Episode 115 - Founder and CEO Jared Siegal on Risk, Resilience and Building Aditude

It sounds like you went through a few different periods of explosive growth, right? On different levels, right? Like there was the consulting business and there was the rapper and then there's the past few years.

How have you grown as an entrepreneur and CEO in those different periods? And how have you needed to become a different person to steward the company at those different levels? Yeah, it's a really good question.

Early on, I was the main ad ops person.

I was the main engineer.

I was the main seller.

I did everything, right? As we went through the wrapper phase, I was still very, very, very involved.

So was Erica as the CTO, very involved in every single client.

Every client knew us.

We worked on every account and we pushed all the code changes.

If we kept scaling and scaling and hiring more people and things like that, our roles change, right? We're no longer doing sales.

We're coming in maybe to close the deal at the last second.

We're worrying about, you know, what's up and what's our funding strategy? What's our marketing strategy? What's, you know, what product should we be focusing on and not focusing on and things like that.

And so, I think it was really hard for me as a pretty controlling person to give up a lot of that control to employees.

And I mean, I had employees.

Yermi, who's our senior director of RevOps, he's been with the company almost five years.

I think for a year and a half, I really didn't let him do anything.

But it was obviously a great decision to take a little bit of a step back and focus on other things.

So I went from very much an operator, like a day-to-day operator to more of an orchestrator, if that makes sense.

And so focusing less on, hey, we need to find 1% more for this publisher to what's the next acquisition, right? Are we going to fundraise? Things like that.

And I mean, it's, there's good and bads with that.

Like I, frankly, I love actually the day to day, but if I want my company to succeed and to scale, like it's, it behooves me not to be involved in the day to day, the art of like acquisition and negotiation is also just as interesting to me.

So like I'm getting my kicks and giggles out of something else now.

That makes sense.

But yes, my role and frankly, the role of all the leadership has changed.

Like when we raised capital, we only had six employees.

It sounds like you went through a few different periods of explosive growth, right? On different levels, right? Like there was the consulting business and there was the rapper and then there's the past few years.

How have you grown as an entrepreneur and CEO in those different periods? And how have you needed to become a different person to steward the company at those different levels? Yeah, it's a really good question.

Early on, I was the main ad ops person.

I was the main engineer.

I was the main seller.

I did everything, right? As we went through the wrapper phase, I was still very, very, very involved.

So was Erica as the CTO, very involved in every single client.

Every client knew us.

We worked on every account and we pushed all the code changes.

If we kept scaling and scaling and hiring more people and things like that, our roles change, right? We're no longer doing sales.

We're coming in maybe to close the deal at the last second.

We're worrying about, you know, what's up and what's our funding strategy? What's our marketing strategy? What's, you know, what product should we be focusing on and not focusing on and things like that.

And so, I think it was really hard for me as a pretty controlling person to give up a lot of that control to employees.

And I mean, I had employees.

Yermi, who's our senior director of RevOps, he's been with the company almost five years.

I think for a year and a half, I really didn't let him do anything.

But it was obviously a great decision to take a little bit of a step back and focus on other things.

So I went from very much an operator, like a day-to-day operator to more of an orchestrator, if that makes sense.

And so focusing less on, hey, we need to find 1% more for this publisher to what's the next acquisition, right? Are we going to fundraise? Things like that.

And I mean, it's, there's good and bads with that.

Like I, frankly, I love actually the day to day, but if I want my company to succeed and to scale, like it's, it behooves me not to be involved in the day to day, the art of like acquisition and negotiation is also just as interesting to me.

So like I'm getting my kicks and giggles out of something else now.

That makes sense.

But yes, my role and frankly, the role of all the leadership has changed.

Like when we raised capital, we only had six employees.