Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:00:00 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:00:00] S0: How do you think about what the Internet looks like in five years? [00:00:04] S1: I think for the folks or the businesses whose product is content, it could be a very difficult period. [00:00:10] S0: Hi, everybody. Welcome to Inspired. I'm Alexa von Tobel. Today, I have on James Cadwallader. He's the cofounder and CEO of ProFound, one of the fastest growing new marketing AI companies, helping brands understand and control what AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Pod and Gemini say about them. [00:00:26] S1: As agents become the primary user of the Internet and can share a 100 x, maybe a thousand x more content on the Internet than humans ever did, marketing teams globally are going to need to create orders of magnitude more marketing. [00:00:39] S0: Before ProFound, he built Kyra, working with TikTok's biggest stars to understand the ins and out of human attention. Since founding ProFound in 2024, he's raised four rounds, most recently, a $180,000,000 rounds at a $1,800,000,000 valuation. When very clear that content and pictures and videos are created by agents, We've got to be really careful because the second what I create looks and feels like slop is the second people start to tune out. How do we avoid the slop? I'm so thrilled you're building in New York City, so welcome. [00:01:07] S1: Thanks, Pat. [00:01:08] S0: Let's go back to the beginning. Let's just quickly, in plain English, talk about what ProFound is doing today, sort of how you stumbled upon the product, and let's go from the beginning.
00:01:08 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:01:08] S0: Let's go back to the beginning. Let's just quickly, in plain English, talk about what ProFound is doing today, sort of how you stumbled upon the product, and let's go from the beginning. [00:01:19] S1: Cool. Yeah, mean, in the most simple terms, we're building the vertical AI company for marketing. So what we're seeing is generative AI birthing big vertical opportunities across everything from legal, finance, obviously software engineering. Marketing is a top three line item for every business on the planet. And, yeah, for some reason it's been ignored. I think it's because it's somewhat... It's something to do with it being, like, less verifiable than software engineering or. So yeah, I think it's more fragmented, it's messier as a category. Yep. But also I just think the smartest people in the world tend to gravitate more towards places like software engineering, etcetera. So marketing tech has, for a long time, been not the sexiest category. It's a bit of a crowded graveyard. [00:02:16] S0: Yep. I feel like martech was pretty out of vogue for venture investing for about a decade too, so.
00:02:16 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:02:16] S0: Yep. I feel like martech was pretty out of vogue for venture investing for about a decade too, so. [00:02:21] S1: Yeah. We've really noticed that as well as, like, you know, in our fundraising cycles. It's... Yeah. I think a lot of investors have PTSD around marketing tech quite rightly. Yep. But, yeah, we... You know, what we've managed to do is build a very technical, very exciting pool of talent. And, yeah, we've we've managed to build a team of some of the smartest people, at least here in New York, who are dedicating themselves to, yeah, reinventing the category of marketing with applied AI. [00:02:54] S0: I love it. So let's go back a little bit. I think, from 2017 to 2022, you were building Kyra, which was a media company really aimed at TikTok. First, just let's talk a little bit about that business. And how did you go from there? So focusing on marketing inputs and skills for real people on TikTok to now being truly the fastest growing company in Martech at the bleeding edge of AI, helping machines figure out how to put in the right marketing inputs to help people. Kyra Media, what was that?
00:02:54 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:02:54] S0: I love it. So let's go back a little bit. I think, from 2017 to 2022, you were building Kyra, which was a media company really aimed at TikTok. First, just let's talk a little bit about that business. And how did you go from there? So focusing on marketing inputs and skills for real people on TikTok to now being truly the fastest growing company in Martech at the bleeding edge of AI, helping machines figure out how to put in the right marketing inputs to help people. Kyra Media, what was that? [00:03:29] S1: I mean, Kyra was, yeah, really the warm up. Very grateful for that experience. It was a baptism of fire. It actually started in a very different place. We began in tech, so it was a consumer software business. We built a discovery app in 2014 that helped millions of people find cool things to do in the city. We started in London, we launched it at Paris, and it was very successful. We couldn't monetize it well. So we went through like series of pivots. [00:04:03] S0: Yep.
00:04:03 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:04:03] S0: Yep. [00:04:03] S1: Where it pivoted through a desire to monetize a consumer app. We started meeting with advertisers, which then pushed us towards video. And that pushed us into kind of going more down the media path, but we're trying to use software to kind of enable what had been a very human and capital intensive business. Yeah. And I I think, you know, the the business is still going. They're doing well. I stepped away in 2022. I come with that business to The US and stayed here in in The US through COVID. And yeah, it's really hard, you know, working with co founders across time zones is very tricky. And yeah, felt like the right time, so I stepped away in 2022. But really, yeah, Kyra, I think had I not worked on that business prior to this business, ProFound, there's a lot... ProFound's been a real rocket ship. And [00:05:04] S0: Truly. I mean, wow. [00:05:06] S1: Yeah. It's been it's been a wild, wild ride so far so far. And, you know, there's a lot of people telling me or us that I'm clever. And I think I would have taken that more on board and, you know, attributed more. I think it'd be it'd be easy right now to start to believe my own bullshit and believe that this is some, you know, this is some stroke of genius on my part. And I think if I were 24 doing this now, I would... And without that experience at Kyra, I think I would maneuver very differently. So I'm very grateful for that experience. Think it taught me a ton of very hard lessons, that first business. [00:05:43] S0: Yep.
00:05:43 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:05:43] S0: Yep. [00:05:44] S1: That have allowed me to keep my feet on the ground with this business and stay super paranoid and understand that things can get really hard. And understand that we're very blessed to be in this position and that there's a lot of timing and good luck that has allowed us to get here. And when you get presented the opportunities like this by the universe, you could say God. Yeah. You repay those opportunities by just working super hard and meeting the opportunity with an appreciation and a recognition for how lucky we are. [00:06:21] S0: I appreciate that mindset. First of all, I appreciate the admission that a lot of life is luck. And I've been lucky. I appreciate your point of it's luck and then meeting the moment with extreme amounts of hard work. And it sounds like having some things that didn't work as well helped you get to something that is working wildly well. So let's go back to Quickly Profound. The world is shifting pretty profoundly, dramatically underneath all of us right now. In plain English, AEO and GEO, which is for people who maybe don't fully appreciate that. What is that?