Viant $DSP CEO Tim Vanderhook

Auren Hoffman (00:00.888) Hello, fellow data nerds. guest today is Tim Vanderhook. Tim is the co-founder and CEO of Viant Technology, a public ad tech company with the NASDAQ ticker DSP, and that powers digital advertising through its identity-based platform. Viant even acquired MySpace, if you remember them from News Corp in 2011. Vion went public in 2021. Tim, welcome to World of DaaS.

Tim Vanderhook (00:22.317) Yeah, thanks for having me, Auren. Great to see you. Excited to chat. Excited to chat with you today on the World of TAP.

Auren Hoffman (00:24.64) I'm very, what did say? super excited to chat. Absolutely. All right. Now let's dive into, mean, you're, you're, we can be a bit all over the place since we're both kind of like OGs in ad tech world. You're more of an OG than I am, but let's talk about ad tech fraud. Like what is, what's the scale of the problem?

Tim Vanderhook (00:39.372) Yep.

Tim Vanderhook (00:47.123) ad tech fraud. Well, I mean, the hardest part is just describing what fraud is. You have things that are not necessarily fraud, but certainly low quality, like made for advertising websites was a big discussion earlier this year. But let's say those are low quality, not fraud. When I think of fraud, I'm thinking bots. That ads are going to bots and not to humans.

Auren Hoffman (01:04.866) Yep.

Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (01:11.887) And if you look at the bigger players like IAS or DoubleVerify, they'll tell you this is a sub 5 % problem on any given campaign with roughly reputable publisher partners on there. But there's some new technologies that have come out like Dr. Augustine Faux, an MIT scientist, he's created Faux Analytics, which is giving new insight into bots. And his numbers are between 25 and 35 % on any given ad campaign.

So based off of Dr. Fo's analysis, it's a bigger issue than we originally thought.

Auren Hoffman (01:48.17) If I'm a scammer and I run like a random site, know, the Orin Hoffman movie review, random site kind of thing, then yeah, I definitely have like an incentive to create bots to go to my site to pump up the ad impressions. But like if you're running ads on ESPN or something, like where's, is there fraud that could come in there?

Tim Vanderhook (02:09.751) Yeah, it's actually interesting when you talk to the experts in this space what the bots need to look like humans. And so they'll visit advertiser websites, they'll visit publisher websites. So it's not so obvious.

Auren Hoffman (02:21.537) got it. So they need to go, they visit the UASBN first to look like a human so then when they go do the fraud somewhere else.

Tim Vanderhook (02:26.189) Exactly. Exactly. And then hit their own inoperated inventory. So that's been a big issue. And these guys, it's very cheap to buy a domain name. And really, they used to have to steal content. Now you're seeing they're not even stealing content. They're using things like headless browsers and all types of way to try and get through without actually even hosting content and paying for web hosting. So the sophistication level is very, very high when it comes to ad fraud.

Auren Hoffman (02:42.35) Cause I can.

Auren Hoffman (02:56.598) Interesting. then, and so for like somebody like you that's like in the advertising business, obviously you don't want like your client's dollars going to waste and stuff like that. So is it, is it just like a cat and mouse game every week of like, of dealing with it or, or, and are, everyone in the same boat? And so there's like a collective action, or is there some people who are benefiting from fraud more than others in the ecosystem?

Tim Vanderhook (03:22.893) Yeah, well, when we look at where does the fraud originate, it's hard to put your finger on a person or an organization that's doing it, but you can see the bad actors popping up. And so if you take this approach of, we just won't buy ads on this big giant block list of domains that are there, the fraudsters have another thousand domains ready to spin up as soon as they shut the other thousand down.

Auren Hoffman (03:40.705) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (03:49.208) Correct.

Tim Vanderhook (03:49.933) I would say historically it's been a cat and mouse game. The go forward is now entering the world of artificial intelligence, being able to train it on what fraud looks like in a more real time environment and making a prediction on whether it is or isn't fraud. From the buy side, that's where we see the future going. That's where a lot of our internal efforts is making that same decision right prior to purchase so you don't buy unknowingly a bot.

and then it comes through and what a waste of money for ads going to bots. So more and more, you're seeing artificial intelligence in real-time decision-making and all the AI can do that very effectively. Obviously, historically, we've had machine learning to kind of do it, but as domains get shut down and pop up every single day and IP addresses rotate between the bad guys, making that real-time decisioning is pretty critical. And there's new companies like Dr. Faux who's come out.

And he evangelizes all over for you to look at with the bad actors, working with experts like him as well to improve the way that we go to market has been huge in gaining a leg up in this market.

Auren Hoffman (05:02.254) But let's say there's a privacy safe person who's going to visit ESPN.com or something like that. And they're a legitimate person, they're, you know, they're going in Safari and they're somewhat privacy centric. then separately, there's a bot that's going in kind of like to ESPN.com. like, how would you know one from the other? Like, how would you know one's a bot versus one's a person?

Tim Vanderhook (05:27.405) Yeah, I mean, one of the easiest ways is to figure out bots run on servers inside of data centers. And so you're trying to identify what does a server look like versus say my handheld iPhone or my MacBook that I operate on. And a lot of things that you'll see too is the number of cores available on the machine where a server that's being used as a bot will have, you know, let's call it 60 cores or more that are actually inside of that server. That's a huge one.

Auren Hoffman (05:40.567) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (05:55.364) and you could, you could see that when that's when that, when that request comes in. interesting. Okay.

Tim Vanderhook (05:58.497) Absolutely. Absolutely. So you can look at the device itself and what it's capable of handling. And when you see very high powered devices like a server in a data center, that's usually sign number one.

Auren Hoffman (06:11.706) So a bot isn't necessarily just like, because I would assume it could be buying like gazillion iPhones and running it off through there too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (06:18.477) No, yeah, you see that on social media in China where they've got them all on the wall. And those are farms. Those are effectively farms and those are hard to detect as well. There you've got to look at other things like network signals. How are they accessing the Internet? Where are they coming from? So there's a million different data points that you could analyze at any given time. And the truth is, it's a hard problem to solve. But I think from our side, since we represent the buyers of the advertising only,

Auren Hoffman (06:32.247) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (06:46.947) we're taking a much more aggressive stance in bringing commercial products to market that where we're not going to buy everything that we bought historically because we now know more.

Auren Hoffman (06:55.438) Yeah. Okay. You want to buy, okay. You want to, you want to have a 99 % you know, belief that it's not a bot before you buy or something like that. And then even if it, so therefore you will like not buy good users essentially.

Tim Vanderhook (07:00.653) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (07:07.617) Exactly. And you're using artificial intelligence to create predictions kind of in real time on the fly. And as the bad guys change, hopefully the AI detects it and can change very, very quickly as well. Because like you said, the cat and mouse game, it's a real game. There's new approaches to it. And when you're the buyer of the ad, you'll find out over time. But then what do we do different today than we used to do before? And that's real time decisioning.

