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We are all vulnerable. We are all stressed. We all have problems. Acknowledging and talking about these things helps us to get through them together. Overcoming these challenges together builds community and it becomes what our community is based on. Join us as we interview Lou Carpino from PubX.ai
What does it take to found a globally important company in these times? We’re interested in what happens before universally-acknowledged success.
Join Brett Kistler as he engages in deep conversations with business leaders from emerging markets, being vulnerable about their experience in the early- to median-stage moments of their founding journey.
Intro: Immediately, the conversation changes because we are all vulnerable, we are all stressed, we all have problems, and acknowledging it, talking about it, and working through them together, even if it is only one piece of the problem, is huge. It builds a community. It is what the community is based on.
Brett: Welcome, everybody, to the Clearview podcast. Today I am talking with Lou Carpino of PubX.ai. How are you doing today, Lou?
Lou: Fabulous. It is a bright, sunny, almost spring day here in New York.
Brett: Beautiful. It has been a very, very rainy couple of days here in Hawaii, but the rain just stopped for the moment, just for this recording, which is really convenient for me because it is loud otherwise.
Lou: Hawaii sounds nice. I just returned from Panama, and we were in my butt forest before we came back. It was torrential. It must have been 70 mile an hour wind gusts at some point.
Brett: Lou, tell me a little about PubX. You have got a couple of companies actually, so I am curious about which one you feel most alive about talking about today.
Lou: I could talk about both easily. PubX.
Brett: We could talk about both.
Lou: PubX is new. It is an AI driven, programmatic, publisher, pricing solution today or supercharger for publishers, basically. It’s pretty young. I mean it has got lots of traction, so I could definitely talk about that. But the story is kind of short on PubX. Hindsight I can talk about longer. It is a little bit more mature, but whatever you want. Whatever floats your boat.
Brett: Let’s talk about what your biggest challenge is in either of these. Maybe that’s right now in the younger PubX or maybe you have got a whole history of challenges and growth experiences with Hindsight.
Lou: Challenges, growth, certainly with PubX, it is getting the technology working. Right now that is the challenge. We started off with a basic premise. The whole AdTech digital ecosystem is messed up, and a couple of our co-founders, we got together about a year ago now at this point. We are working together at another digital ad operations platform based out in Eastern Europe, and what they did was basically they work with publishers and help them monetize all of their ad units, layouts, all of that fun stuff that publishers, for the most part, just don’t really know a lot about doing and user optimization.
What they were doing from a floor pricing perspective is they had about 20 or 30 people that were basically adjusting the floor prices daily, manually, which is pretty labor intensive. We just thought that there must be a better way to do this, and we got together and raised some money, which was less challenging than you would have thought believe or not, at least on the PubX side of things. We put a team together and started solving the problem, but we uncovered a whole bunch of other problems across the industry as we started really getting under the hood and actually building the engine, and looking under the hood of the broader Adtech ecosystem and space.
Brett: Were these issues with interoperability or inefficiency in the industry?
Lou: Tons of inefficiencies across the industry, tons of fraud. Every publisher has a different stack, which is another problem. They are storing their data in many different ways. They are stretched to the max from a capabilities and an engineering perspective. The Adtech are typically shared services, and when one editorial wants to get a few things up and operating, it is partially the same team that will also get the Adtech and ed ops running. All of the demand partners and supply partners that everyone is plugged into don’t all necessarily play nice in the sandbox, so certainly figuring out what to do there and how best to handle that was and still certainly is a challenge.
We came to market with an idea. We built it over the summer during the pandemic, which is just another challenge. We started testing our alpha back in November, December, give or take, so we are just ramping up there if that answers the question.
Now challenges on Hindsight, wow, there are still some challenges but it is kind of easy. In the beginning, putting a team together was the challenge. Finding the right people who understood what we were doing, finding a brilliant data scientist to create a contextual search algorithm that worked and that could just amplify related content for the publishers and just get readers engaged more in content that publishers were offering. That value prop was what we went to market with, and a lot of people jumped on it and thought it was nice. We didn’t always describe it that way. It started off as computational journalism, and it sounds all nice and snazzy. But when you are talking to ad agencies and publishers, they don’t really know what that is.
Brett: How do you explain that to them? How did you convey this idea to candidates to get somebody excited to be working with you and be building that team?
