Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
00:27:53 · Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo
[00:27:53] S1: Yeah. I caught a stray on this one, and I do not deserve to be catching a stray, by the way. So so I I, there's a lot of posts about this. You know, I think people are already focused around price and then... Another buy in. Somebody said, oh, the the the former undertone investors, have to be disappointed here. Was like, dude, we sold the thing ten years ago. We sold it, you know, for a great multiple. I'm I'm good. And I didn't publicly comment, you know, it's just not my style, but I didn't think that we should have caught a Did you... [00:28:25] S0: Well, two questions. What what was the undertone price? It's been ten years. You really can disclose it. And secondly, what... Did any of the investors keep the equity in Perion? [00:28:38] S1: To do the tone price was public. It was a 180,000,000. It was on a on a multiple of EBITDA at the time. It was it was good. We we were happy with it. The undertone investors did very well and kind of... We'll get into that. But we fully sold the company. Whoever had stock options, frankly, stock options throughout the, you know, the next five years or so during that whole kind of like COVID bump, you... If you stayed, you you you could have done well. But now there was there was no equity as part of it. [00:29:10] S0: Alright. Then there's nothing to complain about. [00:29:12] S1: No reason for me to catch this straight. [00:29:14] S0: Do we know how much, Perion was exposed to Open Web? Was it still the majority of their business? Because I think that's the real that's the real story of 2027... 2026 right now.
00:29:14 · Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:29:14] S0: Do we know how much, Perion was exposed to Open Web? Was it still the majority of their business? Because I think that's the real that's the real story of 2027... 2026 right now. [00:29:24] S1: I I saw that. They... My sense is they were super diversified. So CTV, they acquired a a digital out of home company called High Stack, which I think is Yeah. Know, it was... Was all move. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think they acquired some RMN. So I think of all the kinda, like, publicly traded ad tech, they probably are quite diversified, but I I don't know. [00:29:48] S0: Yeah. They also had like a search our business that... Another thing that hit them was that they had some reseller arrangement with Bing, and I think that also is a probably a flat to down business. [00:29:59] S1: Yeah. That was the original stray that I caught by the way. When Perion acquired Undertone, you, my friend Me? Said something to the effect of, I will remember this tweet until the day I die. Some of this is like, not gonna I'm not gonna click on this because my my my browser is gonna get hijacked or something like that. It was quite good. We could go into the archives 12/01/2015. Anyway... But, yeah, that was that was the legacy [00:30:25] S0: Okay. That
00:30:25 · Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:30:25] S0: Okay. That [00:30:25] S1: was the legacy business of Perion, which gave him the cash to acquire Undertone and started this whole thing. Let's move on. Oh my god. This isn't about me. But this is about me. I was kidding. So Rembrandt, a portfolio company of, of our firm, they merged with a company called Whisper World. So Rembrandt, if you don't know, they do they do a few things. They acquired Spaceback, but effectively what they do is they use AI to do virtual product placement in existing videos. These could be, like, sitcoms from the nineties. They could be movies. They could be creator videos. Super cool stuff. This is very, very hard to scale for a number of reasons per... Particularly for professionally produced content. Whisper World kinda solve that legacy problem with standardization. They're... Another one, you know, non US. It's, it's quite a scaled business. They've been doing this for for some time, not well known. But this is one, again, from an insider perspective, is very complementary in terms of taking, like, you know, something that is scaled with scan... Standardization, bringing in, like, great AI. I am excited about this deal, and it is a merger.
00:31:34 · Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:31:34] S0: Yeah. The... This deal rhymes with the Perion deal, but the dynamics are a little different. Like, Rembrandt, real tech. Hot company. Interest... Hot hot company, but definitely it feels like this... And I know you're an investor, so I could just give you my perception, which is Whisper World, a company no one's heard of outside The US, wants to get big, wants to... They talk about going public, you know, acquiring... Effectively merging, but really acquiring The US based company with a lot of good tech seems like a a pretty important move for them to increase their, you know, awareness and whatnot. And to give one crazy example, you really can't find them on the web. Like, you could Google Whisper World, and they just do not come up, which is so weird. I had to find their website by, like, going to LinkedIn and finding their employees and clicking into their URLs and stuff. Super weird. [00:32:23] S1: I saw that. I saw that you put that in the in the notes. When I did it, I landed on their YouTube page, which then put me to their website. So, yeah, maybe an SEO vendor if you're... Or an SEO vendor. [00:32:36] S0: It was just
00:32:36 · Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:32:36] S0: It was just [00:32:37] S1: free free lead. Free lead. Get get after it. But the new the new company is called, I think, WR Labs. So, you know, we'll, we'll we'll hopefully, you know, see some see some visibility in the engines, from there. But shout out to Omar. I mean, Omar is is is a is a brilliant founder and and, you know, product and technology leader, but he's been particularly good at M and A in his, you know, kind of two point o acquired Spaceback acquired the The US business of Myriad, now merging this thing, obviously going for scale and potential IPO, knock on wood. Don't have any information like, you know, very very interesting to see, like, how Omar's trajectory has matured. [00:33:14] S0: Are you still a shareholder of the combined company? Yeah. [00:33:17] S1: Yeah. [00:33:18] S0: For sure. Okay. Great.
00:33:18 · Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:33:18] S0: For sure. Okay. Great. [00:33:19] S1: Good to hear. Alright. Cool. So earnings? Sure. Alright. There's been a lot of earnings over the course of the past week, and of course, over the course of the past night or so. So maybe the best way to do this is how we've done it before. I'll just kinda like rattle through and we'll we'll come up with, with some some insights and and some some themes. So Amazon earnings, they didn't do that great in terms of the public market performance, but ads are up 12%, AWS 39%. This is basically Google. You know, just like ads growing, cloud really, really growing. So that was Amazon. AppLovin reported last night. AppLovin absolutely crushed it. Their stock, again, we're not a stock show, but their stock was ripping. Revenue up 55% to a record 2,180,000,000, making a push into CTV finally, and a market cap of $90,000,000,000. Our friend James Burrow, who you were on just on on his pod, he did one of those tweets where it's just like, this market cap is now all of these companies and sports teams and, like, you know, the billionaires combined, like AppLovin is is certainly on an incredible trajectory again. Magnite reported. Magnite revenue up 14% to 204,000,000. CTV up 39%. Criteo revenue down 12% year over year, profits down as well. Mountain, 15% revenue growth, but CEO is out, management talking about an execution crisis, the stock got obliterated. And Teads, Teads just came out, revenue down 37% year over year. [00:35:06] S0: Not good. Not good.