Auren Hoffman (07:34.636) Now on the data front, what kinds of data are advertisers most interested in right now?

Tim Vanderhook (07:41.069) Yeah. mean, broadly speaking, you're seeing third party data get replaced with first party data. And I think that's a generic term, like the word data is generic. So we got to break it down a little bit. CRM data, their customer data is being used tremendously. And everyone looks at the big platforms like Amazon and say, what is that company done so brilliantly? it's leveraging transactional data and advertising has been probably the broadest move into first party data.

Auren Hoffman (07:51.192) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (08:09.955) but it's your CRM data, you want to put that into action. And what is that replacing? It's replacing retargeting. It's going after the loyal shoppers. Yeah, very much like custom audience. And I do think more and more you're seeing third-party data providers starting to offer data enrichment. And so if the old way was third-party data marketplaces, and now I'm Hulu and I know who the subscriber is, but I don't know anything about them.

Auren Hoffman (08:17.71) It's like a custom audience or something like that.

Tim Vanderhook (08:38.061) the gender, the income level, the education level, whatever it may be. So I do think for third party data, they're going to be enriching first party data of advertisers and publishers on a go forward basis. So more and more, everyone used to activate on third party data. Now it's, I've got to match Snowflake or whoever their platform is that they're using their customer data. They want to activate it in advertising. But in it's really two use cases.

The old way, Oren, when you were still heavy in ad tech, it was all about targeted advertising. It was finding that exact audience segment. Now that data is used equally or more for measurement purposes just to answer the question, what am I getting for my money? In a world of cookies or single devices or very few devices where consumers would browse and buy on the same device, in an omni-channel, omni-device world,

It's very hard for marketers to understand what they're getting for their money. And so first party data, the first use case that we talk to customers about is using it in measurement of advertising. Let's first understand what we're getting for the...

Auren Hoffman (09:49.208) Got it. So did this person then later on engage with your brand and did they have a higher propensity to engage with your brand or something like that?

Tim Vanderhook (09:52.279) Man later, how do we?

Exactly, exactly. So I would say measurement's been the big area where first party data and understanding or enriching that data to get more insights. Kind of the original principles, just a different way and kind of order than what we use.

Auren Hoffman (10:10.06) Back in like the day, you know, pre-internet when like Crest wanted to do measurement of like a TV campaign or something, they would run like a TV, a specific TV campaign in Phoenix and not run it in Tucson or something. And then they would try to see the lift if that, if that lift happened in Phoenix, but that would come, you know, take a long time, could take like many, many months later. So obviously kind of an expensive thing to run before you can kind of learn.

Tim Vanderhook (10:34.927) Just yeah.

Auren Hoffman (10:37.952) Is that the type of thing that's like still going on today?

Tim Vanderhook (10:41.233) absolutely. Geographic holdouts is very, very common. I would say in measurement, the most exciting part or the report that everyone looks at is measuring incrementality. If you're Coca-Cola or Ford, there is a certain percentage of customers that are going to buy your product this week because they buy it every week. Well, the question, and I think most marketers, digital advertising did a good job at data-driven decisioning and

Auren Hoffman (10:54.093) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (11:09.143) measuring what you're getting and trying to figure out how to attribute what drove it. But that no longer is the reality today. We used to log in to DoubleClick and you'd be able to attribute 90 plus percent of the conversions to who drove it. Now when marketers log in to DoubleClick, they can attribute maybe 30 % or just Chrome within that ecosystem from a last touch attribution. there's, think,

Auren Hoffman (11:31.18) Yeah, yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (11:34.189) That has created the opening for all new ways of measurement. you're right, geographic holdouts, I panel-based methodologies are gonna come back in the near term. And you're always gonna have a bucket that's addressable and measurable. And I think there's always gonna be a bucket that's not addressable and therefore less measurable, but still really, really important. And we even acquired Iris, which provides an ID, it's a content ID. And we think Iris,

the potential to move, to still do bidding, buying and targeting and measurement against the content ID in non-addressable environments. So, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (12:13.038) Guys, so it's like, so even back in the day, you would buy a specific magazine or you'd buy a specific, you know, TV show or something like that because of the types of people that would be the types of audience that that would attract.

Tim Vanderhook (12:27.765) Absolutely. So there's contextual relevance of the content. Like I'm Bass Pro Shops and if I target Western sports like bull riding, fly fishing, you're going to sell more fishing lines than if you're on Bloomberg. So there's that contextual relevance there. But I think what Iris provides from a universal ID. we're making it, we make it available to everyone in the ecosystem. Think of it as the MPEG file.

Auren Hoffman (12:40.012) Yep. Yep.

Tim Vanderhook (12:55.019) loaded in the content management system that's going to be consumed or viewed, that MPEG file gets put into a number. And therefore, I don't know what you're watching, but I know when Bass Pro Shops targets that number, the conversion rate is pretty similar, whether it's that video was watched through Hulu or Vizio or LG, because content comes out in many different apps as well. So it really is a global video ID.

regardless of the app where it's consumed, that as a marketer, you can buy it and bid against it and have predictable returns. And we think that's gonna be a very privacy friendly, unique approach to bidding and buying, but not around addressable targeting.

Auren Hoffman (13:40.364) Now people have been predicting like the decline of linear TV advertising for a very long time. And it seems like just in the last couple of years, have we actually been really seeing that decline happen very, very, very fast on the linear TV? What's your prediction on like the linear TV world and then where those dollars go?

Tim Vanderhook (14:02.297) Well linear TV is such a unique world, I think it ends in a huge cataclysmic explosion. Because what you have is content owners license their content, and then to license the content, you have to guarantee a number of subscribers if you're an MVPD, like DirecTV. And so your content costs go up as the lower subscribers you have, and you're not gonna be able to meet the needs of

writing the check for the content to get it in, to offer that MVPD service, if the declines on the consumer side switching to digital versions of MVPDs like Fubo or even DirecTV Stream, which is the streaming version. So I do think it ends in a, abruptly, given those dynamics of the way you have to commit content costs and subscribers. So to me, I think it probably has five years or less.

Auren Hoffman (14:32.78) Yeah. Yep.

Tim Vanderhook (14:58.285) before it's now all digital versions of MVPDs. But I do think MVPDs serve a place in packaging and bundling content.

Auren Hoffman (15:05.966) And these content channels, like they still, they somehow still get, they still have a premium. They still command a premium. Like, you know, my, my YouTube bill, my YouTube TV bill is like, I don't know, 85 bucks a month or something like that. So I pay over a thousand dollars a year to basically watch football. And I've got the football package on top of that, which is probably a few hundred bucks a year or something. I don't, I never do anything else on like, you know, quote unquote live TV.