Lou: For the data scientists, we had to explain this is a piece of the publishing space that is kind of blowing up. To the buyers of our product, to the brands and to the agencies and the publishers themselves, we had to explain what the value proposition was and literally dumb it down and kind of switch pitch and even switch the way that the tech was actually working.
We started off with a goal, and it still is the goal of just helping publishers with recirculation and engagement. Through that, the publisher will monetize more efficiently via their own content. It worked. It worked really well. One of our first customers was actually the Tribune, and the Virginia Pilot. They saw north of 20% uptick in engagement across the board, which is a pretty solid number. Our second customer was Forbes. They had an even bigger return. They were north of 30%. We got very excited. Quickly, we were playing in the big leagues, and just onboarding was a challenge.
The ramp up time and speeds that are industry standards, we were lean and mean and underfunded at the time. We were essentially bootstrapping the thing at the beginning. Now we have raised north of a million. We have got some private investors, friends, and family. At last time I checked, no, we don’t have any institutional money that we brought into Hindsight. Certainly, that helped. I mean paying the bills and paying our staff when you are barely generating revenue with a handful of publishers in the beginning is an issue and a challenge and keeping everyone motivated and keeping the lights on.
Brett: What was that like for you emotionally going from the phase of this idea to then seeing the idea working and working with big league publishers and then going to friends and family and receiving their money and trust and all the weight that comes with that?
Lou: We knew it would work. We had to explain to them and everyone else that we were raising and the investors we were going to that this would work, and here’s why. They said okay. The weight of it I guess was less of my problem, and more of one of my cofounder’s problems, Hersch, because he was doing more of the day-to-day interactions with the investors and putting together those reports. I was still more focused on the sales and taking it to market, the go to market strategy. It is literally just the hustle out there. The investors get excited with the big names of the publishers that come in, but everything has to work. Onboarding has to work, and streamlining the onboarding process. It is a constant evolution. Constantly analyzing, constantly tweaking, constantly making things faster, getting the right contracts in place. Even with the investors, we had some friends who invested and they weren’t accredited investors, so they had to go through their uncles to actually fund the company.
It was stressful, and not paying yourself when you have a family can be stressful. Certainly, it was stressful, very stressful. Exciting to be in the meetings, but one gets good at compartmentalizing all of those stresses in various ways as they get piled on throughout the years in the war room, if you call it that.
Brett: At what point did you recognize that you had to reconcile these things, that you had been doing this compartmentalizing? Was there some point that you realized that this was harming your relationship with your family or having you be checked out at work while you are feeling disconnected? Was there a moment that you realized this?
Lou: I think. You know, when the bank accounts started running dry, that’s when I realized shit, I’ve got to do something. Do I consult? Does that take away from the promise made to Hindsight and the investment of time and everything that comes in? We do need cash. We have bills to pay, a roof to keep over our heads. Definitely the relationship between myself and my family suffered, and it sucked for a while. But we got through it. We figured out the missing pieces that were through communication. Communication is key. Transparency is key in business and in personal life. Managing expectations also becomes critical. What deal is coming through? What new partners are coming in?
All of those affect what revenue is coming in. All of those affect what we have coming in as a family, what I am earning, and what our employees are earning, too. They have families as well. It is kind of constantly there. It is when it finally hits that boiling point. I think that’s when you just take a step back and say let me assess this and figure out how we can fix these and get the team together. We are constantly talking about how we can improve things even to this day.
Brett: What did you learn specifically about communication and setting expectations? If you can give an example or two when that boiling point hits.
Lou: Locking yourself in a room trying to get shit done without saying things to anybody and existing in your own world thinking you can get everything done by yourself sucks and it doesn’t work. It just amplifies the problem. Being open about the challenges in business and personally, about the business to the family became critical because everyone is important. We are all a big family in one way, shape or form. We all want everyone to win, and we all want to be comfortable. Literally, things started to change when we all started talking about it on either side and discussing where those challenges are and really working through them.
Brett: That’s beautiful.
Lou: Communication is key. The transparency thing, being able to ask the hard questions and deal with the losses, deal with copycats that were your early partners and sending out cease and desist letters and having them take it down. That’s all stuff we shouldn’t be holding in. It all adds up. It is all stuff we have to deal with. It happens. Being truthful.
Brett: Communication with yourself, too. Recognizing where you are at, recognizing when you are burning out, recognizing when you are feeling disconnected, when you feel you are putting all of the weight of everything on your own shoulders and not asking for help.
