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Demystifying the conversations we're already here at RRE and with our portfolio companies. In each episode, your hosts, Will Porteous, Raju Rishi, and Jason Black will dive deeply into topics that are shaping the future, from satellite technology to digital health, to venture investing, and much more.
Ari: The algorithm told me the worst thing I could do would be to stay at the very large company that acquired my last company. So, that was pretty honest. And the [laugh]—that—I mean that’s below running for mayor of New York, right? So [laugh]—
Raju: Oh, man.
Will: Welcome to RRE POV—
Raju: —a show in which we record the conversations we’re already having amongst ourselves—
Jason: —our entrepreneurs, and industry leaders for you to listen in on.
Raju: Hey there listeners. This is Raju Rishi along with my partners, Jason Black and Will Porteous. Today we’ll be having a discussion with the legendary Ari Paparo. If you’re one of the few people who don’t know Ari, he’s been a senior executive at DoubleClick, Google, Nielsen, AppNexus, Bazaarvoice, and of course Beeswax, one of our portfolio companies. He’s currently the CEO of LaunchScience and Marketecture Media, and as close to a stand-up comic on Twitter-slash-X as possible. So, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with Ari for nearly ten years now. Ari, nice to have you on our RRE POV.
Ari: Thanks for having me. This sounds like a fun conversation we’re going to have.
Raju: Yeah, it’s going to be great. So, I’m going to kick things off, you know, sort of historical stuff. You did an undergraduate degree in Marketing at Georgetown and an MBA at Columbia. But you jumped right into startups, actually, pretty immediately. Not a traditional pathway at the time. What was the impetus of that?
Ari: I’ve always been entrepreneurial. My father was quite entrepreneurial, and not always that successfully. And so, exiting college, I definitely had a bias towards small companies. I like to tell people about my first entrepreneurial journey, my first job out of college because it was pre-internet, so I did a data company—I didn’t found it, but I was kind of the right-hand man of the founder—it was a data company that scraped state filings to collect interesting competitive intel about franchising companies because franchising is regulated at the state level not the federal level.
So, we would go to state filing offices with a giant Xerox machine, copy 10,000 pages of documents. We weren’t even digitizing them at the time. We were literally copying them and [laugh] file them away in different forums and create products out of them. That was kind of quite an interesting little entry to the business world for me.
Jason: You’d be shocked at how many companies still operate that way [laugh].
Ari: Yes.
Jason: Which is a completely different topic, but fascinating start.
Raju: So, it sounds like your father was also an entrepreneur. I mean, what were some of the coolest or bizarrest businesses that you and he were associated with?
Ari: Well, there were probably too many to name, but I think the highlights might be the fact that if you look at the patent office, you’ll find his patent filing that was accepted for French Toast on a Stick. So, every time you’ve ever had French Toast on a Stick, you had to pay me, like, ten cents. I’m kind of joking because the patent was never enforced. But he does—he did when he passed a couple years ago—have the patent for French Toast on a Stick. He also worked on specialized insoles for sneakers for different sports. He came up with that idea. Nowadays, it actually exists at scale, but his first instinct was that golf versus basketball should have different insoles to rev up your performance.
Raju: Man, that’s really ahead of its time. First of all, I owe you about $3 for the French Toast on a Stick.
Ari: Yes.
Raju: And my kids probably owed me, like, probably about three bucks, too, so I’ll send that next time I see you.
Jason: Ali G might be interested in that patent, by the way.
Raju: Ali G would love that. The ice cream glove.
All: [laugh].
Jason: Yeah.
Raju: And the insoles on the sneakers man. That’s… that was way before its time. I mean, I think that’s kind of reality now.
Ari: There were so many. But those are the two memorable ones.
Raju: Well, thanks for sharing that. So, you had a long string of ad tech businesses. You know, you’re kind of probably one of the handful of experts in ad tech in the world today. What are your feelings on the state of ad tech today?
Ari: Ad tech is certainly mature at this point. I entered ad tech in 2004. My first job there was at DoubleClick and it was still a public company at the time. And there was a lot of room ahead for ad tech at that time. The dream of being able to successfully monetize publisher content at scale was still nascent; it was not fulfilled.