Tim Vanderhook (15:24.099) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (15:29.807) Absolutely.

Tim Vanderhook (15:34.723) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (15:34.892) So there's some others still, is it just sports that can command that or for some reason, assume like, even though I never watched CNN, I assume CNN is still commanding something on YouTube TV.

Tim Vanderhook (15:46.503) I mean, definitely. Live sports equals the NFL. I think if you look at the last, just this last year out of the top 100 shows by viewership and mass viewership, 94 out of the 100 were NFL games. Yeah, 94.

Auren Hoffman (16:00.09) What? 94? So even more than like the NBA finals or whatever?

Tim Vanderhook (16:05.141) Exactly. And the one below that, believe was the college football championships were in there as like the 95th football.

Auren Hoffman (16:10.444) my, so football, so in America, football is the dominant thing. Okay.

Tim Vanderhook (16:15.225) by far dominant. I see, when I think of the opportunity, even though the viewership of the content is concentrated in the NFL, that just means the NFL is worth a lot of money, because everybody, it's mass appeal. When I think of that space and the opportunity, Chris, my brother Chris and I are also the founders of Zumo, spelled with an X, now owned by Comcast. And that, we always believe you had the traditional coaxial or satellite cable delivering the content.

Auren Hoffman (16:24.96) Yeah, yep.

Tim Vanderhook (16:42.825) IP enabled content streaming created much more flexibility, interactivity, the ability to change what is just flat video content. And I still to this day believe that Zoom-O, even though I'm biased and we're the founders of it, is best positioned with Comcast's ownership because you buy your internet access from them, they're giving you a TV that will auto log you into Netflix, Macs, all your services that are out there, all through a single bill.

Auren Hoffman (17:09.027) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (17:12.269) And I think Zumo is by far cable companies are best positioned to win this because they've laid that wire to your home and can offer such outstanding service levels, as well as frictionless in getting from one app into the other. It could be a lot less friction.

Auren Hoffman (17:31.212) What is going happen to these like legacy media companies like CNN's that are getting like one to two bucks a month per person for cable and stuff like how are these guys going to like, are these guys going to all go out of business? they going to somehow have to, are they going to change your business model to like a special subscription where like a small number of people pay 20 bucks a month for it? Or how do think things are going to change?

Tim Vanderhook (17:55.555) Yeah, mean, number one, just look at the most successful companies in the space. And I think that's where you look at someone like a Netflix whose pure subscription, just the fact that everyone's getting into ads. I wrote a LinkedIn post about this like a year and a half ago when they did the announcement or whenever it was. The available average revenue per user, the ARPU associated with advertising on a monthly or quarterly basis is so substantial, you can almost double your revenue.

Auren Hoffman (18:04.813) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (18:24.655) If you look at the old traditional way, profit even more, yeah, because it's 98%.

Auren Hoffman (18:26.798) We certainly

Tim Vanderhook (18:37.261) Definitely. It's a digital good, so you really have some labor associated and that's that. But when you really look at the ARPU for an organization coming from ads, it's too great to ignore, which is why Netflix came in. The other reason is if you want to sign live sports to carry it on Netflix or Prime Video, live sports equals ads. You must have ads. There's time breaks. There's all this stuff. So.

Auren Hoffman (18:59.905) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (19:02.979) They have to build all that infrastructure and get it all in place. And I think you're seeing that with the Tyson fight that aired on Netflix. These are dry runs to getting more live sports content across their app.

Auren Hoffman (19:16.088) Can we start to see like better ads that are like within the live sport? you know, obviously you always see it on like the, you know, the billboards when you're watching the sport or on the people's jerseys and stuff like that, like they already have kind of ads built in, but we see more targeted ads that are, you know, where Tim and Orin will see slightly different ads when they're watching the same game.

Tim Vanderhook (19:40.919) Yeah, no, everyone's going to see different ads. mean, the principles of digital advertising, buying the users who are likely to buy your product or service, that's going to continue. I think the exciting innovation, the things that we think about in the future is how do you make an ad like for Bank of America in context to a scene that ended on a beach? You're going to have problems like that where the ads I do think will be modified on the fly.

Auren Hoffman (20:04.259) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (20:09.228) Mmm

Tim Vanderhook (20:09.483) using artificial intelligence to be placed in context of that episode that you're watching.

Auren Hoffman (20:16.062) I got to, it's kind of a continuation on that. Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (20:18.575) To a degree, yeah. Or just, you know, rather than I'm at a veterinary clinic, maybe I need to be in a jungle or maybe I need to be on a beach. How do you make that advertiser be more in context of the video versus the old way of I want to target my ads at the context category of finance users or whatever. So I think in making the ad relevant to who that audience is behind the content, I think there's big opportunity to improve

the results of your ad campaign with that type of.

Auren Hoffman (20:50.382) Yeah, like I watched the Tyson fight on Netflix and on the ropes had Experian ads, but they were a little like painted on the ropes. So like every single person who watched the Tyson fight, either, whether they were in the arena or they're watching on TV like me, all saw the exact same, you know, Experian ad, but I can imagine a scenario in the future, those ropes are just green and, and maybe in, in person, you'll all see the same thing, but

Outside of it, you'll see something, you know, you'll, you're watching on TV, you'll see, everyone will see something different.

Tim Vanderhook (21:23.279) Yeah, mean, Omar, the old Blue Chi founder, if you look at his new business, Rembrandt, very much virtual product placement. So yeah, if I'm a content owner, when we looked at the business at Zumo, it was, you know, how much ARPU are we getting? That's number one, but how much time in consumption of the video content is there? The problem with the current setup is someone watches, let's say, an hour worth of content and you have ad pod breaks.

Auren Hoffman (21:31.703) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (21:51.031) And we know that those pod breaks create friction and users leave. They'll change a channel, whatever it be. So I think that the future model, if I were on that side, which we're not anymore, but is you need to monetize every second that a user is consuming your content, virtual product placement, on-screen banners, things like that. think you're going to see more experimentation to drive advertising revenue from the moment someone tunes in.

Auren Hoffman (21:56.023) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (22:18.851) versus today's setup, which is the old way of a minute and a half or two minute pod break every seven minutes, which creates a lot of friction.

Auren Hoffman (22:25.101) Yeah.

And it's just so like the way people consume content, especially like kind of live kind of is so different where they may have like a screen on their phone at the same time that they're watching something. My son, who's kind of like crazy, he watches four football games at once. So he's got the four things all on the same screen on the big screen. He watched it once. And then he just kind of like.

moves around on the sound to the one, you know, three of them have commercials. He goes to the other one that does have commercials or the one that looks, well, they're in the red zone. He moves to the sound of the one in the red zone. And somehow, because he's younger, he can like bring it all in at one. And I see like more and more people are going to, are going to kind of multi-watch stuff.

