Blockthrough

“He went from a million ARR to ten million ARR, and last year he sold his business for nearly a hundred million dollars, and this was effectively a bootstrap business.”

“We launched that in March of 2018. So when we launched it, we had like 28 days of cash left in the bank.”

“I ended up actually making a small investment in this company, and I'm really happy. It was my one of one angel investments, which I made before joining Mistral.”

“There was a lot of moments where I deferred salary. There were a lot of moments where, you know, we had to like pull 25 grand out of our ass to like make payroll. We didn't, we never missed payroll once during that time span.”

“There was actually a whole like generation of ad block Circumvention solutions like ours that, that started in that 2015 to 2018 period and like either flamed out, failed, you know, sold for pennies on the dollar or ended up, you know, pivoting away.”

“Ironically, we ended up buying one of them. So acquiring one of those companies and then the other one pivoted So many times that they don't do ad blocking anymore. So we actually ended up being the sort of the winner in the space.”

“I think our average investor return was like eight and a half X. Our very first investor did like 25 X, you know, a friend from high school.”

“Yeah, I think it was almost exactly two million in total.”

“And so they ended up acquiring us late last year.”

“We actually ended up getting ad block plus as parent company. So IO they ended up investing in us in late 2018.”

“We go a hundred dollars in revenue the first month, a thousand dollars the second month. 10,000 the third month, 20,000 the fourth month, 48,096 thousand, like.”

“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…”

“Ad blockers don't just block the ads. They also block all the secondary technologies that make the ads valuable to buyers. So that could be, you know, cookies for targeting. It could be you know, attribution technology technologies that measure whether the ad …”

“The vast majority of us ad block users are not militant ad haters. We just, you know, are really annoyed by a handful of obnoxious experiences, like, you know, pre-roll ads on YouTube.”

“In that time span between twenty-fifteen when we started the company and twenty-eighteen when we found product market fit we never had more than, like, four months of cash in the bank.”

“Like, it went from zero to a million in, like, four months, and then grew to ten million and got acquired for a hundred.”

“And ultimately Marty went off and he was able to like a few years into it, I guess a couple of years ago, he sold his company. He sold it for nearly a hundred million dollars. He didn't raise much.”