Ad Tech

“Personalization is not targeting. And that's kind of like in the ad tech world is like, well, we'd create personas. That's not personalization. That's taking a group and treating them the same way. Personalization is understanding Why you want something, and g…”

“There could not possibly have been a less sexy category than ad tech in 2016, 20 17. Forget it. No one was touching that.”

“I think what you're going to see is this whole industry, this whole ecosystem that sort of mirrors the ad tech world, but really isn't advertising at all.”

“So I think one of the interesting critiques of ad tech is that, like, it's still a lot more opaque than you would imagine. The answer to this question, like, are, like, there's a lot of indications that there's just a lot of chum and maybe fraud, fraud's a leg…”

“In the very early days of Snowflake, we could only sell into ad tech accounts. That's it. They were just selling to ad tech.”

“The people who are most skeptical about the space were ad tech people. I would talk to them and they would say, well, like, oh, ad block users don't want to see ads. That's why they're blocking them. And that, that sounded intuitive to them, but You know, to u…”

“In ad tech, actually, there's a lot of, there's two hundred billion dollars of waste, you know, in reacquisition and wrong acquisition.”

“Media tech and ad tech had kind of played itself out. And I had been on both sides. I had worked for Google and Facebook. I had worked for a challenge, a challenger startup, but the game had kind of consolidated.”

“Now they've all come together, and the CDPs that declare a winner, that's taking over those functions. So now we can have an end-to-end journey, manage the end-to-end journey, from when the first time an anonymous customer visits a website, all the way to when…”

“Over the last 10 years, if you started a company that did, like, fintech infrastructure or vertical SaaS for enterprise, the probability that your company became a billion-dollar company was astonishingly high. Whereas if you started something in consumer hard…”

“My basic thesis on advertising is that no one who doesn't work in ad tech understands any of it. Particularly people in tech. No one in tech who doesn't work on an ad tech team understands advertising. Like no one at Google who doesn't work on the advertising …”

“The last 25 years we've built up this sort of inverted pyramid of complexity, rent-seeking, arbitrage, Fraud, privacy, infringement, and god knows what else, on top of a cookie, and now that's kind of going to get turned off.”

“The crucible that is ad tech, I mean, it is literally one of the hardest industries to compete in, is an amazing learning ground for entrepreneurs because you just get the crap beat out of you constantly.”

“And so they're locking up all the growth in the industry, and that's what's putting out a business, things like media companies, as well as small business ad tech Players and other advertisers. No one can really compete with it.”

“I think what we see in the market is about six, seven X on net revenue and about, you know, two, two and a half on gross. If there's real, Growth and into the company.”

“If you look at the ad tech and or the advertising world at the moment, it's still very fragmented as an industry. And I think there are too many players. And this is like the former consultant who's talking. I don't think it's, you know, keeping the same numbe…”

“I think the reason you will see a consolidation, but you still have a lot of specialization in terms of, you know, being able to develop top-notch, state-of-the-art technology, and I do not think that the majority of publishers can afford, you know, to develop…”

“Well, you know, for us an ad tech company will generally be on a net revenue. So you were kind of asking about gross versus net. So gross being the total advertiser billings net being what we make after we pay the amount of publishers before, before an SG and …”

“What is happening, which is an evolution from, you know, the ad tech world and the traditional media agency world to much more marketing tech and own media assets and businesses trying to control the destiny with the customers much more directly.”

“If we don't do a SAS model is they would value us by the number of contracts we get in the length of time. So if we could get a company to say, commit to a two year contract where they'd spend extra year, that would be material to valuations.”

“The opportunity for fintech today is the same opportunity I saw in ad tech 15 years ago. It's just a blue ocean.”