Tim Vanderhook (22:58.67) I'm going to

Tim Vanderhook (23:11.303) definitely. mean, you see the generational changes, multitasking just in general. I think our generation is pretty good at multitasking. We're more used to having something on TV and consuming through our phone. Kids are that on steroids times 10. I mean, even if you look at YouTube videos now, you've got two videos playing at once. And I asked my son the other day, how are you paying attention to what's going on? And he explained, no,

He's making fun of this and it's a point of view video, so you need both. But their ability to ingest information is like no generation we've seen. So it's gonna be very interesting to see how it changes.

Auren Hoffman (23:42.103) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (23:50.06) Yeah, it's unbelievable. Now on the, on the data front, like I assume like this third party data is like going to become smaller and smaller part of the ecosystem or, have we kind of bottomed and it's not going to get any smaller.

Tim Vanderhook (24:06.733) You know, think cookie deletion already hurt third party data providers. There's chunks of the market that you couldn't activate spend, therefore you had to spread them. Yeah, so I think a lot of the pain has already been felt that's there, but certainly you're seeing a breath of fresh air from data companies getting into the enrichment game and trying to work with other parties who want to learn more about their audiences. And it's just rather than activating

Auren Hoffman (24:12.493) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (24:16.332) Yeah, safari and you know.

Tim Vanderhook (24:36.855) at the real time ad moment, they're going to be integrating their data to tell you more about your customers for you to learn new insights from. So I still think there's opportunity. I think they've felt a lot of pain that's out there, but I think your point is well taken that it's probably a first party world first and third party world second moving forward. But I see room for everybody in that maybe market share changes a little bit.

Auren Hoffman (25:05.996) Now it also seems like, and there's this joke that in the tech world that everyone becomes an ad network. and that joke seems like more and more real every day. Like, like every company, you you talked about Netflix, which is maybe more obvious, but it's like everybody, Walmart has a massive, you know, multi-billion dollar ad network. And it just seems like everyone is becoming an ad network as everyone becomes an ad network. Like, does it mean like

Tim Vanderhook (25:11.832) Of course. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (25:33.006) the ad tech companies, whether be Vine or all these other ad tech companies are going to become like more important because they need to like, they can't like all do it themselves and need to power or how do you think like dynamics change over time?

Tim Vanderhook (25:43.671) Yeah, I think we serve advertisers. So I think about solving their problems a lot. And if you think about an advertiser that's very large, pick anyone, Procter & Gamble, Nike, McDonald's, they're going to work with everybody. They're going to work with Google, Meta, TikTok. They're going to be all over the place. Their big need is understanding what they get for their money from all that ad money being in market simultaneously. And that's a big challenge to solve and one that data.

Auren Hoffman (25:50.017) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (25:59.149) Yep.

Tim Vanderhook (26:12.735) and analytics can really bring lots of insight to tell you how to spend that smarter, or at least that's the long-term goal and the ambition. Everyone else, there's buy side, and we break down the world when we talk to investors or customers, there's really only four DSPs. There's a lot of people who say I'm a DSP, but self-service, where you could log in with a username and password and self-direct all your activities.

And by size, they're Google, Trade Desk, Yahoo, still a very large ad tech assets, and Viant. Everyone else is just a sell side pretender that they're a DSP and they're there to sell you more of the advertising either off their property or not. And that's Google's point of view, it's Yahoo's point of view. So there's really very few buy side only DSPs. And on the buy side, everyone else is a publisher and we're gonna work with you to some degree.

The question is, how do you measure and attribute what drove the sale? And there is no perfect science to it if you're Coca-Cola or a McDonald's. You have to make assumptions and make bold claims, but letting data lead you that way.

Auren Hoffman (27:22.466) Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. the, mentioned Trade Desk, like why have they been so successful? Like why is that company done so well? I mean, you know, we both know CEO, we know other people work there. They're obviously super smart, talented people. They've run a great playbook, but like they're just so much bigger than everybody else. Like what did they do right?

Tim Vanderhook (27:48.835) Yeah, mean, a lot of things as an entrepreneur, you know this, are the right move at the right time. And I think the trade desk made the right moves at the right time. Number one, starting with their name, which was the trade desk, which is to power and claim allegiance to agency trading desks. That's where the name comes from. So I think, and at the time, agency trading desks were trying to get created and ad networks were making a lot of money. We ran an ad network back then.

Auren Hoffman (27:56.589) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (28:18.617) to very successful in the DSP became a way to partner with the agencies and drive a lot of spend. Their anti-Google positioning also played really, really nicely. think was really strategic that in any world, Google has competitors. So in theory, you can win 20 % of the customers in the market by being anti-Google. So I do think both of those combinations of things were the right moves at the right time.

Auren Hoffman (28:29.868) Yep.

Tim Vanderhook (28:46.137) But I don't think those same moves, if executed today, would create another trade desk. You've got to out innovate. In today's world, you've got to out innovate, use new technology that's coming to market, be first to market, be the thought leader behind it, and then innovate faster than everybody. And that's the hardest part of ad tech. Just in the long run, we've been in this for two and a half decades now. In the long run, you can never stop innovating.

Auren Hoffman (28:50.807) Right, yeah for sure.

Tim Vanderhook (29:14.287) when it comes to ad tech, because there's always someone else out there who's been thinking about a problem for a long time and can execute really, really well. So to me, the go-to-market today is very, very different. And it really stems with the use of artificial intelligence on top of this industry that is the big data industry. Programmatic advertising deals in more volume of data than most other industries out there. So it's like a great

blend of two.

Auren Hoffman (29:44.814) The business is so much bigger than even like me who I was in the business for so long. But if you had asked me 10 years ago, like, could you build a DSP, which is really just like a piece of the business that has a $60 billion market cap? I would have said, no way. Like that's impossible. Like, like you're smoking something. Like I wouldn't, I wouldn't even like thought it was possible, let alone like that. So it's just crazy that like these things are happening.

Tim Vanderhook (30:00.793) No possibility. No possibility. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (30:11.48) Like this market is so much bigger than I think anybody has understanding.

Tim Vanderhook (30:11.826) yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (30:15.881) it's, I mean, I think when you hear things like it's a $1 trillion market, we're so used to big numbers, but $1 trillion being spent every year buying ads is crazy big. I mean, that is a huge industry when you look out across. And I think we get lost because we're used to big numbers just in society. You get lost into how big of an opportunity that is because we've seen it built, advertising built Google.

Auren Hoffman (30:22.765) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (30:28.546) That's super crazy. Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (30:45.623) It's generating all the profits at Amazon. We know Apple's lurking and they're coming and their app store, their ads for app stores driving huge increases in profitability. So just an absolutely massive market and what a great ecosystem to participate in to try and drive growth.

