um, I started in the ad agency world after after college, and I was attracted to advertising because I think I'm a bit of a different creative thinker. I've often been told the way I look at problems is different than most people look at them in the way I look at solutions. And I had an interview I had. I had a job in hand, actually, based on a Friday interview on Ben. I had a second interview that same day with another agency, and I had somebody challenged me and they said, Look, anybody can go into advertising and sell grape jelly. That's not a challenge. But if you're gonna really be successful and you want to think creatively and out of the box, try selling a pharmaceutical product with a black box warning that literally says this product could kill you if you take it. That's really challenging. You know, Toto operate within the confines of a restricted environment, and so that's That's what got me into the pharmaceutical side of things. Then I was there for a couple of years when a vendor came in. Um, this is back in the early nineties, called Physicians Online online services were big. A o. L prodigy, CompuServe. The Internet wasn't really around yet. Um, and I felt like I saw the future when I when I went in and I saw that vendor presentation and we debriefed along with a lot of the senior agency people, and I was hearing comments from the senior people that I respected, like, um, you know, Hey, that's an hour of my life. I'll never get back. And did you see how bad that that the color scheme was? Our clients would never go for this. And when they finally got to me is the last person around the table said, What did you think? I said, Guys, I think we just saw the future. I'm surprised everybody is so negative on this. And I literally called that company that night, and I, uh, asked for an interview and I went and I worked for them. Um, then that business actually was disrupted. I was there for about six years. Then the this thing called the Internet came along and actually disrupted that whole business. Um, but with every disruption, you have opportunity. And so I looked at that and said, Hey, how Doe I lean into this Internet thing, move away from the online service world and lean into the Internet. And I went I interviewed for a company called Double Click, which, um, double click. Well, now it's part of Google. At the time, it was an independent company, and it was not just a technology for ad serving, but it was an actual ad network, and they were gonna hire me to build their public. They're basically the role be called publisher, and I would be responsible for building their whole health vertical. And they said, you're gonna have an ad sales team under you to focus on health, and you're gonna have a publisher development team focused on under you. And I said, Well, where are we today? It was about the third interview. It was getting serious and they said, Well, we're kind of at the beginning. We really don't have anything going on in health yet. And I thought to myself, Do I want to take this job? Or if they're really the beginning, Can I just start a health network and maybe, um, have these guys by me in five years? Who knows? And so I said, Well, what's the piece I'm missing? They have this ad tech that I don't have. So I started asking around about the virus ad tech providers, and I got a connection to Riel media at the time who ended up investing in me and this idea of starting an ad network network in the healthcare space. And that's how we got started at Healthcare Solutions about 21 years ago. Um, then we found some interesting opportunities in the medical association in society space that became our safe haven and what we started to really grow. Because our initial success, um, was always stymied by WebMD coming along and buying a partner. We would sign a partner, a really good one. We grow the revenue. WebMD would come and buy that partner. And so eventually we said, Hey, let's go to medical society associations because they're not for sale and WebMD can't buy them on gun. I started a company which I'll talk a little bit later about called adjuster. Ah, while running a healthcare solutions that would start to solve one of my own business problems. And then I also recently started a company called Tab Native eso. I've started three businesses, uh, two of which I started well, running hs

so our first couple of months were kind of interesting. Um, we we I was actually staying on and consulting with my former company at the time when I started the business physicians online because I had some big deals in the pipe that I had committed. I would help see them through and close. Um, when we started the company, we were still trying to figure out what we were going to be exactly. We had the general idea of being an ad network, but we couldn't articulate it very well, and we didn't have a very good presentation deck put together. But what we did have is we had strong client relationships. We have been servicing the pharmaceutical industry for years and doing it at Overy, um, high level with intention and providing great customer service. So when we told our clients that we were starting a business, we were able to go in and talk to them about it. And I remember one of our early meetings was with a client who had bought from me when I was a physician's online, and it was probably the worst presentation I ever gave. He sat us down. Hey, said, Hey guys, I only have about 15 minutes. Tell me what what