Lou: Yeah, it is now I realize when you start to feel or at least for me. I felt like I was on autopilot and stuck in the routine, stuck in the routine of something that had worked for so long but it wasn’t working the way it used to work. Just kind of holding on to like when it is going to work. When is it going to work? I know it is going to work. I don’t know. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when, at least for me, it finally clicked that something has got to change. We have to try a different approach, but it does. We put up all of these barriers and blockers that we don’t necessarily want to listen to internally, and meditating, being cognizant of them, and doing some soul searching and just figuring it out on your own through the help of other people and mentors and spiritually and physically is helpful. More people should do it, I think.
Brett: Tell me about your mentorship.
Lou: I have been mentored by a few people over the years. One of them was the father of a high school girlfriend of mine by the name of Josh Feigenbaum. He was a radio guy, an old school radio guy. MJI Broadcasting was his company. He sold it to Clear Channel for a lot of money, mid 30, 50, 80, 90 million, something like that. I forget the number. It was back in I guess 2000, ´99, 2000.
Brett: That was the right time to be selling a company.
Lou: It was the perfect time to be selling a company. I mean Clear Channel had the edict. I worked for Clear Channel. I went into radio myself, which was an interesting time at the time that this happened. It was like in 2003 when I got into radio. Because everything was converging, you have got the AOLs of the world. You have got the Yahoos of the world, and the Googles of the world that are just burgeoning as an industry and blowing up. You have got these old school behemoth dinosaur media companies that were laughing to the bank, and the holding companies that are laughing on their way to the bank post de-reg and consolidation. These new tech companies just came out of nowhere and kind of exploded and changed the dynamic.
These traditional broadcasters, media companies had the relationships with the ad agencies. They had the relationships with them, and they had to create these offerings that competed with the new digital media. All of the radio stations had websites, and the radio stations gave them away for free. That’s a whole other industry problem and conversation that happened as a result of it that the industry today is still paying a price for, but going back to the mentorship and Josh, we had always kept in touch. I would always ask him questions and respect everything he said and did. He had been so successful. He was a shoulder that I could always lean on for an honest, unbiased opinion in terms of pros and cons and decision making professionally through the career and throughout the industry. I advise strongly for somebody to find a mentor to help them guide their way through whatever it is they love doing.
Brett: Mentorship has been very important for me all along the way. Starting from like my hockey coach in high school, he was like a marketing guy who had worked for Bath and Bodyworks and P&G. I did his website for his marketing agency, and just doing that was a mentorship experience, just like walking through this process with him as we were designing a website together. I am learning how marketing works, and then how just a number of my naïve assumptions about business fell apart. He also just lovingly held space for that to happen when I missed my first deadline or let myself get stuck in a room alone feeling behind on everything.
Lou: It is a reality. It happens. Like the industry, all these industries. They churn and burn. It is a churn and burn mentality, and it is not for everyone. I got into the industry, and marketing and sales were two completely different animals. But both churn and burn their people from the very start. I saw it, still see it, have family members that went through it, have friends that have gone through it, and some people make it through. Some people never look back. Some people go brand side, and some people go vendor side. They switch all around, but it is not to say that it isn’t part of the journey or shouldn’t be part of the journey of one’s career. You only find out what you enjoy doing or like doing by going through stuff like that.
Brett: Right, absolutely. How do you keep that churn and burn energy? How do you maintain the kind of energy that you want in your companies now while still working with that energy?
Lou: I’ve made a lot of friends over the years, so that certainly helps. But meditating, personally, I meditate. If I am in a bad mood, it kind of has to be checked at the door and I understand why. Kind of sharing my plights and challenges with my clients that all literally become friends. They have challenges, too. We are all people. It’s not just purely transactional. I think when all of the purely transactional BS gets out of the way and you connect to people on a deeper level, that really makes the process much easier personally, professionally, and corporately. Just doing the old business development stuff, people don’t want to be treated like a commodity even though the properties that we realize and are representing have become commoditized. Being cognizant that there are people on the other side of the line and on the other side of the screen that are doing things, and there is a lot of work involved to do it and appreciating it and expressing the gratitude for it is an important thing.
Brett: Yeah. Absolutely. I’m curious now. Having heard all of this experience through Hindsight, which is really poetic right now, how are you applying all of those lessons about your personal balance with your family and with your work and the way that you want to feel in a company and the way that you want to work with people and these meditation practices? How are you bringing that into PubX? What are you doing differently now in this new company? How does it feel to you in your body as you are doing this?