Auren Hoffman (30:50.028) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (31:03.854) No, agent, you know, the agencies are really interesting and they're like, they're your partner, they're your customer. we're now we're seeing two of the very largest agencies that have decided to merge together. Like, how do you think that, how do you think the agency market is going to change over the next few years?

Tim Vanderhook (31:22.637) Yeah, I think what you have is a very mature industry that's a service industry. So it's heavy people costs that are there. I think in the future, the answer is obvious. You need productivity gains. And the way you get those is you invest in technology through build, buy, partner, whatever. They'll go through that whole analysis on their own. But that's an industry that needs substantial productivity gains to continue and be, I guess, more compelling.

Auren Hoffman (31:51.16) They've tried like over the years, like every every few years they buy some sort of tech company and like it just does either the antibodies for whatever reason doesn't work and they go back to that kind of more service oriented thing.

Tim Vanderhook (32:02.807) Yeah. And I do think that's going to change because it's how they get paid by customers. The traditional ad agency holding model is one of temporary staffing. If you're GM, you need a thousand people to run your advertising account. They hire them. They fill the roles. I think where you're starting to see lots of discussion is advertisers talking to agencies about producing outcomes with the ad budget. And in a world of outcomes, you're able to change the way the compensation model goes.

I do think the compensation model of the historical agency model has held them back from really investing in technology. But you're seeing the early discussions have now moved to outcomes. We'll see if that's followed by action by the actual advertisers.

Auren Hoffman (32:47.542) Are there like, like if you had to kind of like think about like generally the winners and losers over the next decade, are there like non-obvious kind of categories that you would be thinking about?

Tim Vanderhook (32:58.798) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (33:04.847) you know, when I think of winners and losers, it's really about price dislocation right now. Yeah. and I think when I look at where is the carnage, the carnage is in linear television right now. I do think, out of home historically has gotten, had a lot of carnage and in billboards in strategic locations work really well, in terms of notifying the general consumers about whatever it is, the product or service. So.

Auren Hoffman (33:11.063) Okay.

Auren Hoffman (33:27.672) Super well. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (33:32.364) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (33:33.857) I think there's been the most carnage in linear TV and I think there's probably a lot of value to be had there given where they're all trading right now. And so you're seeing a lot of &A trying to take advantage of that potential future value creation. That being said, if you were linear only with no streaming assets, you're in a real tough spot. I'm talking about just simply transitioning that content to a streaming platform. There's a lot of uncertainty in that market. So values are down and I bet.

a whole bunch of people are gonna make a whole bunch of money by picking up linear TV assets that are probably undervalued right now for the entertainment value they deliver.

Auren Hoffman (34:12.706) This idea of like a network or a channel, you know, you and I grew up and we would go to like channel seven ABC or something like that. or even when there's cable, maybe we didn't exactly know the channel, but we'd go to MTV and we turn it on and we'd watch MTV or something like that. Like all of that has gone away in the last 10 years. I mean, there's still some people who are like over 60 that may do that, but like, this is very, very, or maybe some people still like their news junkies and they still go to like these news channels.

And they watch them. But even those are like, you know, really starting to go down pretty dramatically. Like we have, we still may have an allegiance to a show or something, but like, I don't know that my kids know any like who produced it, where the produce like they might know they can find it on Netflix versus on, on Disney plus versus Hulu or something. but that's a bit, sometimes I don't even know that I'll just like go to the Apple TV and put it in and like, it'll tell them where it is.

Tim Vanderhook (35:04.164) Yep.

Tim Vanderhook (35:10.603) Exactly. I mean, the linear TV world was asking too much of consumers. You need to show up in front of a TV at this time if you want to watch this show. In today's world, no one can do that. So it makes sense. Everything's on demand and the ability to pull it down. And what does that do? It grows consumption because I get to watch that show on my time when I actually have the time versus that set time frame. So I do think it just grows the overall category of consumption.

Auren Hoffman (35:19.67) Yeah, it's crazy.

Tim Vanderhook (35:40.419) by having more flexibility on how you can access that content. And that's gonna grow the overall category in Pi for CTV.

Auren Hoffman (35:47.948) Now, like podcasting is growing and more and more podcasts have ads, but they have like old school ads where like, you know, it's like the Lex Freeman ad is for everybody who listens to Lex Freeman. it's like, then almost like it's him reading a script almost like it's really old school. It's like really going back to like the fifties of like him reading a script about why he likes this particular shampoo or something. And it goes out to everybody.

Now I know that at the, amount of dollars spent on podcast ads is really tiny today, but how do you see something like that evolve?

Tim Vanderhook (36:22.323) mean, streaming audio over the last year was growing, probably the fastest grower of all channels. We said on our last earnings call, it now represents 10 % of ad spend across the platform. Streaming audio and a lot of that was... Yep, and it's growing gangbusters. And so what's great about podcasts, there's similarities and differences. The similarities is you have...

Auren Hoffman (36:35.16) Wait, what? Streaming audio is 10 % of ads? Holy, I had no idea it's that high.

Tim Vanderhook (36:50.031) attention by consumers when they're listening to podcasts or watching an NFL game. Right. Or social media, you might get me for a split second or I'm looking at different stuff. So it's very, very high attention relative to pricing relative to CTV because it's more audio. It's usually cheaper, but you have the same level of consumer attention. And so we see audio driving huge

Auren Hoffman (36:54.882) as opposed to like music where it's like in the background. Yeah, it's a good point.

Tim Vanderhook (37:17.599) contributions to incremental conversions by advertisers who are measuring it. And so I think streaming audio could get as high as like 25 % of the spend of a marketer. think TV, if you look at the historical, it's always been around half. So combined, that's 75 % of marketers' budgets. And it's because you have such high engagement by consumers, the impact of the advertising is substantial, relative to a banner ad, relative to

a billboard on the side of the freeway.

Auren Hoffman (37:50.466) Yeah, it's really interesting. Now a few questions about being a public company. So first of all, like your ticker is DSP, which I love. It's just great branding. know, a few other guys did it like Salesforce said that was CRM. I know Nextdoor did that with KIND, K-I-N-D. But, but it's pretty rare for companies to like brand their ticker. Like why did you do that? And why don't more companies do that?

Tim Vanderhook (38:07.673) Yep.

Tim Vanderhook (38:14.893) Yeah, well, our biggest issue when we went public, we were trying to solve a lack of awareness in the industry problem. There's also balance sheet and all other reasons to go public. one of the big...

Auren Hoffman (38:24.492) Yeah, because you could have been like viant, like V-I-N-T or I don't know what it would been, something like that, VNT or something, you know.