And we’re sitting here in 2023 and most of the major domains of ad tech—meaning, like, display ads, mobile ads—are at scale. They’re sort of—they’re at the efficient frontier. In addition, so much is controlled by these really large-scale companies like Facebook and Google that I think that the whole market remains healthy, but it’s sort of in a stasis, and there’s opportunities, but they tend to be kind of on the margins, little innovations around privacy tech or around, you know, in-game ads, et cetera. But I would hesitate to make a prediction, but it seems as though the era of creating a new billion-dollar ad tech business has probably passed.
Raju: Is there any innovation happening in the field? I mean, you said something about privacy. I kind of understand that because it has become, you know, GDPR and everything like that. You know, do you feel like there’s going to be a rebirth at some point, like a Web3.0, an AdTech3.0 kind of explosion at some point, or no, you don’t feel like it’s ever going to happen?
Ari: There are a number of businesses that are doing really well. So, the hot areas in ad tech are connected TV—so basically, as consumers move to streaming, the ads move as well, and there are some fundamental differences with the way those ads are bought and sold versus banners in mobile, so that’s one area. Privacy is an interesting domain. I don’t think we’ve seen the emergence of large, venture-scale privacy companies in ad tech on their own. The standalone companies in that space are on the smaller side, at least today; maybe there’s an opportunity.
But I think the interesting opportunity is if you say, well, in a world without identity where you’re anonymous—the consumers are anonymous—is it a disruptive change that will change who the leaderboard are on the buy-and-sell side? Maybe there are opportunities for new companies to come in and disrupt major public companies like the Trade Desk back in [unintelligible 00:06:10] PubMatic, or maybe even, you know, Google and Meta to some extent. So, there’s an opportunity, but it’s unclear and no one’s done it yet.
Raju: Yeah. I mean, I can imagine we all just go back to the days of the billboard [laugh], you know, once you—
Ari: Right.
Raju: —anonymize identity, it becomes the old adage of just get your content in the most viewable locations kind of thing.
Will: Actually Ari, I’m wondering about kind of how you see ad formats evolving as we move more and more into a streaming world. Do you think that we just recreate—continue to recreate, I guess—the analog TV ad experience or do you think that we got something richer and better and different that leads to more consumer engagement?
Ari: Yeah. So, the ad formats have been evolving quite a bit, most notably that on a platform like TikTok, there’s quite a bit of video ads and they’re all vertical, short-form, shoppable, and that’s a pretty big difference from what a traditional TV ad is. If you think exclusively about the experience on your living room couch, leaning back with your family, watching something, but it is on an app not on a linear TV, then the question is, what is that experience? Because interactivity in the living room has never really worked that well. I’m seeing interesting developments around bringing some of that social excitement to TV.
So basically, you can take, let’s say, an Instagram video—a Reel—turn it into a TV-formatted spot, add a QR code and a call to action, and potentially make it a direct response ad. There’s a couple of venture-funded businesses in the general theme of making TV accessible to smaller and midsize advertisers and I think that’s a pretty exciting area.
Raju: Yeah, that’s great. So, now you’re launching a B2B SaaS startup [laugh]? Why the shift? And why did you just sort of leave that universe?
Ari: Yeah. So, I sold my last company and wanted to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, and I made a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet had columns for each of the things that matter to me, like, am I good at this? Will it be fun? Can I make more money? Those sort of things.
And I listed out everything I could possibly do with my life, ranging from, like, write a book, run for mayor of New York, you know, those sorts of things. And I ranked them, and the ranking was pretty honest because I’ll tell you, the worst thing on this list of 40 things I could possibly do—and this is just the algorithm talking, not me—the algorithm told me the worst thing I could do would be to stay at the very large company that acquired my last company. So, that was pretty honest. And the [laugh]—that—I mean that’s below running for mayor of New York, right? So [laugh]—
Raju: Oh, man. I think you’d make a good mayor, man. I’m just serious. I [laugh]—
Ari: I think I’d make an okay mayor. I couldn’t be worse than what we have. And then the number one thing was start a new business. And so, going through the process of starting a new business, I ended up with a Google Doc with 26 different business ideas. I worked some through, a lot—a bunch of them with my friends and, kind of, did research.
