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OhHello - Ari Paparo
41 Plays1 year ago
OhHello!
It's episode 75, and this #adtech #influencer is not only proud to be an early "Hello" (mentor) on the OhHello.io 🌞☕️ platform, but Ari Paparo also co-hosts, with Eric Franchi, one of the best pods in #digitaladvertising #marketing (a la Marketecture Media).
As an AdTech pioneer (Doubleclick, Google, AppNexus) to CEO of Beeswax (Acquired by Comcast), Ari has picked up a thing or two during his tenure in the ecosystem.
In this episode, he provides advice, actionable tips for entrepreneurs, and pays homage to 2 powerhouse mentors that helped him along the way:
🔥 David Rosenblatt --> "what's the 1 thing we can do to create change?" - that has made an impact on Ari for 20 yrs
⚖️ Neal Mohan --> being able to manage complexity amongst teams, products, and still always GSD
We're stoked to have Ari on the OhHello.io platform!
https://pod.link/1666003514 (for your listening pleasure)
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annnnd, for those playing at home, don't forget our cliff-hanger from Zach Kubin's vod- go to adelaidemetrics.com/ohhello to uncover the cure for Waldosis (free 👕)
Recommended
Transcript
Understanding 'Waldosis' in Digital Campaigns
00:00:00
Speaker
Today, many digital ad campaigns suffer from an affliction known as Waldosis. This disease gets its name from the children's book Where's Waldo, whose protagonist was famed for being viewable, but nearly impossible to find. Just like Waldo, Waldosis campaigns are highly viewable.
00:00:18
Speaker
but capture very little attention. The antidote for the silent killer? Adelaide Attention Metrics. Join Audie, Coca-Cola, and the NBA in the fight against Waldosis. Uncover the cure and grab a free Waldo Is Viewable t-shirt at AdelaideMetrics.com slash oh hello. Disclaimer, Adelaide AU may result in elevated campaign performance and a surge in ROI. Side effects may include unbridled joy and envy from competitors. And now, on to our show.
Introducing Ari Paparo and His Ad Tech Journey
00:00:54
Speaker
Oh, hello, Harry. Hey there. How are you? How are you?
00:01:00
Speaker
I'm great. I like that mix. I do too. It puts you in a great mood. We talked about this last week when we were catching up on life and careers. You know, do I have to go and do this headbop thing that I see people do on LinkedIn? And I said, no, you don't have to. And you smiled and you did it. And that just made me feel great. So that warmed the cockles of my heart. Thank you, my friend.
00:01:21
Speaker
I'm glad I can warm the cockles. Mission accomplished. Mission accomplished. For our viewers, for our audience, why don't you tell the viewership of the Oh, hello, Vadim Pod, who I have the pleasure of speaking with right now.
00:01:33
Speaker
Sure. I'm Ari Papeiro. I like to call myself the ad tech influencer. I have a very long career in doing virtually everything you can do in ad tech, primarily on the product side as product management at Google and DoubleClick and Nielsen and AppNexus and Bizarre Voice. And then at my own company, Beeswax, where I was the CEO and I sold it to Comcast. And now I run Markitecture Media, which is a amazingly useful service at Markitecture.tv and a podcast about ad tech.
00:02:04
Speaker
Love it. There we go. Thank you everybody. Thanks for coming out today. You encapsulated a huge component of your career as the founder of Marketecture, which I'm a big fan of. I listen to the vast majority of the pods. I may have missed one or two here or there. I appreciate the content that you're putting out.
00:02:25
Speaker
Additionally, Oh, Hello, Incorporated, we are excited about partnering up with Marketecture and just being underneath your umbrella or part of your umbrella for the pods and vods.
Product Management Insights and Evolution
00:02:36
Speaker
But that's not why we're here today. We're here, basically, to take a layer off the onion, layer by layer by layer, and understand who Eri Paparo is. You know, peeling down the onion sounds like I'm going to be crying at the end. So I'll have to keep it on the light side. Well, lots of warm fuzzies with Oh, Hello.
00:02:56
Speaker
From a career perspective, as I said earlier, I've been on the product side. So product management as a discipline
00:03:03
Speaker
is fairly new. When I first got my first product management job in ad tech, it was a double click in 2004, so coming up on my 20th year in ad tech. And the title and the job was still a work in progress. It wasn't always clear to the people you work with what that meant. It wasn't clear to me what I woke up in the morning, what I was supposed to do. And there are these sort of trite sayings like product manager is the CEO of the product. Yeah, that's sort of true, but
00:03:31
Speaker
You also don't have to deal with rent or late billings or other things like that. So you're not really CEO of the product. CEO is CEO of the product.