Tim Vanderhook (38:32.771) Basically, no one knew who Viant was. Everyone knows what a DSP is. So we wanted to put the association together and we were clearly thrilled when we looked up the ticker and it was available. And it it felt right from the very beginning to associate what are we, we're a DSP. Let's put what we are as the ticker to drive the association to investors, customers, partners. So everyone understands we are a DSP. And I think it's a pretty clear sign.

Auren Hoffman (38:37.304) Yep.

Tim Vanderhook (39:01.315) to our customers that we're going to be buy side only for the long tenure of our, which is how you take a trip. Yeah, exactly.

Auren Hoffman (39:06.126) Yeah, right. Because it's like hard to change your ticker. Yeah, yeah. Why do you think more people don't do that? Because like you could you could imagine like most people it's like some sort of shortened version of their name or something.

Tim Vanderhook (39:18.925) Yeah, I mean, I think if you're a company with huge awareness, the ticker of your name makes a lot of sense. But I think if you're a company, a B2B company like Viant, that's a small cap, it's very hard to stand out and like getting to being a public company. Very few amounts of companies are public companies, but even amongst the public companies, very small amounts of companies are who investors are keyed off of.

Auren Hoffman (39:24.803) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (39:44.385) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (39:45.063) Even when you get public, it's like there's another door in the private club you just got in that you've got to get through as well. So it's a never ending mirage that we're forced to deal with as well. It's just driving awareness that, we even exist. Just look up the ticker. Then they'll analyze the financial performance. But it's hard being a public company. Even once you get there. We've been public now since 2021, and it still feels like every other meeting I ask people, hey, do you know who we are? And they say no.

Auren Hoffman (40:14.124) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (40:14.443) Never heard of you and it's like, 25 years in no one's heard of us. So yeah, it's From marketing marketing matters a lot and that ticker symbol the association We try and be really thoughtful when we came to market and it felt right from the very beginning. So we just rolled with it made the decision

Auren Hoffman (40:33.314) Now being public in some ways gives you more credibility. So I assume if you're like working with customers or they have a more of a sense you're going to be around and is that part of the reason that you went public is just like the credibility that it gives you.

Tim Vanderhook (40:47.573) Absolutely. And as well as having public financials goes a long, long way when people are evaluating partners. And so like we have a really strong balance sheet, $200 million of cash, no debt. We generate cash flow every quarter, EBITDA profitable, all the great aspects of a great company, but now it's public for everyone to see. So if you are a wall drink,

Auren Hoffman (41:03.043) Yup.

Auren Hoffman (41:09.826) God, because if you just told customers that before, they wouldn't know that if you were telling them the truth. But now, now it's like, now it's like it's there. It's like anyone can go see, can go look it up on Yahoo Finance or something.

Tim Vanderhook (41:14.191) truth or you don't believe you.

Tim Vanderhook (41:21.359) Absolutely. And that's a great part of being public. There are major negatives to being public. Like when our stock prices went from post IPO high of 69 down to 330 or whatever it is, the same amount of cash we had, that too is public. So it is an adjustment in running it. But after three years now, and we've already hit rock bottom, once you're there, you're like, well, it can't get worse for the most part.

Auren Hoffman (41:46.286) What, what is it like? Cause like, you know, you're, you're either, I'm sure there are weeks where your valuation changes by 10 to 20%. Nothing in the business has changed. and, and sometimes it's 10 or 20 % up and maybe 10 or 20 % down. And it's just like the market doing whatever the market does. Like, how do you deal with either the super highs or the super lows of your employees during those times?

Tim Vanderhook (42:14.637) Yeah, it's really hard. The great part is on the upswing, it's great because then people are firing on all cylinders and there's no detractors internally, everyone, it's kumbaya. It is certainly hard to, one thing when the stock price is sliding, we had a tough time recruiting new executives into the org because the one thing that Wall Street does is it is validating to the public.

Auren Hoffman (42:22.006) Yeah, woohoo, yeah, yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (42:41.347) They either validate you a winner or validate you a loser. And so when that volatility happens in stock price, it is you've got to sell really, really hard at why this is a great company and why you feel good. You're running twice as fast just to stay in place. So that's certainly a big part. But if I back up and I say, it better or worse to be a public company? The positives far outweigh the negatives in running a public company.

Auren Hoffman (42:41.549) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (43:09.913) The credibility you mentioned, access to capital. As soon as you become a public company, you have cheaper access to capital than almost every private company.

Auren Hoffman (43:18.03) What are you, do you need access to like, is like, do you need debt or stuff or is.

Tim Vanderhook (43:23.0) We don't, but let's say if you're a public company and you want to do a large acquisition, something presents itself.

Auren Hoffman (43:27.382) Yeah, okay. So if you want to acquire something and you want to quickly, you want to quickly get $200 million of debt or something. Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (43:30.927) You can raise capital in 48 hours. can have it all debt, equity, what's the right structure? Obviously, things have to make sense and logical, but access to the capital markets, both equity and debt is a tremendous advantage in the the biggest advantage that big tech has over everyone. They can raise money with the cheapest cost of capital. Therefore, they can do any industry that they want aggressively. So but certainly the positives of being a public company.

Auren Hoffman (43:37.623) Yeah, yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (44:00.171) I encourage everyone, if you're running a company and you have the ability to get public, you should do it.

Auren Hoffman (44:05.026) And you even think like if your market cap is, you know, $250 million, like you should go public type of thing, or is there some sort of threshold where

Tim Vanderhook (44:13.115) Well, okay. There probably is a threshold around 500 million. I saw investor interest when we were below 500 million, very low, hard to fill a room when you're giving presentations. At investor conferences, your meetings get real thin. You got a lot of time for lunch. And I think there's some logic to that.

Auren Hoffman (44:25.485) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (44:33.038) Right, because they can't own more than 9.9%. So all of a sudden, yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (44:35.949) Right. And what are your daily trading volumes? If I get in and I need to get out, can I get out? There's all these very logical concerns, but I think around 500 million to a billion, there is a great set of investors that focus on small mid cap companies that they're deploying money against. And if you are successful, you're going to naturally get the big investors over the course of time when your market cap allows them to get there. So to me, I mean, after having done it run

Auren Hoffman (44:39.713) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (45:06.159) I've raised VC, I've raised private equity, we've raised 150 million of debt, we've taken a company public and access public equity. Private capital raises are 10 times harder than public capital raises because you've got so many more credibility questions. Who's your auditor? Tell me more about you. I got to do customer checks. When that public equity side, if you have the ability to cross that chasm, you really should because it also helps you become

a better run company as well. You have quarterly board meetings. You've got to have the materials done. And it really makes you a machine because of the regulatory framework. You've got to be to the right stage. You can't be too small. But if you can do it, we're only today post-Iris acquisition, we're 380 employees. So we're not a huge company by employee size, but we're a billion three market cap and have a great balance sheet because the public markets enabled us to get public. And I would say,

Auren Hoffman (45:40.024) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (45:55.83) Yeah, yep.

