Building a Billion Dollar Unicorn: Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The ratings and the Internet recommendations were free. There were no monetization model around any of that?

Yaron Galai: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: The first monetization effort was with the paid recommendation of external content into these larger publishers. What was wrong? Why did the first iteration fail? >>>

A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Peter Gassner is a self-described late bloomer. In a wonderfully authentic interview, Peter describes here how he turned his middle-age crisis into a multi-billion dollar market cap company. Veeva, in 2016, will do well over $500 million in revenue and trades at a market cap of over $4 billion. There’s nothing foo foo about this company. It’s raw execution. I love the story.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? >>>

Building a Billion Dollar Unicorn: Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I have three questions as you were relating that portion of the story. It sounds like this is an experimental period. Were you financing this period yourself?

Yaron Galai: Yes. I did finance our early days. I also had a couple of our investors at Quigo.

Sramana Mitra: The second question is the people who were putting your recommendation or rating button on their sites, how did you distribute? How did you get to them? How were they finding out about you? What were the ways of recruiting this army of sites?

Yaron Galai: The reason why we decided on top RSS readers to focus on bloggers was exactly that. We needed distribution for this. We said, “What better way than journalists that can both use it on their own sites and also talk about it?” Bloggers read bloggers. We thought that was a great way to do it. Our first KPI for the entire company, before we focused on revenues and click-through rates, was how many times does a blogger write about us in a positive way. >>>

Building a Billion Dollar Unicorn: Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You sold at the right time because after the iPhone and mobile advertising, the whole ad rate world just collapsed.

Yaron Galai: Generally, it did. We sold at a very pretty good time. I do know that just by talking to a friend from AOL that they kept running Quigo as an independent product until last year. Just recently, they sold it to one of the bigger ad platforms. They were extremely happy with the results.

Sramana Mitra: You had a good chunk of ownership in Quigo and you made good money off that transaction?

Yaron Galai: Yes, it was a good outcome.

Sramana Mitra: Did you have to go to work for AOL? >>>

Building a Billion Dollar Unicorn: Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Given that was your observation and that was you interest, how did that manifest in the next startup?

Yaron Galai: In 2000, I started a company called Quigo. It was a mix of similar ideas that my co-founder and I had started working on independently. We merged it as one company. The idea was to look at the data of what people are consuming and based on that, provide links to what’s next. What it quickly became is what’s called now as contextual advertising. We started doing that around 2000.

It turned out that there was one other company doing something similar. It was called Applied Semantics. They had a little product called AdSense. Pretty quickly, Google acquired them and made it Google AdSense. We stayed independent for about eight years until we sold the company to AOL.

Sramana Mitra: The AOL acquisition happened in the 2008 timeframe?

Yaron Galai: 2007. >>>

Building a Billion Dollar Unicorn: Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Yaron came with a clear notion of how he wanted to recommend content and monetize those recommendations. It took, however, many years before the market caught up with his vision. It has now. The company is going gangbusters.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Yaron Galai: I was raised in Israel. That’s where I grew up most of my childhood and spent my first 30 years. I served in the Israeli Navy for 7 years and then started startups.

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to? You said you worked in the Navy and then started working on startups, or was some of that interweaved while you were still at the Navy? >>>

Microsoft Acquires LinkedIn for $26.2 Billion: My Analysis

In a singularly brilliant move, Microsoft just announced the acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. Two questions are swirling in people’s minds: why, and why did LinkedIn sell?

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Billion Dollar Unicorns: Reconsider Your Aspirations

In November last year, I read a brilliant piece titled Reconsider by David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, and a partner at Basecamp, a small 50-people collaboration software company. David starts the piece by saying:

It [Basecamp] didn’t disrupt anything. It didn’t add any new members to the three-comma club. It was never a unicorn. Even worse: There are still, after all these years,less than fifty people working at Basecamp. We don’t even have a San Francisco satellite office!

I know what you’re thinking, right? BOOOORING.

After all, in these crazy days of Unicorn mania, what wisdom does a founder of a small, 50-people company full of remote workers serving about 6000 global customers offer you, really?

You are wrong.

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