00:03:41
Speaker
So the interesting thing about the product management career path is that it's both technical and creative and people oriented and project oriented and everything else in strategic. And so that's what I've enjoyed doing. I'm a little bit of a jack of all trades as CEO of beeswax. I definitely had to do all that stuff plus the boring stuff. No one else wanted to do clean the bathrooms, et cetera, et cetera. And, uh,
00:04:06
Speaker
And now I find myself post exit doing something new. I'm kind of a journalist now. And I'm trying to get information into forums that are useful for people.
Entrepreneurship and Leadership Lessons
00:04:17
Speaker
How do you make the pivot from being a product leader to creating and starting your own company? Well, being a product leader is probably the best training for starting your own company. Because you're dealing with all of those complex issues around building a product and making people want it and
00:04:35
Speaker
actually selling it to people and then marketing it, then hiring a team. So it's a step more complicated and there's no safety net when you're the CEO, but it's a lot of the same activity that sort of rhymes with the product job.
00:04:49
Speaker
I feel like I was always meant to start my own company. I think I did it kind of late. I guess I was in my forties when I started beeswax and I had done a startup in the dotcom booth, but it wasn't really, you know, my baby alone. It was sort of a joint venture joint activity with a bunch of other guys. So this was my first real go at it and it went very well.
00:05:11
Speaker
So as someone who started a company in their 40s, who had been successful prior to that, what advice could you give to someone like me who is 43 years old, who's worked at some great companies, who's had some fun and amazing roles, but wants to do it himself or with, you know, building with people? What kind of guidance would you advise me to give me?
00:05:31
Speaker
First, I'll say, what do the stats say? So the stats say that older entrepreneurs are more successful. The Mark Zuckerbergs of the world at 21 starting Facebook are not the common, not the average. They're very uncommon. The success rate goes up with age. The second thing I would say is that the statistics show that doing your own company is a 10-year commitment.
00:05:58
Speaker
And you have to know that, are you going to be interested in working on this idea for 10 years? Because that's the average, even in a great scenario. I was lucky enough to exit beeswax in less than six from start to finish, which is very fast.
00:06:12
Speaker
But if you're 44 and you're starting a startup and you think it's going to be the next phase of your life, you should at a minimum think you're working on it when you're 54. And you have to also accept that it may be difficult during those 10 years, including periods in which you're paying yourself far less than your market rate or nothing. And that's just the way it is.
00:06:31
Speaker
You know, there's no way around that. And I think that one thing I noticed when we were working at Beastwax, I had two co-founders who were amazing. And we always accepted we were going to have lower than average salaries. But we did pay ourselves for the first sort of six or seven months of the company.
00:06:47
Speaker
And we're running through our seed funding pretty quickly just based on having to make payroll for the three of us each each period. And we made the choice to remove our salaries for a year and to take zero. And that really helped. And those are the kind of pretty hard decisions you have to make when you may have a mortgage and kids and all that sort of stuff.
00:07:08
Speaker
having been a sales leader, a commercial leader, a marketer, you had said that when you're a product lead, it's really easy. So what about from your perspective of when you went and decided, okay, I'm a product lead, but now I need to also develop the sales pitch, I need to develop the marketing strategy, I need to develop everything that goes along with the commercial engine of at the time beeswax now for market texture.
00:07:31
Speaker
It was like the Big Bang. All the particles were in one spot. And then over time, I replaced myself at various things. And some things I was very smart to replace myself quickly on because I wasn't that good at them. I hired a CTO right away. I wasn't going to be the CTO.
00:07:47
Speaker
And then other things, especially when it got to like year two and three, you know, all the particles were in one spot. And then over time I replaced myself at various things. And some things I was very smart to replace myself quickly on because I wasn't that good at them. I hired a CTO right away. I wasn't gonna be the CTO.
00:08:05
Speaker
And then other things, especially when it got to like year two and three, I didn't replace myself fast enough because I thought I was good at them. And also I sort of enjoyed doing them. And that's where there were some pretty big errors in judgment around one thing that comes to mind is like finance. You know, we use outsourced accounting for far too long. We needed a head of finance.
00:08:25
Speaker
We were running lots of money through v-swags and we didn't get on top of it. Legal is another one. We had a lot of paperwork going back and forth with various SaaS contracts and we didn't have a full-time lawyer until it was well past the point where it was necessary. And each time I replaced myself, I was amazed at how much better I got at the rest of my job.
00:08:48
Speaker
being the job of a CEO, which is hiring strategy, leadership, direction, things like that, because I wasn't spending two hours frustratingly on a phone call with some lawyer, trying to figure out how to redline some complex contract.