Tim Vanderhook (46:05.453) What a great setup if you're running a company to have a great balance sheet, no debt, access to investors overnight almost if you need to. mean, those are great things to have on SpeedDot.

Auren Hoffman (46:16.126) By the way, your market cap to employee ratio is quite high.

Tim Vanderhook (46:20.495) yeah. yeah. And then to get on it, once you do pull out of the rut, because we fell in a deep dark hole from $4.4 billion market cap to like $300 million market cap. And we had almost the same amount of cash. So it was effectively zero. I mean, at one point, I told investors, if you do the math, we have $350 per share of cash. The stock's trading at $3.35. If you buy the share, it's effectively free.

If that's not convincing enough, you just don't buy the stuff. So a whole bunch of people got into that time and just made boatloads in pulling out of it. But when you crawl out of that hole, the team that you had in place does feel invincible. And I think that's what creates the next potential trade desk is you go to war and you win and you come out of it stronger, stronger for having done it.

Auren Hoffman (46:53.772) Right, right, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (47:16.162) Another company that we haven't talked about that I'd be interested in your thoughts on, which is to me, like the biggest surprise over the last 10 years is at Blovin. And, you know, it's like a hundred billion plus market cap. Like, what is your thoughts about like what they did right?

Tim Vanderhook (47:25.455) tremendous.

Tim Vanderhook (47:31.405) Yeah, I mean, they're the world's best ad network. They're an ad network business model. They've got they've bought a bunch of assets. They bought an SSP, but they operate as an ad network. And I think what you get there is much more volatility around the revenue and profitability versus a trade desk, which is going to have a lower growth profile, more predictability because DS self-service DSPs are stickier, but it's a net revenue gap accounting reporting.

Auren Hoffman (47:41.815) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (48:00.973) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (48:01.077) AppLovin is gross accounting, gap revenue reporting. Just that change alone means huge volatility in revenue growth rates. So I think the challenge for AppLovin is can they maintain these unbelievable growth rates? Unbelievable, more power to them. But I think what separates both the trade desk and AppLovin, regardless of which business model is best, I have my opinion. If I'm choosing between the two, I go with the trade desk, but I'm biased.

Auren Hoffman (48:14.55) Unbelievable, yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (48:30.115) We're a self-service DSP versus AppLovin. We used to run specific media, large ad network. The volatility of having to go re-win budgets quarterly versus training and certifying people on how to use your software. I prefer the trade desk model versus AppLovin, but if you look at public investors, they're saying AppLovin's better and it's pretty incredible. That being said, the difference of AppLovin and the trade desk versus all other public companies,

Auren Hoffman (48:31.544) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (48:35.703) Yeah, I

Tim Vanderhook (48:58.999) is that those are founder led businesses and those are the most valuable public companies, I believe, over the long run. If I'm an investor, if it's founder run, I'm willing to prescribe more value because I've seen it over 25 years.

Auren Hoffman (49:01.196) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (49:12.728) Well, they can make hard decisions. It's a lot easier for them to make hard decisions. They, and they have long-term skin in the game where they're going to own like a fairly large chunk of this, of the company. and yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (49:24.811) All incentives are aligned and they're the smartest people in the room. And you gotta find those too. And I tell everyone that knows myself, my brother Chris, you should buy our stock and make money off of the Vanderhooks. Because that's what's cool about the founder led public companies. You can actually make money off of that person's brain power and when they fail and we might suck at it, but after 25 years, we can't fail that bad. it's.

Auren Hoffman (49:45.56) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (49:51.663) If anything, it peters out, but you should bet on known horses. The one of the biggest things I kick myself is looking at the Google valuation when they did a double Dutch auction for their IPO and I've made fun of it. They were at a $1 billion valuation and I just poo-pooed them, but clearly was one of the best businesses ever created of all time. And so I always encourage people in ad tech to invest in other people in ad tech that you think are smart.

Auren Hoffman (50:12.536) Yeah, absolutely.

Tim Vanderhook (50:20.271) because you might as well make money off of them that are low.

Auren Hoffman (50:22.508) Yeah. And it's not to me, such as the founder led thing per se, but it's just like what percentage of the business is owned by the CEO and the board, right? Like what percentage and then the employees, like what percentage of the business is owned by that? And a lot of these companies, it's like 2 % is owned by the employees, the CEO and the board or something like to me, they're just, they're going to have very different incentives for a long term.

Tim Vanderhook (50:43.823) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (50:49.312) Now, in some other scenarios, see like the CEO, the board and the employees own like 50 % of the company. Okay, well, now we're much more aligned with where the company is going to go.

Tim Vanderhook (50:59.875) Yeah.

And I think the thing, the comment around founders is founders provide a sense of urgency that no one else can provide. Through the org. And I think that's what's special is like, I, what keeps me awake at night, the next morning at 8 a.m., I'm emailing that person. We gotta get on this. And then at 10 o'clock, I'll have a different fear that I'm addressing. And I just think it's that overall sense of urgency. And over time, it plays out in the financial results by having that.

Auren Hoffman (51:10.529) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (51:30.745) you know, call it founder mode or whatever you want, but that autonomy of being the smartest person in the room and the ability to implement change that they know instinctively needs to get put into the business quickly.

Auren Hoffman (51:43.998) You guys also have been a good acquirer. Like you bought MySpace for $38 million just a few years after News Corp paid $500 million for it. where do you, you don't have to talk about something specific, but where today do you think like the undervalued assets are or sectors that people are dismissing?

Tim Vanderhook (52:03.555) I mean, we talked about linear TV, I think is massively, massively undervalued of, wow, so important in society, but the values are pretty low. All things in streaming audio, Spotify, these platforms are gonna be huge because what's unique about streaming audio is the niche nature of the content. And that's what's so cool about podcasts is that they can go very niche into B2B applications.

Auren Hoffman (52:05.43) Yeah, linear TV. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (52:18.947) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (52:31.865) data, talking about it and all the consumers. And when we look at the world of advertising, who has the best products in market today? Meta does. Meta dealt with signal going away across Apple, revenue downturn and brought it back very fast. And I think we pay attention a lot to how they solve that. the niche nature of content across social media, that if I'm thinking of men's health and fitness,

Auren Hoffman (52:34.22) Yeah, yeah, world of death. This is the most valuable podcast. Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (53:01.563) hitting

Auren Hoffman (53:04.696) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (53:24.29) But the thing about podcasts is I'm a huge podcast listener. love podcasts, but it's even in programs like they're playing podcast to listen to. I've never met the host. I don't know the host, but I feel like I do know the host. Like I feel like I feel like this person's my friend. have this relationship with it. And maybe I don't, I don't listen to every single one, every single podcast that they do, but like they're almost inviting me to our home. It's, it's conversational. It's just where I don't have that relationship with anybody else that I don't know.

