a job working for an unknown sports marketing startup for less money than my peers. Instead, I came away with a fast-track education in sales, which was foundational for my career and still serves me well.
Fresh out of college with no real business experience, I was tasked with cold-calling executives from Fortune 100 companies to sell them luxury hospitality packages to major sporting events. I learned about rejection and persistence in a hurry. While I focused on my sales role as an individual contributor, I wanted to be more involved in building the overall business. I learned early on in my career that this was a natural tendency. For the rest of my time there, I worked hand-in-hand with the founder on developing initiatives to advance the business, including creating their digital footprint (website, demand gen, newsletter) and forging new strategic partnerships.
My desire to be close to entrepreneurship led me to work for a serial entrepreneur who later founded the famous Crumbs Bakery. It was one of the most fun jobs I've had. The business developed licensed novelty products based on consumer trends. We were a three-person team and could take an idea to production to store in a few months. While I was there, we created Jolly Rancher flavored Lip Balm, which is still sold today through different manufacturers. There, I learned two valuable lessons. Creativity has value, and you only need a little (resources, people, capital) to build something impactful.
Entrepreneurship False Starts
Working with great entrepreneurs early on in my career made me want to realize my ambitions to start a business. I partnered with another college buddy of mine to explore the idea of opening a fast-casual grilled cheese concept restaurant. Our thesis was that classic comfort food should be available to the masses. We wrote a comprehensive business plan and pitched it to former colleagues, family, friends, and the rest of our network. We had some funding committed to us. We secured distribution partners and suppliers and formulated the menu in my friend's parents' kitchen. Our plan was ambitious. We attempted to lease real estate in mall center food courts, which proved challenging.
I learned a couple of crucial lessons through the process. First, sometimes you have to start. Instead of focusing on getting into shopping malls, we could have started small (pop-up shop, food truck) to get it going. Second, a plan is just a plan. Execution is everything. We developed a comprehensive business plan, designed a menu, created a loyalty program, and had a million other ideas for making the concept successful. A few years later, a flock of grilled cheese concept restaurants and food trucks flooded the market.
I learned another key lesson early on in my career but didn't realize it then. Being early can sometimes be the same as being wrong. My brother-in-law and an ex-colleague planned to start a mobile messaging company (pre-smartphones). At the time, SMS was beginning to go mainstream. They saw an opportunity to build a platform that enabled restaurants, bars, and small businesses to drive foot traffic and sales through promotions sent via text messaging. I believed in the idea and knew I could add value to the team. I came up with the name M-List (for mobile list), developed sales materials, and conducted market research at my alma mater, Indiana University. The owners of the most popular bars and restaurants on campus were enthusiastic about the idea. We built the business model and secured a vendor to develop a mobile app. Ultimately, my brother-in-law and his partner decided not to move forward. This decision was disappointing at the time but turned out to be prescient. FourSquare and other companies that attempted a similar model got traction several years after the iPhone launched and smartphones became mainstream.
Finding My Footing (Startup Life)
I stumbled into online advertising through a chance meeting in Las Vegas while attending a friend's bachelor party. I ran into a friend who I met studying abroad in Spain during my Junior year of college. He had been working for a company selling online advertising and was doing great. He said I should join and that he would set me up with an interview. With no job and little money, I joined the company circa 2003. Digital advertising was nascent, and big brand advertisers had no significant digital presence. Most advertising on the web was performance-based, where direct marketers drove sales and generated leads online. It was still the Wild West when spam regulations and consumer privacy were not yet part of the conversation. I saw first-hand how effective digital advertising could be. I spent two separate tours of duty with that company with a slight detour between. During that time, I sold online advertising and built out email marketing programs that were significant profit drivers for both firms.