And one stuck out, which was a problem I’d seen at virtually every company I’ve worked at, which was the problem of how to commercialize and launch new products and features. That’s a problem that has existed at every company I’ve worked for. Whether they were staffed properly or not, they’re still under-tooled and under-processed. And so, I felt there was a SaaS opportunity there.
Raju: Fantastic. Agree. I think I was in a few of those conversations with you as you were thinking things through [laugh] and I remember—
Ari: We won’t talk about all the bad ideas that I pitched you, right?
Raju: [laugh]. There were some good ones. I loved the service tech school.
Ari: Yeah [laugh].
Raju: Yeah. Yeah, I just—Jason and Will, both Ari and I had trouble getting plumbers and electricians and, you know, any kind of handyman to our houses and just such a shortage. And so, we both said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had more—just a school”—
Ari: Boot camp.
Raju: —“To train more?” Because you know, literally 50% of these laborers are going to retire in the next, you know, three to five years. We’re going to have a shortage even more than we have now. So, just a curated school for training techs. Kind of still like that one, Ari, and you know, maybe we’ll go back to it eventually. But I like LaunchScience a ton.
Ari: Flatiron School for Plumbers was, I think, the elevator pitch.
Raju: [laugh]. That’s great. You already have the marketing pitch down. All right, so can you tell us a little bit about LaunchScience? You know, who’s the ideal customer? What are the two or three core problems you’re solving here?
Ari: Sure. So, like I said, LaunchScience is SaaS for launching products. When you think about launching products, you might be thinking about, like, Steve Jobs on stage or the iPhone. Great, yes, you should do that. If you can hit a launch like that, that’s great.
But that’s not what the day-to-day is like. The day-to-day is new products, features, bug enhancements happening every week, every two weeks. And very often, the non-engineering teams, the commercial teams, don’t really have a handle on it. They can’t pay attention, it’s too much information, it’s coming in from too many sources, or they may not even know what’s happening. So, what the tool does is it takes that flow of information, effectively it integrates with Jira or whatever system you’re using for product management, it organizes it into different launches—those can be the monthly release notes, it could be a big, you know, once a year conference, whatever it is—and it allows you to have one place to put all of that information, share it with the teams in controlled manners, uses AI to produce communication materials so we can actually pull in the text from Jira, use AI to turn it into a really nicely formatted, bullet-point summary that’s appropriate for sales or marketing, and otherwise just helps you with that entire flow of process.
The ultimate goal is to improve the ROI on product development because we know how much you’re spending on product engineering, but every single opportunity there is to use some of those products or features to generate business value could be improved by better training, better information, having your sales engineers on top of every little change that’s happened. The ideal customer profile is probably, to start, B2B companies. Size-wise, maybe 50 to 500 employees seems like the sweet spot for us. Well, when I’m—I sound a little uncertain. That’s mainly because we literally opened the doors to customers about two weeks ago, so we’re learning as our customers do. But the reaction has been very good.
Raju: I have to tell you, I mean, Will, Jason, and I have been involved in a lot of product launches in all of our portfolio companies. I think across the three of us, probably 100 or more launches, and you know, maybe even 60, 70 companies here. Just speaking for myself, I mean [laugh], every single one of them had some issue, right, you know, where you’re just like, well, you forgot to do your social media properly, or you didn’t train your sales reps properly, or you didn’t get, you know, sort of this legal docs translated into, you know, German because you sell to the German market or whatever it might be. I will tell you this, I think this is going to be a really powerful product, and one that will almost be the de facto standard if you’re going to market with something new.
Ari: Well, yeah, we believe so, too. I mean, I think the ability to customize this tool to be different for different companies, so if you have a German office and it’s important to, you better do the work to make sure your launches are ready for Germany. If you’re in a regulated market, if you have, you know, a product-led growth versus a sales growth mindset, those have different activities that are required to really be ready for every single launch.