00:09:03
Speaker
Delegation is really important. And so as you grew into the role and as you delegated different hats to different people over time, when you think through mentorship and you think through just how you would teach them your different ways or your styles, or you would say, hey, you've come to the table, you have your experience, you have your seasoning, add it to the dish, add it to the entree. When you think about mentorship, what does mentorship mean to you?
00:09:28
Speaker
Well, I think it's not telling people what to do, right? I'm an advisor to many startups and I see CEOs making some mistakes and every once in a while I'll actually tell them what to do. But most of the time I'll use analogies or histories or ideas to get them to do the things that they probably should be doing or thinking about, right?
00:09:50
Speaker
And so I think it's a two way street and that the mentee needs to have enough self-awareness to know when their internal sort of biases and ego and other things might be pushing them in a direction of decisions that aren't optimal.
00:10:06
Speaker
Who are some mentors that you want to call out, that you want to shout out, that have made a profound impact on who you have become and who you... I'll keep it at that. Who's made a big impact on you, Larry Paparro? Who are your professional mentors? Yeah, it's been a while. I've been... Well, I'm asking.
00:10:26
Speaker
been around the blog. So probably the best boss I ever had was David Rosenblatt, who was the CEO of DoubleClick during the interim period before it was acquired by Google. And he gave a masterclass in, I'd say, business management, from working with sales to holding people accountable to really focusing on the small things. My favorite thing he would do is like a trick almost, is whenever anyone presented
00:10:55
Speaker
like a really complicated deck or series of decisions to him, he would sort of like not read them, even though he probably read them. And he would just ask the person, what's the one thing we could do to make change here? Or what's the three? What are the top three things I need to do? And, and that always caught people off guard because they had, didn't think in terms of like, what if I can only do one or two things? Or what if I can only do three things? I love that.
00:11:21
Speaker
I've probably used that trick a number of times. So he really comes to mind. I worked for Neil Mohan for a while, who's now the CEO of YouTube. And I think he was a great boss. And I saw during my time at Google how incredibly ineffectual I was at playing corporate politics and how amazing he was. And I mean, that's a compliment if Neil's listening. I do not mean to say.
00:11:46
Speaker
anything bad about it but the ability to get things done across teams that were in some cases hostile was amazing and that's why he's the ceo of youtube and i left after two years. Well you know where your strengths are nor your weaknesses are and that's important many ecosystem to be able to. Identify move quickly see move quickly.
00:12:07
Speaker
Yeah, and I think also there's this whole theory about focusing on your strength and don't try to fix your weaknesses. I forget some author, I forget what it's called. There's a book about it. I kind of buy that a little bit, but I don't think you can ignore your weaknesses. You just have to surround yourself with people or processes that fix your weaknesses.
00:12:28
Speaker
That makes sense. I'm with you on that. As we create Oh, hello. Oh, hello.io, a platform specifically for mentorship mentees, expert advice, expert guidance, being able to identify and pick and choose different people to help one another, we are able to plug into 50 different charities. What is a cause that is near and dear to your heart, Mr. Papparo, or causes plural?
00:12:54
Speaker
My wife is very involved with a organization called the New York International Children's Film Festival, which I'm a big fan of as well. It is a film festival of non-U.S. films, but for children. And they are, in many cases, quite thought provoking or serious. They're not Marvel and nonprofit. And I really like the cause. It combines sort of art, education, a bunch of other things.
00:13:21
Speaker
Amazing. Ari, before we conclude this Oh Hello podcast, any other parting words of wisdom? Any succinct advice for those watching, for those listening? I find that a lot of folks are scared to sort of be themselves, to be open to conversations that are not strictly within their lane, their swim lane in their career or life. And I think that's a mistake.
00:13:49
Speaker
If you go to my LinkedIn page, you'll see that I have my phone number on my LinkedIn page and it says, text me. And a lot of people do not text me. A lot of people are scared to text me. And it's funny because like, why wouldn't I want to hear from you? If I know you well enough that you found my LinkedIn page,
00:14:10
Speaker
Is it really going to be any sweat off my back to say hi? Or to direct message me on Twitter? And it's just with me, because I'm like sort of this little mini celebrity in the ad tech world. But like, reach out to people, be friendly. Everyone wants to learn. It's a collaborative world. We're not in the NSA. We're not hiding secrets from each other. And I think just being a lot more open is good for your career, good for your success, and I'd recommend it.
00:14:35
Speaker
Amazing. Arie, thank you so much. Really appreciate you coming on the Oh Hello Pod. And Bob, thank you everybody for listening. We appreciate you. Thank you for watching. Thank you, my friend. Thanks for having me.