your new thing is all about. And we got through about three horribly designed Power Point presentations where we're trying to describe what we were doing and he looked at us and he smiled and he said, Are you gonna be doing any like consulting? And we looked at each other, my business partner and I and kind of shook her head. Of course we'll be able to do consulting, he said. He said, So maybe you'd be able to create me some white papers if I give you some topics and you'd be able to research them and we said, Oh, absolutely. And he said, Okay, put put me down for 10 grand of consulting He said, I know what I'm gonna have you do yet, Um, but you gotta get me an invoice by next week And this was like mid December and he was trying to wrap up his year and he said, You gotta have an invoice in by mid mid week And so that was our first customer they bought from us because they knew us. They knew we would deliver for them that he knew he would get way more than $10,000 in value from us. Andi wanted to basically give us a start. Um, and that kind of that built up the confidence. To be able to continue to do this on Bennett really became, um, exercise in refusing to quit. You know, people often ask, What's the what's the most? What's the thing that got you where you are? And I think the number one thing is is tenacity and the refusal to quit. In fact, when my business partner left about 3.5 years into the business and it was now all on my shoulders, I put up a big banner over my desk that said, Failure is not an option, Andi. I just I just simply refused to quit. And that was difficult at times, including at our biggest low. Probably around that time that my business partner left. I remember having a conversation with my parents who who have always been there for me 100%. My parents have always been extremely supportive and everything I did, and I was 3.5 years into this business still struggling, still not really taking any kind of a meaningful paycheck, and my parents sat me down and said, R J way, love your tenacity. We think your you know, your great for pushing this through. But we just wanna have a heart to heart with you We think it's time to go get a job and, uh and it was a very tough message to get from them because they've always been unconditional love and super supportive when everything I did and I said, Hey, guys, I appreciate the feedback, but I'm gonna make this work. And it was It was it was probably the In some ways it became motivation. Um, but it would be very difficult moment because these guys had never, ever, like, not supported me, and something on debt was very difficult to hear them say, You know, hey, from the outside looking in, it's really time you fold this thing up, Andi, It took about from that moment. It took about 12 more months and then we were flying and then back

we're we're often looked at as a technology company. I'd really describe us more of a sales organization. We represent and sell other people's websites. The advertising on other people's websites that said, We have toe have a lot of technology we refer to as our ad stack in place, um, to be able to do that effectively. But we're really, uh, a new organization that takes the best of breed of other technologies. We don't build the technology we license, and we piece it together to make it work together. So some of the things that we use we use double click ironically, um, which is one of the companies I interviewed with. It's now part of Google. We use that for ad serving. We use APP nexus, um, which is part of Xander or which is called Xander, part of A T and T now, and we we use those products for ad serving, but on top of that, we layer a contextual ization engine. We layer the data management platform, so we have a whole bunch of components to our ad stack to make it work effectively in terms of general office tools. We I love tools like callin DLLee, which helps for appointment setting. Um, I just started using ah transcription service called otter dot ai, which I think is really interesting. It will transcribe calls, makes word, clouds, that kind of thing we've been using zoom an awful lot since covitz struck. It seems like everything is a zoom meeting. Now, Salesforce is great for managing customer database and emailing um, Excel is huge. I would encourage every student to become an excel wizard, Excel, master. And if you're really good at that, and you like that, take it to another level and really embrace something like tableau where you can really bring data toe life through visualization, um, tools like slack for communication and and, of course, email tools like like outlook Gmail, etcetera aan den from an algorithm standpoint, um, for tap native, we've built an interesting algorithm. Um, tap native is a native network that that we run across healthcare properties and we've built something called flex bid where a knave, er tizer could put in essentially a maximum bid. We won't necessarily bit up that high, but we'll use the algorithm to determine which widgets in which placements on which pages yield the best return in terms of a cost per acquisition for that advertiser, so that that idea of being able to just a bit up and down to basically squeeze out underperforming placements or pay less on underperforming placements and pay mawr when conversions air happening so that we can win that advertisers position on the places where they typically convert. That's been an interesting algorithm. Thio grow that business.