00:31:16 · Michael Provenzano
[00:31:16] S1: Yeah. Look, I I think in the early days, people forget like you're just, you know, working with engineers to build software and then pre selling it to people. Like you're showing demos of something that's not even fully baked. And you know, people say, oh, great, let's use it. And you're like, well, I need a few more months, you know? So the first months of these businesses, if not almost almost the first year is pretty dead on the business side. It's really a heads down engineering thing. We didn't hire someone on the business side, probably till year two or so. It was a while before we did. So probably the first milestone was just the marketplace turning on. So like, you could log in as a buyer, you could log in as a seller and transact. Was like the basics. Brass tacks. And then when you have that, the next would be being able to integrate with a media owner. And even those integrations were really complex in the early days, this sounds crazy talking about it now, but early days when when we when we would talk to CMS companies or media owners that had their own CMS, you know, they everything was on a loop system, right? So just play over and over again. And, when we said like, well, we need you to track every single transaction, every time you show an ad, we need to know about it. People are like, mind blown, my god, how can we send this many requests? It's like, that's what computers do, guys. And it was just, to make the industry transactional, as I would call it, it was probably one of the biggest fundamental jumps for the the industry. So we moved into this like, systems are going to track every transaction like every other form of advertising, let's go. And that that took a big mindset shift for media owners, and for buyers, but that was a fundamental moment in like year two or so where like people started doing that by default, and that became pretty much the standard now. After the marketplace though, probably maybe year three or four, think you checked my calendar, but bringing in data was a big one. So in the early days, we actually first brought in carrier data. That's right. And we started buying that and building models on it of how people move throughout the day and, what were they doing and where were they. And if you knew that, you could better target out of home advertising. And then of course that data moved into GPS data.
00:33:30 · Michael Provenzano, Ian Dallimore
Now full circle, we're talking about carrier data again, but the the idea of using movement data to understand statistically the patterns of consumers and using that data to tie back to attribution and measurement, that was game changing for the pitch, game changing for the industry, actually being able to bring ROI to clients on the brand side. I mean, that that was a massive milestone for us. [00:33:52] S0: Yeah. And to be able to look, act, and behave like other media. Exactly. It's key. [00:33:57] S1: Yeah. I mean, you want to feel like a unicorn, you feel special and stuff. But if you're if you're... You know, people don't know where to put you at an agency in terms of buckets of money, you just get kicked out. You've got you got to fit into something that makes sense. And audience based buying was how most online media was bought. So Right. If we could fit into that, that that was... That proved to
00:34:19 · Ian Dallimore, Michael Provenzano
[00:34:19] S0: be really productive. Yeah. So I've I've said this statement a hand, quite a few times, but, you know, the importance of employees, the importance of people, one of one of the things that I've loved from day one, even in in that office that you guys were running, you really kind of have set the standard in culture, culture in the workplace, which, you know, oftentimes it can kind of be this fun little cheesy word that people say, and part of their mission statement, and they may have a podcast and their HR department may talk about culture all the time. But, you know, one of the things that I've always seen and has seen an evolution as well within within your organization, and obviously it goes back to people, but the culture that you have at Vistar is... It's fun. While you guys still continue to, like, grind and innovate while you're working in a relatively, like, traditional corner of advertising that is out of home. Like, explain that. Because you guys all of a sudden become, like, if I'm gonna coin the phrase, you guys are all of a sudden, like, really cool kids where it's like, wait, that... Yeah. These are our tech friends. And it's like everybody wanted to be friends with this. They're like, yeah, it's my guys. [00:35:24] S1: Yeah, that that that coin flipped. I mean, it wasn't always like that. [00:35:27] S0: Oh, without a doubt.
00:35:27 · Ian Dallimore, Michael Provenzano
[00:35:27] S0: Oh, without a doubt. [00:35:28] S1: You know, I mean, you remember those days, but, look, I think we were left a little bit in a corner from the early days, so you had each other, and so we were very close knit team, kind of did everything together, and, we were also very young in our careers at that time too, so you just had that life of living in New York, living in Philadelphia, and, obviously those are massive cities where it caters well to that age group and that lifestyle. And yeah, I mean, that foundational relationship that we had with most of now people who are in leadership and management roles, the company, kind of trickled down. They passed all that kind of behavior and culture down to the next level, the newest people that work here. So people know what the company is about. And just again, we just had an off-site, a global off-site of the whole company, 300 people, or two fifty came. But, it was it was amazing to see. It was almost like we never missed a beat. It was the same culture, even at this size, people having a blast, no one taking themselves too seriously, and it was really amazing to see that we were able to kind of persist that over all these years through so many new hires.
00:36:37 · Ian Dallimore
[00:36:37] S0: Yeah. And as a leader in a in a tech startup in the early days as opposed to now being a air quote grown up business, it's... Yeah. Yeah. Mean, that's... That can become tough because it can can be like, oh, all fun. But what I've always loved about it is everyone, even probably within which I would love you to talk about is everyone within the walls of Vistar, they're comp... They're competing for time and resources as well within each other, while at the same time, it's like, if Keira isn't doing her job in producing the products, then maybe Eric Lam and his products aren't working and Christian and his products aren't working. So it is a unique...
00:37:14 · Michael Provenzano
[00:37:14] S1: It's intense. Yeah. It was weird because you're friends with everyone, but you're in these very tense situations all the time. Because, yes, something, you know, might be delayed and it's trickled down and affected multiple teams. And it's like, well, I always ask, like, what's the what's the result? Like, you know, who what's like, what does accountability mean? Is does it mean we're gonna slap someone on the wrist? Does it does it mean someone has to get fired? Right. That extreme? Like, what what's the answer here? And typically, answer is like, we need to have a retrospective, we need to sit down and make make it clear that we can't let it happen again, and here are the things we're going to put in place to make it not happen. And so yeah, you have to switch from kind of friend mode all the way down to like, this is a very annoying and serious conversation, like people's jobs are in line, people's clients are on the line, right? Lose a client because you don't bring something to market in the right timeline. So yeah, it's been, it's interesting. You have so much more to lose later on as well. That's another pressure cooker point. Early days, you know, you don't have any clients or you have very few clients and the risk of losing or risk of anything is very low. So if people mess up, kind of like, alright, well you can try again guys. Now it's it's fairly large business and it's like, oh, wow, mistakes cost lots of money. Right. There's an error in the code for transacting media, you know, $60 can go out the door in five minutes and you're like, whoops, like... Yeah. And it's like, okay, well, is it the engineers fault? Is it QA's fault now? Is it, the product team's fault for not seeing that come out? It's interesting. Like the issue has just become way bigger, way faster.