a very direct and clean and fast path to where I am today. I'm, uh I'm now a third time entrepreneur in, uh, technology, software driven businesses that are optimizing advertising. I started my 1st 1 25 years ago. I I got here because I've always had a passion around things that air new technology. But I actually ended up after school. Yeah, Following the path is a lawyer and working on essentially business side. And after working in the media industry, I watched that whole industry become disrupted by technology. And while I wasn't a technologist, at least I had a fluency in it. And I found the need for people that could sit between businesses and problems and and technology that could solve it. And so, um, that gave me confidence that, you know, there was value there, and, um, I started helping trying to create deals and partnerships between media companies and advertising companies and technologists, and I found them both whacking and both very myopic that the media companies saw themselves as as dominant significant businesses that needed to have people circle them and technologist saw things is everything has to be binary. And you need to understand what I'm doing, and I and I don't care about what you are. So I found myself coming finding a way to sort of negotiate them in between and literally I had some ideas and I ran into somebody on an elevator in Dallas, Texas, 25 years ago and he was wearing a name badge in a conference and he was a venture capitalist, and I pitched him an idea in an elevator over 14 floors. And while I did not get a deal done in that time and in fact he never invested in that first company idea, we became good friends. He is now went on to found one of the more important venture capital firms in the country or in the world. Union Square Ventures, which backed first money into Twitter and Tumbler and coin base. And companies like that and twilio. And so a bunch of really interesting in mongo, db and, uh and and I e got the confidence from that that I could start a company, and the ideas behind it are having worked in media and understanding what I could do. It was just, um, the business. My business today is about optimizing advertising on TV, and I worked in online advertising for years, so I was familiar with the problems.

Waas, the one I pitched on the 14th floor down Waas. I think that websites needs someone to build technology that will actually deliver ads is if it's direct marketing and change the ads, depending on who's watching it and that the company that does that also needs an organization to sell those ads because people that work for the companies that make the websites don't know how to sell complicated Mawr complex solutions like this. And, um, he liked the idea, but he couldn't get it funded, but I got it funded by others. Um, my business. Today, Simon Media actually does a similar thing, but for TV. And so it took about 20 years for these digital ideas to migrate into a large legacy ecosystem, because the problem is that while linear television, old fashioned television is quite far from dead, more than 100 million people in America watch about four hours a day. I mean 100 million households, about 300 million people, watched about four hours a day. We all get the same that by and large, and they are not scheduled in a way that understands what's the best you know, mathematical probability of who is going to watch and what they might want. And and so and being able to place ads on 120 different television networks is hard in an industry that works by handshakes, phone calls and faxes and log books. And so building a software an automated solution so that an advertiser like a dollar Shave club or Expedia can just say come to a dashboard CIA plan. Understand how they can optimize it? Have it distributed across 100 different companies have a dashboard to show how every single ad is being delivered everywhere in the country and how much is being viewed and then have that tie into how many people visit their website, download their app, make a purchase.them. They had to solve it with people they had. They had lots and lots of people in the television. That industry. Today, it spends about $8 billion on people that use phones and literally write things in log books or collect faxes to manage the transactions of television ad spots.

I The first few weeks and first few months in my experience have been always pretty painful because everything is possible. So sometimes people, when they do start ups, they are in the middle of an intense, active market. They have a point solution to make a difference, and they just hit it. And then and then the question is, how do you evolve from there? Um, my startups in this one particularly. It was very anticipatory of a change that would come into the market that would take years to develop. And I we didn't know if it was two years or eight years and so so because you have to change behaviors, we have to say No, you don't want to do it by people and you want to do it by data, science and software. And so for those first few weeks, it's it's it's trying to solve a multidimensional problem. Which piece do I solve first? Who do I solve it for? What will it take to solve it? How much will it solve? How defensible is it? And and that that hurts the head