Tim Vanderhook (53:35.875) That's right.

Tim Vanderhook (53:54.439) Definitely. I mean, that is that I think is the, I guess, the most misunderstood part of social media in general. When you interact in social media, those that are connected to you, they feel like they had a conversation with you, even though you didn't directly. And I noticed this even at dinner, someone would come up and say, hey, Tim. And in my head, I'm trying to place them and I can't place them for the life of me. I realize

Auren Hoffman (54:09.569) Yep.

Tim Vanderhook (54:19.499) and they make a comment and it's like, LinkedIn, they follow me on LinkedIn or over on it. But yeah, I definitely, I just experienced that myself as well. But that niche nature of podcasts, you're gonna see huge value creation in the future.

Auren Hoffman (54:23.51) Yeah, yeah, interesting. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (54:33.134) Yeah, interesting. Now a few personal questions. You founded the company with your brothers in 1999. I think you were like 19 at the time. Like what's it like to working with your family? How does like family dynamics go etc?

Tim Vanderhook (54:43.758) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (54:50.167) Yeah, you know, I was when people find out about that, half the people are like, my God, I could never work with my brother or sibling. And other people are like, that's amazing. I wish I could. Us, it was always natural. We shared a bedroom from the time we were like four, you know, so we negotiated who is shutting the light off at night every night for our whole life. for us working together, it's pretty easy because we just we kind of

Auren Hoffman (54:59.757) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (55:05.76) That's cool.

Auren Hoffman (55:10.977) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (55:17.295) You already know when the person's agitated or whatever it may be. I think from a business perspective though, working with family creates more long-termism in the outlook versus I'm gonna build something for five years and I'm gonna sell it for 100 million. That approach, which there's nothing wrong with either, both are good. But I think because we all work together, we had just naturally a more long-term outlook. Like we were never racing to put the business up for sale.

Auren Hoffman (55:33.42) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (55:47.215) And very few times did everyone ever come and say, want to buy your company. That happened twice, but those are very rare events. And I think we always felt like being a public company would be the destination that we want. And we always say internally, we want to try and build a company that can last for 100 years, because that's really hard, a whole nother level to exist. I mean, I won't be running it during that entire time, but we think about the world like that.

Auren Hoffman (55:54.392) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (56:08.534) Yeah, yeah, totally.

Tim Vanderhook (56:15.201) And then you take the you try and do the right approach that always like you don't short circuit anything. It's like, OK, I can make a lot of money this next quarter or we could do it the right way. We're not going to have the money, but it'll pay dividends for five years. And I think we do generally side to long term approaches.

Auren Hoffman (56:35.118) I'm going to call you up in 2099 and we're going to have this conversation about it. I hope so as well. Okay, a couple more questions we ask all of our guests. What is the conspiracy theory that you believe?

Tim Vanderhook (56:38.284) Hopefully we're still around.

Tim Vanderhook (56:49.327) There is no way there was a single shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, that took out JFK. So it's not possible. It's not possible. I'm the son of a LAPD SWAT. My dad was LAPD SWAT. So just like we've had these debates since the beginning of my life going on. So no, no way that you're hitting a moving target with a bolt action rifle and multiple shots.

Auren Hoffman (56:55.776) Okay, that's a very common thing. are like, yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (57:06.67) so he's like, he's like, there's no way that guy could be that good.

Tim Vanderhook (57:18.987) and it's the president of the United States. It just, to me, that's the conspiracy I believe in. There's more than one shooter.

Auren Hoffman (57:25.846) Okay. Yeah. And also the thing that really gets me, I don't know enough about guns and stuff, but it's the Jack Ruby thing where he, where he kills Lee Harvard Oswald a few days later. Like that, that to me, like creates the whole conspiracy in my head. Yeah. All right. Last, last question. We ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Tim Vanderhook (57:38.113) Exactly, exactly. So yeah, that's one.

Tim Vanderhook (57:47.757) What conventional wisdom is bad advice? This might be controversial, but my brother and I do not take the advice that you should not judge a book by its cover. We judge a book by its cover to a large degree because that cover was designed by the person to present them to you. Like if I meet someone and they have teardrops tattooed on their face, I'm not second guessing whether that's a real teardrop. I just go with it. I judge the book by its cover.

Auren Hoffman (58:07.714) Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (58:16.673) And to me, what people want you to see the way they present themselves is accurate 98 % of the time. Yes, sometimes you never thought that about someone and it's 2 % of the time, but I'd rather be accurate 98 % of the time and wrong 2 % of the time upfront and learn that over time. for me, we judge a book by its cover in hiring, in the way people present themselves. If you don't present yourself appropriately,

You are out. So to me, never listen to that advice of don't judge a book by its cover. Always judge them by the cover.

Auren Hoffman (58:51.602) I love that. Yeah. What about when people say something like, do you believe what they like? Like, how do you like when people just do or do you try to like uncover like what they are, what they're truly motivates people or something like that when you're hiring or whatever?

Tim Vanderhook (59:09.819) to me, I, when I'm hiring and asking questions with people, I'm trying to figure out if this person actually did the work to solve the problem at the other company or the task at hand. There are so many individuals in corporate America that didn't actually do the work, but we're in a position that they get credit. And so it's me, a lot of my questions are finding out, are you the person who actually implemented this strategy and did it and brought it across the finish line?

everybody will take credit, but there was one person there that had 85 % of the idea and usually were in charge of implementing it as well because they're the smartest person in the room who came up with it to implement it. So yeah, I mean, we are by nature, my brother and I are generally cynical people, but I think lots of people are cynical. And in ad tech, you gotta be cynical in this industry. 90 % vaporware everywhere that's out there.

10 % of really good businesses though, and it's harder to identify.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:12.046) We should have a saying that like an ad tech like like 90 % of businesses are ad and 10 % are tech. But they're all called ad tech. Yeah.

Tim Vanderhook (01:00:18.959) Yeah, it's like when Rocket Fuel was around, which is a public company that that blew up and every public investor that I talked to has a Rocket Fuel story. And we used to they used to claim artificial intelligence. And we used to say, yeah, it's 0 % intelligence and 100 % artificial at the time.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:26.976) Yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:41.198) All right. Well, thank you, Tim Vanderhook for joining us on World of DaaS. I follow you on LinkedIn. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun and a long time coming. I really appreciate you coming on World of Dazs.

Tim Vanderhook (01:00:56.407) Yeah, so I'm so thankful that you have me, Auren. It was great to chat and catch up.