Jason: I’m curious which companies you look to as being those, kind of like, shining examples in the B2B space that you’re helping smaller companies, kind of, templatize towards—templatize is probably the wrong phrase, but really kind of achieve in a younger stage of growth. Because you mentioned Apple earlier. Obviously a large consumer company, already very famous when he’s, you know, announcing the iPhone and the iPod before, but in the B2B phase, it can look very different. So, I’m just curious who you think does really well, and how you’re building product to enable a lot of those experiences for smaller companies?
Ari: Yeah, sometimes it’s a little bit hard to tell from the outside. I mean, Apple, obviously, is incredible at product marketing. And that’s really what we’re talking about here is, like, product marketing and a different set of words. I’ll tell you the characteristics of companies that are good at this because I’ve interviewed, you know, coming up on 100 companies about how they launch.
So, the companies that are in good shape, do things in a certain way. First of all, the product marketing team has clear responsibility for this activity. In some companies, it’s not clear who’s responsible. Secondly, they’re very in sync with product management, so they know the big stuff and the small stuff that’s coming and then they do regular updates on that. Third, they have a sizing system, so they know the difference between a large launch where it’s all hands-on deck and the CEO needs to be briefed versus a small launch where it could just be in the release notes, you don’t need to spend a lot of effort.
Fourth, they create templates. So, they do it the same way every time and templates are the way to do that. So, the same write-ups, the same spreadsheets, the same project plans, et cetera. And there’s a lot more, but last thing I’ll say is that they have an expectation from the downstream group—sales, service, support, whatever—as to how they’ll be informed, the mechanisms, the training sessions, an example would be a standing monthly sales training session where everything new is reviewed so you can just coordinate calendars. Those are some of the things I’ve seen among the best-in-class B2B launching companies.
Raju: I agree. So, just one more question about the product and then I’ll move to the Gatling gun, you know, more—
Ari: [laugh].
Raju: Humor-oriented side of things. But the world is enthralled with AI. It’s kind of waxing and waning, but you see it in the press all the time. And you said you’re incorporating some of that into the product. Can you talk a little bit about the specifics and how you can help a company with AI?
Ari: Yeah absolutely. I think the process of launching and getting ready for launch is very document-heavy; there’s a lot of writing involved. And it’s often taking the same basic ideas and writing them ten different times for different audiences. And there’s really nothing better—no better scenario than that for AI. The large language models are especially good at manipulating text.
And so, we felt that we could make a big improvement in the lives of our customers by taking input text—Jira being the most common example, but it doesn’t have to be Jira, it can be a Google Doc or whatever you have handy—and then having pre-built prompts, effectively, that can transform that with various parameters. And most commonly, it’s a format—like, I want a blog post, I want a sales email, I want something like that—as well as inputs like the user personas or customer types, which are things our customers can define in our platform. So, you could say, “Well, I want to write this press release, but I want to write it in the vein of the decision-maker, economic decision-maker,” versus, “I want to write a blog post and it’s much more about the individual user.”
I think that there’s a lot of discussion about how it’s hard to differentiate on AI because there are APIs available from OpenAI and other companies like that. That may be true, but fundamentally, I think that end-users are not going to write prompts. It’s just not the way most people think about the world. And SaaS companies can really add a lot more value by pre-baking these things, so it’s one button, two buttons, and you get a pretty good draft and you’ve saved time and you’ve increased the value of your offering to the end customer.
Raju: Amazing. So, how do people sign up? If you’re listening to this podcast and you want to sign up, where should people go?
Ari: Yeah, absolutely. The name of the company is LaunchScience—the word launch and the word science—so launchscience.com. You can sign up there. You get a 14-day free trial. If you need more time, just text us or email us, we’ll give you a little more time on that free trial to see if you want it.
If you want a demo, there’s actually a button right in the system to let you set up a demo with me, so I’ll be happy to get on a Zoom with you. You could also just text me. Here’s my phone number: 917-576-1488. That’s my real phone number. Text me if you want to talk to me.
Raju: Wow. Man, you’re a risk-taker. I never knew how much of a risk-taker—
Jason: That’s incredible. Personal service. You don’t know the millions that will listen to this. It’s incredible the following we’ve already amassed—
Ari: Yeah, yeah—
Jason: —with the RRE POV.
Ari: —well, text me. Do not call me. If you call me, I will not answer the phone. Text me.