Lou: Structurally, as an organization, we went and formed PubX far more mindfully than Hindsight. Hindsight was formed. Yes, let’s do this. Let’s make a shit ton of money because we have this awesome technology that will help publishers, which was a great idea. We had that energy, and that energy became a challenge. With PubX, it is a very different approach. It is not just about money. It is about solving problems. Hindsight was about generating revenue and still is about generating revenue and solving problems, but it is very different. We are connecting every conversation we have. We are connecting so much deeper with our alpha partners and our customers. We are delaying really releasing the solution to the first customers because we have uncovered so many other issues and challenges that they have, and some of them are similar.
It sounds cheesy, but we have taken a holistic approach to solutionizing Adtech. But we are doing it one problem at a time instead of having a solution for all. I mean we could try and solve A and try and solve B. Being VC backed certainly helps us and gives us the ability to solve these problems. We have got tons of runway, but time is of the essence. But being really pragmatic about what we are doing right. Let’s A/B test. Is this working for the publisher? Is this solving their problem? Is it solving it efficiently? Are we solving it efficiently? Can we scale it appropriately across the board?
Brett: I am really curious how you strike that balance between maintaining the holistic approach, solving for many interacting variables for the health of the system while also trying not to boil the ocean and get stuck in too many things, too many irons in the fire at once.
Lou: Honestly, it is being transparent and having an open dialogue of communication with your customer, not hiding things. Some of these are pretty large media companies, and the only reason they are willing to put their pen to paper and say all right, we like your idea. We like you. They trust us, which means we have to trust them. It is reciprocal. They believe in the idea, and they would love to see it work. They want us to help solve it, so they are going to give us the tools to solve it. But if we lie or we are not transparent about what the challenges are and why things aren’t getting ramped up in time or why we are integrating or why we are losing them money some days, that’s a big thing to say. Working through the problems with them and telling them hey, we are trying to solve it. We have got some pretty bright people that are behind this makes things a lot easier.
I mean we have revised timelines and all sorts of things. Honestly, it is the transparency part of it. In this media business, in the Adtech ecosystem, there is such a lack of transparency that is just a systemic problem. I think the people that we deal with, the product managers, the publishers, the editors, the CTOs, they appreciate the transparency because so many companies just don’t have it. They are siloed. They don’t see it. They don’t know what the other hand is doing. They appreciate it even with their partners. They see money coming in, but is it valid? What’s happening on the other end? What’s getting lost between 5 vendors before an ad is actually being served? They don’t know. They can’t see anything. It is a black box.
Brett: An industry as rife with fraud as the ad industry, I think transparency and vulnerability would be a breath of fresh air.
Lou: Yes, and it was for us. That’s how we started PubX. Immediately, the conversation changes because we are all vulnerable. We are all stressed. We all have problems, and acknowledging it and talking about it and working through them together, even if it is only one piece of the problem, is huge. It builds a community. It is what the community is based on. When you have some villain trying to come in and finds a weakness in the system, which a lot of these Adtech companies out there, they are not villains but they see holes in the system or they exploit holes in the system. They make money off of it. It makes everyone look bad. It makes the honest people look bad that do all of this fraud stuff. Rooting that out is a massive problem that I still think is not spoken about enough.
We have CTV that’s blowing up, and it’s rife with fraud. Everything has it. [child’s voice] I’m sorry. My son just barged in here with a paper jam. [child’s voice] I’m doing a podcast. [child’s voice] Maybe this is a good place to pause if you don’t mind. When Gabriel, my five and a half year old son, gets on something, it is kind of impossible to get him off of it. [child’s voice]
Brett: Let’s take a short commercial break.
Lou: We will pick up in a few. [child’s voice] Sorry about that. I am back.
Brett: No worries.
Lou: Across the whole pandemic, it was actually kind of hysterical. You have got two camps. Actually, this is an interesting area of contention within companies they have had to solve early on and now are doing all of these virtual meetings with everyone working from home. You have got the empty nesters. You have got professionals with families that have triple the amount of work to do because their kids are being homeschooled because all the classes became virtual. Then you have all the young professionals that live alone and they just work, work, work, 24/7. When you have kids at home, there is nothing you can do to prevent them from coming into a meeting. There is nothing you can do. There have been countless meetings where they end when they end.
Brett: You can even be in cahoots with your kids. Send them some kind of signal. Be like okay, I really want out of this meeting. Can you just come barf all of my shirt or something?
