Sramana Mitra: Are you talking about the category that Outbrain and Taboola have been in?
Peyman Nilforoush: They are the ad networks.
Sramana Mitra: They were in the business of propagating and pushing content.
>>>Sramana Mitra: You are in Chicago and Warsaw?
Stefan Batory: Today we have offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Orlando, Tampa, and San Antonio in the US. We have offices in Warsaw and a few other cities across the country. We are also in Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, and in Madrid. These are the markets that we actively go after and operate in.
Sramana Mitra: How many people?
>>>Sramana Mitra: What were the business metrics with that $500,000 and with that $1.2 million? How was the business moving?
Mike Salguero: When we first bought the website, it was a subscription business where the maker would pay an annual fee to be on the website. We scaled it pretty well. We had a whole team of salespeople and had all these leads.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What was the name of your ad network?
Peyman Nilforoush: NetShelter.
Sramana Mitra: What years were these?
Peyman Nilforoush: From late 1999 to 2008. In 2008, we raised $26 million in venture capital. We moved to San Francisco in 2009 and started building out the company and scaling it out. We ended up selling the company in 2013.
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Peyman has done two startups in the ad network and content network field, and this discussion takes us through that journey.
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?
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This is a fascinating story of a subscription service for high-quality meat being delivered to consumer homes.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
>>>Sramana Mitra: How did you acquire this very fragmented customer base?
Stefan Batory: Initially, we weren’t been thinking about that because we were supposed to work with that partner from southeast Florida who was supposed to acquire clients for us.
>>>Sramana Mitra: I thought you were trying to reposition the taxi company to doing a marketplace. How did you get to the software house?
Stefan Batory: I did not reposition the taxi business. I just kept it growing. At the same time, I was also running a small division of the software development house, which was a spinoff from that original software development house.
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