With a speed of technological advances these days, creating a startup requires a sense of urgency, endless energy, passion, tenacity, a great idea… and money.
My entrepreneurial journey has yielded a great deal of money. In 2019, I sold my video ad company, Vungle, for $780 million to Blackstone, and before that (towards the end of my tenure there), it was generating $300-$400 million per year. Nine years earlier, however, it was a very different story. Ambitious, eager, hopeful young entrepreneurs often ask me, “How did you do it?” I’m happy to tell my story as there are lessons to be learned from what I did, even if it was somewhat unconventional.
In 2010, I was living in London, eating lots of ramen noodle dinners. I had no money….nothing but a vision. I was smart and scrappy and could see that mobile was going to take off. It became clear to me that there had to be an alternative way for mobile gaming to be funded. I was resourceful and completely embodied the phrase ‘the hubris of youth’ (that is to say, I was young and arrogant and as brazen as they come—entirely confident that I had an industry-disrupting idea that could change the world of digital advertising and mobile gaming completely).
Unfortunately, my co-founder and I struggled to find funding in the UK. We heard there was one spot left in a program run by AngelPad, a Silicon Valley incubator. They were having a competition where the prize was $120,000 to fund your startup. We knew this would be a great opportunity for us, but we also knew that we were not the logical or easy choice to be recipients. We did some background research to find out who the decision-makers for this competition were and found that Gokul Rajaram was one of the judges. Gokul had worked at Google for close to 5 years and was a product director for Facebook ads at that time. Since then, he has become a close friend to me and an icon in the digital industry. He has helped many businesses get off the ground and sits on the board of many Silicon Valley successes.
To get his attention, we created video ads that would pop up on his friends’ LinkedIn accounts that featured his face with the headline, “Gokul needs your help. Urgent! Click now.” When you clicked on the ad, a video of me and my cofounder played, pitching our business Idea about the ad network we would build and explaining that we were hungry entrepreneurs looking for our chance at success. The video was quite arrogant and looking back on it, I can’t believe the gutsy and incredibly stupid things we said to get noticed…but it worked. We said things like, “We know you work at Facebook; we’re going to crush Facebook!”
- Be Bold
- Target The Right People
- Use the Right Medium
- Do Your Research
That video went viral, ended up on Facebook’s internal discussion boards and probably ended up in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg‘s inbox. I believe Gokul got into a bit of trouble over that, actually. Regardless, we were excited when we got a call from someone else involved with AngelPad and asked, “When can we start?” He was clearly upset with us for circumventing the standard process. He said in the sternest way, “You need to apply online and go through the normal application process.” We explained, “We did apply. We didn’t hear anything back from you; that’s why we built these video ads.” By the end of the call, he promised to get back to us.
We waited for a few days. As you can imagine, when you were young and passionate about your ideas, you don’t generally have a lot of patience. So after a few days of not hearing back from him, we built more ads targeting others. They did end up calling us back, saying, “Take those ads down! You are causing us all kinds of trouble. Get on a plane and come to the US.” We packed our bags and were on a plane the next day, ready to make our pitch and change the world.
We knew we had an idea worth pursuing, but we also knew that people might not understand it. We didn’t want to run the risk of being passed over. While I wouldn’t necessarily advocate everyone follow the same model that we did, there are still lessons to be drawn from this experience:
- Be bold – find ways to stand out in your inevitably very crowded field
- Target the right people – one of the critical elements of success for us in this effort was that we targeted the right people. Make sure you were going after the right target audience for your situation.
- Whenever possible, use your medium to help convey your message – By doing video ads, we were able to prove that we were digital natives and showcase our expertise in the area we wanted to pursue. Our startup had to do with a new way to use video ads on mobile, so garnering attention via video ads communicated that we understood the medium; it showed authenticity and built instant credibility within our medium of choice.
- Do your research – We understood what we were up against. We knew we would be competing against people who worked at Google or came out of Stanford or MIT, so we knew we needed to go ‘above and beyond’ to showcase what we could do
How can you stand out in the crowd? Timidity will never change the world. If you are a disruptor, the world is waiting for your innovation and fresh perspective; you must find a way to break through the clutter and get noticed.