Raju: I actually know that from practice [laugh]. We’re going to move from the product side of things. I know, there’s a bunch of questions that we could ask, but you know, trying to keep this a little bit succinct. So, I’m going to move to the Gatling gun side of things, unless Will or Jason want to ask one last question. Are you guys good? Maybe, Will, you want to?
Will: I’m just curious Ari, who you sell to, who the decision-maker is on this? Because I can imagine that at first glance, first blush, maybe a lot of product marketing, people might feel threatened by this because you’re kind of stepping it. What are the hallmarks of the decision-maker?
Ari: I think it varies with company size a lot. One of the things that is real is that a lot of companies don’t have product marketing at all. And so, they still need to do these activities, the activities don’t disappear, so effectively, if you have product marketing, probably they’re the ones who want to use this product. If you do not have product marketing, then generally this will be owned by product management. And we’ve gotten a very strong uptake from companies that don’t have product marketing, but realize that’s a problem [laugh]. That would be kind of a really good persona for us.
Will: Probably a lot of startups, probably a lot of opportunity within some venture portfolios.
Ari: Exactly. If you’re under 50 employees or if you only have one product manager in your entire company, probably you don’t really need this product that urgently because communication is one-to-one. It’s as soon as you end up having two or three product managers working on different parts of the product in different paces, that it becomes increasingly a challenge to keep on top of things. And that’s where we start adding a lot of value.
Raju: Okay. Well, thank you. So, here’s our Gatling gun questions. I’ve kind of divided them up into three categories. One is just general Ari questions. I’ll just ask you, you know, I know you cook a bit. So, what’s your favorite food to make?
Ari: Probably chicken parm. Popular with the whole family. I don’t have to make anything special for anybody.
Raju: That sounds delicious, actually. And I’ve seen pictures of your food, so I bet that’s pretty good. How about biggest cooking disaster?
Ari: I made this cake. I made a birthday cake for myself a couple years ago. And if you’ve watched, like, baking shows, there’s a thing called mirror glaze where the top of the cake is very shiny. And the way you do that is that you add a little bit of gelatin to the melted chocolate and then pour it on. And it came out so bad that it was like glue on top of the cake.
It was like a big ball of glue, and it was so bad that my family still talks about it three years later. Like if they see me with a whisk, my daughter just out of nowhere will say, “You’re not making that cake again are you?” Like, “No, I’m not making the cake again. It was three years ago, I’ve learned my lesson.”
Raju: That’s hilarious. All right, moving on to ad tech, since you are an expert. What’s your favorite ad of all time?
Ari: That’s a really good one. I think the Apple, “I’m a Mac. I’m a PC,” ads were really effective as a campaign. And I liked them because a lot of advertising, especially in TV, is just so in the brand category, that you can barely tell what they’re selling. And it was a really nice step down from pure branding, in that they were actually giving you real reasons why you might want to choose one product over another. It was more practical and I think it really appealed to people.
Raju: Yeah, I agree. I love those ads. Most hated ad of all time.
Ari: [laugh]. Oh, um… I’m not sure I’ve got one. I really don’t care for ads where I have no idea who the advertiser are or what message they’re getting across. It just kind of offends me that people are wasting their money. And there’s probably a lot of ads that are in that category, but I can’t really narrow it down.
Raju: There was one that had a lot of singing, a really annoying singer. I can’t remember the name of it. I got really tired—those ShopRite Can Can ads were kind of annoying after a while.
Ari: Oh, wow. That’s really a throwback. I think Cars for Kids, probably be up there.
Raju: Yeah, Cars for Kids.
Will: Yeah, Cars for Kids is definitely a good call.
Raju: Yeah, I kind of agree.
Will: That’s bad.
Raju: But I remember it. It’s very memorable.
Ari: Well, I used them. I got rid of the old car with them because it was stuck in my head so much, so it was very effective.
Raju: Hilarious. Totally hilarious. Okay, now I’m going to move to launch-oriented questions, okay? So, we did your cooking endeavor, we did ad tech, and we’re on launch. So, Star Wars, Star Trek, you know, they’re both—they launch different launch rockets, so what’s your favorite, Star Wars or Star Trek?