After those experiences, I continued to have the entrepreneurial bug. I teamed up with an ex-manager and former colleague to start our performance marketing company. We had a nice run, but the business could not sustain itself. More lessons learned. At that point, I wanted more stability and to work for a more established brand. I took my direct marketing experience to Publishers Clearing House. They needed help building out a digital business. I was the most innovative in one of the oldest and biggest direct marketing companies. While there, I helped clean up a mismanaged customer acquisition program. I had ownership of an annual digital budget of around $10M. With that budget, I created first-of-kind partnerships with AOL and Microsoft. I also hired two digital agencies, 360i and i33 (who later merged), to improve display and search buying initiatives. I was then recruited inside of the organization by the GM of the digital business, Alex Betancur, (who is still a mentor of mine to this day) to build out and monetize new digital properties leveraging PCH's Sweepstakes and Prizes engine.
There, I flexed my creativity and business development acumen. We formed an incubator within Publishers Clearing House to launch new digital businesses and create an ad monetization infrastructure, foundational for the digital business the company has built today. I helped develop one of the first gaming apps on Facebook and launched a Twitter client, enabling instant win opportunities for real cash and prizes. I also created a program to syndicate Publishers Clearing House's backend prize engine to other companies that could benefit from their sweepstakes expertise and infrastructure (legal, operational, marketing). We got through extensive legal and executive approvals and built the product. We found a launch partner, a social promotional platform, Wildfire Interactive , who later went on to get acquired by Google for a reported $450M. They integrated the product into their platform, which was a value add for their customers.
The relationships I built at PCH led me to my first startup role. I became close with a senior exec at the ad agency I hired at PCH, 360i, Josh Winograd, while working together. He went on to co-found AdoTube, a video ad tech company. He recruited me into startup life as an early employee, and I haven't looked back. I was their first BD hire, and it was there that I realized how much of an impact an early employee could have on a startup's growth. I built out the supply side of their business and drove publisher adoption of new technology (interactive video ads). Digital video advertising was still in its infancy, and interactive ad formats were starting to emerge. I was only about 15 months in when we got acquired by one of the leading global ad networks at the time, Exponential Interactive. They needed to bolt on a video business and liked our tech and agency reach. Looking back, even though it wasn't a large exit, I didn't realize how special that moment was. Many years later, I know how hard it is to get an exit.
I spent some time integrating the new team across a few offices but soon realized that I still wanted to be very much a part of a growing startup. Rather than a larger organization that had different incentives and aspirations. When a recruiter who I now call a good friend, Mike Adler, presented me the opportunity to join Innovid as their first BD hire, I knew it was the right fit. I was familiar with Innovid then as they were in the video space with a thesis similar to AdoTube's—better ad experiences for the consumer and more impact for the advertiser. Innovid attracted me because they were a tech pure play with no interest in getting involved in becoming an ad network or a DSP/SSP. I fell in love with the team and the culture and made an impact during an essential phase of the company's growth.
Again, I was their first BD hire, working closely with the head of revenue at the time, Frank Morgano, and the Co-Founders, Zvika Netter and Tal Chalozin. I drove publisher adoption of their technology and developed their publisher reseller business. Emerging video DSPs (Brightroll, Tubemogul, Adap.tv, Videology) became our largest clients. I managed a very profitable publisher-side business with few resources. After gaining broad publisher adoption, I focused on evangelizing interactive ads on connected televisions and over-the-top devices. I played an instrumental role in launching the first-of-kind interactive video ad on Roku in partnership with Sony Crackle. Before Roku's Ads SDK, when no standards existed. With the help of Tal and Michael Tuminello, our product lead at the time, which I still maintain a strong relationship with, we scaled the partnership with Sony and Roku. We then made more inroads with large publishers, including AOL, NBC, Fox, Conde Nast, and Viacom.
As Innovid came to an inflection point in their business, they pushed hard to build a video ad server servicing the buy side, which was a successful strategy. They later went on to go public at a valuation over $1B. However, at the time, it left me in a position where I didn't feel I could make as big of an impact as I had since I started there.