Lou: Some people probably do do that, but that didn't happen here. Our kids broke every lock in the house on every door. It's impossible to lock the doors. They feel the energy. You are speaking. There is an important topic that you are talking about. Wait! Now is a perfect time to go in and jump on papa's lap.
Brett: I want your attention. Interestingly, you have mentioned a couple of times on this episode about meditation being important for you. I am imagining just like on a Zoom call, also when you are meditating, your kids are just going to show up. Why is daddy being still and not moving? What’s going on? I want his attention. I am curious to learn a little bit about your meditation practice, and what that means to you and what practice that is and also the interaction with how you do this in Covid lockdowns with your kids.
Lou: I can tell you I have had many a meditation interrupted by my children in the middle of the day. I will meditate in the morning briefly, and there are things that you can do that are meditative but that aren’t actually active forms of meditation. I’ve been practicing a lot of Qigong lately. I don’t know if you know Mantic Qi, who is amazing. I highly recommend him. I think if more people understood connecting with nature and meditating and leveraging the forces that mother Earth has given us and provided us is remarkably powerful, and we all need to recharge off of her as much as she recharges off of us. That’s something I have been doing a lot, and there are a bunch of different types of practices.
I think it is really important for me, personally. It is different for everyone. My wife loves getting up early and meditating. I don’t. I like to eat in the morning. It is the first thing I like to do. I don’t drink coffee. I don’t do caffeine, so that’s not my fix. But you just have to accept it. If you are 14.5 minutes into a meditation, and your five and a half year old comes running in and jumps on your stomach or on your back, there really isn’t much you can do about it. Me, when I am in a meditative state, I don’t do anything about it. It just is what it is. Meditation over.
Brett: Or the meditation has just changed, and now the being present that meditation is is being present with my kid jumping up and down on me. Transitioning to the rest of the day.
Lou: Yes, being present is key. Actually, before I actually started the various forms of meditation, just like taking the time to work with myself to do that and realizing the importance of it, becoming present and living in the now was a big thing for me to figure out. My life fundamentally changed when I figured out to actually be present. It started off with meditation and focusing on breathwork. All of that helps with becoming present and living in the now, but once you figure out that there ain’t shit you can do about living in the past. There is some stuff you can do about the future, but thinking about it too much will make people anxious. That’s what worries people too much. That’s why our society is so reactive instead of letting things evolve and figure it out. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But control your controllables. Don’t let them control you, is something another early mentor taught me. Jonathan Mason. He was my first manager in radio. It is something I live by. Control your controllables. Never let them control you. Your life will work out much easier. It blends right into living in the now because living in the now is controlling your controllables.
Brett: It is also not trying to control your uncontrollable.
Lou: Right, there are variables that play into a lot of stuff that are just out of your control.
Brett: It reminds me of like a crocheted art piece that my grandma had hanging on a wall that was. What was that quote? God, grant me the courage to change the things that I can, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference. Something like that.
Lou: The Serenity Prayer. I know it well. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Brett: To close this out, I am curious what you want your kids to learn from the way that you do business.
Lou: Patience.
Brett: What do you want your kids to learn about life from the way that you do business?
Lou: What do I want my kids to learn? I want them to learn that people are good. One of the biggest challenges is not becoming cynical in this business. For the most part, one could say corporations are bad. They are only about the bottom line, but people are good natured. You may turn blind to the corporate entity and structure, and there are bad corporations out there. But I want them to know that they shouldn’t do anything that doesn’t bring them joy. The minute whatever they fall into, whether it is playing or music or engineering bridges or cars or becoming an artist, they have to love it and just let their light shine.
I remember when I quit radio because I didn’t enjoy it anymore. I had to get out of the industry, and I should have quit two years earlier. But I did quit two years early and they convinced me to stay. Worst decision I ever made. Hands down. I want them to know to trust your gut. Trust your intuition. Don’t be bullied by anyone. Speak up. Ask questions. Learn. Do what you love and let your energy shine. We all have energy, and it gets stifled by bad management and incapable and incompetent people. If you are smarter or better than someone, so be it. Follow your heart if that makes sense.
Brett: The quickest way to incapable or incompetence is to not be enjoying what you are doing or be doing what you are absolutely not enjoying. All right. Thank you, Lou. This has been an amazing episode. I really appreciate this conversation.
Lou: You are more than welcome. I am honored and humbled that you thought of me and invited me to be on it and certainly happy to do it again anytime, I will say.