Ari: Definitely Star Wars.
Raju: Okay. So, if it’s Star Wars, Obi-Wan or Luke?
Ari: Obi-Wan.
Raju: All right. Go with Obi-Wan. Man, this guy’s an aficionado. I love it.
Ari: Someone once called me the Obi-Wan of ad tech, so that was top-of-mind.
Raju: I think that’s—yeah, you need a cloak. You do need a cloak.
Ari: I—you don’t think I have one?
Raju: [laugh]. You need to wear it. You need to wear it more often. To board meetings [laugh]. Next LaunchScience board Zoom, I want to see a cloak [laugh].
Ari: All right.
Raju: [laugh].
Jason: And a dagger.
Raju: And a dagger. And a dagger. No saber. You need a lightsaber. They don’t carry daggers.
Jason: Well, you know. You can make some.
Raju: Yeah, fine. If you could launch anything from a bridge, what would it be?
Ari: A watermelon.
Jason: It’s a very MIT question, Raju. You guys are famous for dropping stuff off buildings.
Raju: Yeah, it’s true.
Ari: Yeah. I’d go with watermelon.
Raju: You’re going to go for a watermelon off a bridge?
Ari: I’d like to see the splat, you know?
Raju: Okay, fine.
Ari: I was brought up on that comedian—what was the name of the comedian with the hammer?
Jason: Gallagher.
Raju: Gallagher.
Ari: Gallagher, yeah.
Raju: I’m going to Gallagher’s Steakhouse. They just opened the Gallagher’s Steakhouse near me. I’m going to go there on Friday.
Ari: That has nothing to do with the comedian, right?
Raju: No. No.
Ari: Like, they don’t hit your steak with a mallet, do they?
Will: They don’t serve you a watermelon.
Jason: Got to get the smashed watermelon. Yeah.
Raju: I’ll tell you a funny story about Gallagher while we’re here, though, because my dad moved to this country—and you know, he lived in India for most of his life—but when he moved to this country and started working for Panasonic, they took him to Gallagher. And they had front-row seats, the executives at Panasonic. And my dad was wearing a suit, they’d gotten to a nice steak dinner—not Gallagher’s because I don’t think that existed; I think they went to, like, Sparks or something—and they went to the Gallagher show, and at one point, everybody pulls out these rain jackets and my dad doesn’t have one [laugh] and he’s sitting in the front row. And he was mortified, man. He was, like, plastered with watermelon guts. And I think he got on stage, I think Gallagher said, “I mean, your friends really kind of destroyed your suit there.” But his friends wound up paying for his—a new suit for him [laugh] in the end. So, it ends well, but yeah, he was totally naive to that.
Ari: That’s hysterical.
Raju: Yeah. It's a true story. How about launching anything into orbit? You can’t say Republicans. We’re not talking about politicians, but if you could launch something into orbit and be memorialized with all the aliens out there that maybe Obi-Wan could find at some point, would you launch out of this planet so that potentially an alien could find it?
Ari: The All-in Podcast.
Raju: Yeah, okay. The All-in Podcast.
Will: You throw the POV in there? Can you throw the RRE POV podcast in there with it?
Ari: [laugh]. No, I want to keep you guys on Earth.
Will: Thanks, Ari.
Raju: Fantastic.
Jason: We’re trying to stay grounded. Raju is the one trying to shoot us off planet.
Ari: Does Raju have the expensive cashmere sweaters that he bring to the board meetings and stuff?
Raju: [laugh]. I do. I do. Well, thank you, Ari. This was fantastic. I appreciate all the content, I appreciate you humoring us, and all the zaniness that we bring to the table, but this was fantastic. Thanks for coming on.
Jason: Yeah, thanks for coming on.
Ari: Thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun.
Raju: Yeah.
Will: Thanks, Ari.
Raju: And that’s, that’s a wrap. Appreciate all you folks listening out there, and RRE POV signing off. Thanks.
Will: Thank you for listening to RRE POV.
Raju: You can keep up with the latest on the podcast at @RRE on Twitter—or shall I say X—
Jason: —or rre.com, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts—
Raju: —or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We’ll see you next time.