I wasn't seeking new opportunities, but I got a call from a recruiter with an interesting opportunity with a company based in Delray Beach, Florida. At that time, the South Florida Startup scene was nonexistent. They were down there because their founder, John Ferber , was living there. He had co-founded Advertising.com (later sold to AOL) with his brother Scott. Scott founded Videology (another video AdTech company), and I worked with him while at Innovid. They were attacking a problem in the industry that I was familiar with- bad advertising. They wanted to take Native Advertising, an emerging format, and scale it across the open web leveraging programmatic technology. Native advertising, which fits the form and function of a website or app, was (and still is) the primary form of advertising on all social media platforms. I had a good conversation with the CEO, Lon Otremba, and decided to take a trip down to meet the team. Impressed by the team and the opportunity, I was ready to join. It took several months after they raised their Series A before it became official.
Initially hired to develop their publisher/supply strategy and build out a partner ecosystem, I quickly became the right-hand to the COO/CRO, Jason Boshoff, working closely with the rest of the executive team. A few companies were emerging (TripleLift and Sharethrough among them) at the time with similar ideas around the Native opportunity, and I had to figure out what we needed to do to compete. We were building our sales team and driving demand for Native advertising from agencies and brands, and we needed to beef up our supply. The industry was not quite ready to transact native programmatically, and all the big supply-side platforms at the time had not yet built out capabilities. We needed to jumpstart the business, so we struck a multi-year, multi-million deal with CBSi to be their exclusive native monetization partner, gaining access to all their owned and operated properties. The deal was exactly the spark the business needed, and put Bidtellect on the map. We added several other premium properties to the fold, in addition to securing integrations with the traditional supply-side platforms for scale.
As we continued to build out both the supply and demand sides, we came to an inflection point in the business. With limited resources, we needed to choose a side. We knew we had an experienced sales team. We also had proprietary demand-side optimization technology superior to solutions from the traditional DSPs in the market. We recognized that we had to play to our strengths, and I was instrumental in driving this shift for the company. Over the next 18 months, I convinced the biggest native endemic supply-side platforms that we were not competitors and would be better off as partners. They all built an impressive roster of publishers, and we immediately benefited from the quality and scale of their networks. We grew those partnerships over the years and developed the largest ecosystem of native supply in the industry.
Transparency was becoming more critical, and self-service platforms (e.g., The Trade Desk) were taking off. We knew that to get big holding company business, we needed an enterprise-level DSP, which required all the bells and whistles buyers had access to in the traditional DSPs. I shifted my focus there. I listened to the market, directed our roadmap, and hired a new team to develop a competitive and differentiated DSP. Soon after, we closed our first deal with a major holding company and scaled self-service adoption to make up as much as 50% of our total revenue.
I then oversaw a strategic initiative to help offset downward pressure on media margins, creating proprietary solutions and developing partnerships to create new product and platform features, resulting in the company's most successful and profitable endeavor. I pushed the business to innovate and create differentiation to compete with the most significant platforms and DSPs. We evolved the platform into a contextual-first solution, which played to all of our existing strengths at a time when the future of cookies was uncertain. I identified and developed first-to-market partnerships for supply path optimization, sustainability, transparency, b2b, and advanced contextual solutions to sustain competitive advantages.
As consolidation continued to take hold of the industry and the scaled players consolidated advertiser spend, I knew that to survive as an independent DSP, we would need to seek out a strategic partner for the opportunity to scale the business exponentially. [MORE TO COME]
I'm proud of all I have accomplished at Bidtellect and grateful for the experience.
Next Up
As I seek out my next opportunity where I can continue to make a dent in the industry, I am dedicating more of my time to helping more early employees and startups. I coined the term "Angel Operator" to refer to an employee at a startup that has an outsized impact on the company's success. In most cases, these are employees who join at the earliest stages of the startup but can also be employees who come in later in the company's life cycle. The startup community at large should better support these employees. They should also have greater transparency around equity, options, and exit scenarios. When the financial benefits between employees, founders, and the VCs that back them are equitable, the entire startup ecosystem benefits.
[MORE TO COME]