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The official CEO.com podcast featuring unfiltered conversations with the leaders shaping our world.
Clint Betts: Jay, thank you so much for coming on the show. What an honor to have you. You are the founder and CEO of Theorem. What is Theorem? How did you become the founder and CEO?
Jay Kulkarni: Well, short story, I’m the first entrepreneur in my family. I knew in my late teens that I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I came to the U.S. as an immigrant and only had one real job for about five years before starting the company out of a spare bedroom in New Jersey.
Clint Betts: So what is Theorem? Tell us what it is.
Jay Kulkarni: We’ve been in business for more than 20 years. I bootstrapped the company, so we didn’t take institutional funding. We’ve managed through multiple recessions and continued growing. Theorem is a digital marketing technology services company. We primarily work with two types of customers: content companies and commerce companies.
Content companies include large streaming platforms, publishers, and media businesses. Any company monetizing through advertising is a potential client for us. Advertising has increasingly overtaken subscriptions as a revenue stream, especially in streaming. Media companies sell advertising inventory to brands and agencies, but someone has to operationalize those campaigns at scale. That’s what we do.
Over the last few years, we’ve incubated a platform called Upward, which is our automation solution purpose-built for media monetization. We’ve taken two decades of institutional knowledge and future-proofed it through technology. We’re also heavily involved in marketing cloud technologies and direct-to-consumer brands. One area we’re especially excited about is video commerce.
Short-form video is now the most consumed type of content online. If you can help DTC brands leverage video commerce directly on their own websites, that becomes a huge competitive advantage. That’s a big part of how we think about the next 20 years of the company.
Clint Betts: Video commerce feels relatively new. Are you taking principles you’ve learned over the years and applying them there, or is this something completely different?
Jay Kulkarni: There’s still no universal term for it. Some people call it live shopping, some call it social commerce, some call it video commerce. It really exploded in China and across Asia first. Most people in the U.S. associate it with TikTok or Instagram, but that’s not exactly what we’re focused on.
What we’re building is video commerce directly on a brand’s own website. Right now, there’s a lot of friction for brands trying to stand these experiences up. And it’s not always about selling products. Sometimes brands just want to educate consumers, explain how a product was developed, or create a richer experience.
Brands care deeply about having a one-to-one relationship with consumers, but they also want to control that interaction. If everything happens on TikTok or Instagram, they lose ownership of the experience and the data. First-party data is becoming increasingly important. So we’re betting that brands will continue wanting those experiences on their own properties.
Clint Betts: How is AI changing all of this?
Jay Kulkarni: AI underpins a lot of what we’re building. For example, content moderation and brand safety are becoming huge areas. Different brands have different definitions of acceptable content. Partial nudity might be perfectly acceptable for an underwear brand but completely inappropriate in another context.
We’re training machine learning models so brands can establish their own policies around acceptable content and automate enforcement. That’s a major use case.
Another area is workflow automation. Advertising operations are incredibly fragmented and unstructured. There are a lot of disconnected platforms involved. We use robotic process automation and machine learning to automate workflows, especially where APIs are incomplete or unreliable.
And obviously AI can generate content too, but I think responsible brands need transparency. Consumers should know when content was generated by AI. Trust matters.
Clint Betts: At what point do you think AI just makes all the videos and there’s not even a real person involved anymore?
Jay Kulkarni: I actually have a contrarian view on that. Humans still crave authenticity and human connection. Storytelling is fundamentally human. Hearing someone tell you a story is different from hearing it from a machine.
I think AI is fantastic for reducing friction, automating repetitive work, and handling operational tasks. But if a brand wants to connect authentically with customers, the human element still matters a lot.
If you look at great brands throughout history, the ones that survive wars, recessions, and economic upheaval are built on trust and ethos. I don’t think machines replace that.
Clint Betts: What does a typical day look like for you?
Jay Kulkarni: I’m based in Chatham, New Jersey, and I tend to come into the office every day even though we’re a hybrid company. I like structure. My days start early. I’m usually in the office around 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning.
The mornings are packed with standups, development reviews, product discussions, migration planning, leadership meetings, and sales pipeline reviews. We run the business in a very structured way. We have recurring meetings throughout the week for Upward, video commerce initiatives, executive leadership, and client management.
I usually leave around 2:00 or 3:00, go to the gym, spend time at home, and then in the evenings I practice piano. I started learning about three years ago. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I also read quite a bit and usually wrap up any work emails before bed.
Clint Betts: You mentioned being hybrid. How did you land on that model, and how do you think about culture? That debate still seems to be playing out everywhere.
Jay Kulkarni: After COVID, we had to decide whether we wanted everyone back in the office or whether we’d embrace hybrid. Given the nature of our business and the fact that we operate globally—with teams in India, Australia, and the Dominican Republic—we felt hybrid made the most sense.
Talent is very competitive in our industry, and hybrid work allows us to access great people wherever they are. At the same time, there are certain things that are non-negotiable. Training sessions, client QBRs, team-building events—those happen in person.
As for culture, we think about it holistically. We call it our “Ways of Working” framework. It’s built around purpose, process, and people.
Purpose is about mission and vision. Process is about KPIs, MBOs, and making sure every employee understands how their work ties into company goals. And people is about values, behaviors, development, and leadership training.
We spend a lot of time reinforcing those things. We’ve had at least 17 employees stay with the company for more than 15 years, which I’m incredibly proud of. Most of the Upward platform was actually built internally by team members who grew into those capabilities over time.
Clint Betts: That’s incredible. Are you using AI internally to automate operations too?
Jay Kulkarni: Absolutely. That was really the genesis of Upward. We started by looking internally at the work we were already doing in media operations.
When an advertising deal closes, it triggers insertion orders, creative deployment, audience targeting, campaign management, reporting—all of these operational workflows happening around the clock and across multiple languages and regions.
We asked ourselves: which parts can be automated? Which parts can AI improve? We spent 12 to 18 months testing internally before introducing it to customers.
Now a significant percentage of those workflows are automated, and multiple customers are actively migrating to the platform. Advertising as a revenue model is only growing. Even retailers like Target now generate significant advertising revenue through retail media networks.
Clint Betts: How are you feeling about the economic environment and heading into 2026?
Jay Kulkarni: Because we’re in technology services rather than physical goods, tariffs haven’t directly impacted us the way they’ve impacted other industries.
The much bigger shift for us is AI and automation. The biggest conversations we’re having internally and with clients are around how businesses adapt operationally to AI. That’s the major transformation happening right now.
Clint Betts: Finally, we end every interview with the same question. At CEO.com we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes. Who gave you a chance that helped get you where you are today?
Jay Kulkarni: There are several people who come to mind, but there’s one story that has always stayed with me.
I came to the U.S. as a student. I had been accepted into school, but my passport had expired. Without it, I couldn’t go to my visa interview and I would’ve lost the opportunity to come to America.
My father was a school teacher, and one of his colleagues—a retired teacher—offered to help us. He came with us to the passport office, and it turned out the passport officer had once been his student. Because of that connection, they expedited my passport and I was able to come to the U.S.
When I thanked him, he told me his own son had wanted to study in America years earlier, but they couldn’t afford it on a teacher’s salary. His son had written letters asking for help, and eventually Princess Grace of Monaco funded his education.
He told me, “Someone helped my son, so I helped you.”
That’s always stayed with me.
Clint Betts: That’s beautiful, man. Jay, thank you so much for joining us. What an incredible company you’ve built. We’d love to have you back sometime and go even deeper into some of this.
Jay Kulkarni: Absolutely. Thank you. All the best.