Emi Gal

Five years ago the Blackberry was the most loved smartphone in the world and Samsung was known for making refrigerators and TVs. Three years ago Groupon was the fastest growing company ever and Yahoo’s founder & CEO Jerry Yang was resigning. Two years ago Zynga was one of the most innovative technology companies around and Supercell wasn’t making any money (they’re now making $2M / day). It’s bewildering to observe how during the same timespan some companies have reached all-time lows while others have grown exponentially. And there’s a common denominator for the downfall and success of these companies: mobile. 

The companies that have grown over the past few years or in recent months (Apple, Samsung, Yahoo, Supercell) focused all their efforts on mobile while the ones that are quickly becoming irrelevant (Groupon, Zynga, RIM) missed the mobile step and they’re now haemorrhaging talent and money (which is ironic for RIM, creators of Blackberry, as they are after all a mobile hardware company). But besides understanding the importance of focusing on mobile if you’re running a technology company, I think there’s an even more important lesson to be learned here: earnestly observing and adopting trends. 

Trends are important because they indicate where a certain industry is going to end up, long before it becomes mainstream. There are obvious trends like mobile, wearable technology or digital currencies. But there are smaller, generally industry-specific trends that are harder to spot: in digital advertising, it’s the trend of personalising ads (by device, platform, person); in fitness, it’s the quantified self movement; in health, it’s putting medical data in the cloud. Observing trends is important because it enables entrepreneurs to identify gaps in the market before others do. 

In terms of identifying trends, it’s not rocket science. Chris Dixon put it well in a recent blog post saying that “what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years”. Even more so, I think what the smartest people discuss online is also a good indication of what’s going to become a trend. I’m a big fan of discussion boards and community platforms like Reddit and Stack Overflow, because that’s where the geeks hang out. It’s how I first found out about Bitcoin three years ago and Ripple most recently (see? you should be on Reddit), and it’s why last year, long before our competitors, we started focusing on mobile at Brainient. Another way is to observe kids’ behaviour. Take any kid who’s ever touched an iPad and you’ll notice that they expect every electronic device to respond to touch: the TV, the laptop screen, the refrigerator.

All in all, I believe there are many ways to spot trends if you have an earnest desire to observe what’s going on around you and be willing to be laughed at by the mainstream (the way they’re currently laughing at Google Glass). But it’s an important skill to develop if you want to innovate and one that every entrepreneur should cultivate.

I’ve never been good with timezones. I understand how they work and why they exist, but it’s a hindrance in my day-to-day calendar management because I generally need to schedule meetings on three different timezones (Bucharest, London, NY).

Today however, I discovered an amazing feature that will turn me into a calendar pro: the ability to add another timezone to your Google Calendar. Just go to Calendar -> Settings and in the “Your current time zone” section you now have the ability to add another time zone.

I love it how Google creates these tiny, little features with the sole purpose of delighting customers. More companies should do this.

Fred Wilson wrote a great post today about working too hard and not getting anywhere, something I’ve felt intensely over the past seven years since I started my first company. 

But while working too hard and not getting anywhere can be solved by something as elegant as just changing the business model, there’s another scenario that’s not as easy to overcome: working too hard trying to solve the wrong problem.

A few years ago I founded a startup called BrainTV, aiming to build a new type of media company, targeting what we called “smart people”. The concept was to produce video content on certain topics (business, investment, art, theatre) that would be partly informative, partly entertaining (think of it like The Economist meets The New Yorker). I thought it was a good idea at the time but in hindsight - there were so many holes in the whole thing, I don’t even know where to start. We were trying to solve an innexistent problem. We were also perceived as arrogant and even worse, the content wasn’t that good. When I acknowledged that, I shut it down. It took 12 months. 

I see a lot of this most recently through my involvement with the Digital Catalyst Fund and I’ve become quite upfront with founders whenever I see it. However, not once have I seen a founder accept that they may be working on the wrong thing, which I can understand as they’ve invested so much time and effort into their idea. 

The solution to this is for investors, friends and families to stop being nice. It’s hard to tell the truth when you know it will hurt, but if an idea is shit you would be doing that founder a much bigger favour if you say it’s shit rather than letting them bang their head against the wall for 12 months. 

Every quarter, Brainient organises a breakfast event called - evidently - Breakfast & Brains. It’s a forum for our clients and friends, where we discuss the newest happenings in the video advertising world and the next one (happening on May 1st) will be all about mobile: the technology, standards and tracking across the multitude of mobile devices out there.

We’ll have George Dixon (Manager - Mobile & Digital at MediaCom), Paul Lyonette (European Sales Director at YuMe), Simon Andrews (Founder of Addictive Mobile) and yours truly speaking about how to create, run and measure mobile video campaigns at scale. 

You can find out more about the event and register here. Tickets are free but seriously limited so go get yours now.

One of my favourite books of all time is The Great Gatsby. I must have read it half a dozen times over the years, but while eagerly waiting for Baz Luhrman’s adaptation of the novel (coming out this May), I decided to read it again. 

One of the reasons why I love Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is that each time I read it, a totally different scene sticks with me for weeks, sometimes months. This time, it’s when Nick Carraway says “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.” I find it such a beautifully complete way to describe the dynamics between people or organisations. 

Take the startup ecosystem for example: you have the pursued (Stripe, Evernote, Spotify, etc); you have the pursuing (investors, VCs, lawyers, etc) who are generally pursuing the prior category; you have the busy (startups with flat growth being busy to get out of flat growth) and the boring (hipsters in Starbucks). So how do you become a pursued startup, according to F. Scott Fitzgerald? 

It’s not that hard to deconstruct, really: take Gatsby (pursued by Nick): he’s successful (read: has traction), throws great parties (read: has great network) and is mysterious (read: is intriguing, unattainable), or Daisy (pursued by Gatsby): she’s beautiful (read: has traction), she’s part of the upper class (read: has great network) and she’s married (read: intriguing, unattainable). I don’t know about you, but I see a pattern here. 

Or maybe I’m just overdoing it and I should stop now. Regardless, take a break from The Skinny Startup and read a great american classic. You may (actually) learn something new.

If you break down any organisation to its indivisible unit, it always comes down to people. Regardless of whether it’s mining asteroids or building mobile apps, someone needs to create something in order to generate some form of utility or economic value. Obviously, some people create better stuff than others. 

Now, I’ve always thought that when it comes to building companies it’s 50% about product, 40% about people and 10% about luck. Products are created by people, so abstractly speaking building companies is 90% about people. And the general definition of luck is that opportunity meets preparation, which also requires people, so in it’s most abstract form you could argue that companies are 100% about people. So if companies are all about people, it goes without saying that great companies are all about great people. 

I’ve never met Nick D’Aloisio but he seems to be really good at building networks of people quickly (regardless of whether it’s investors, journalists or public company CEOs). I mean, the kid is 17, he’s raised money from some pretty high-profile investors and by the looks of it he’s also met all the right people along the way (including Marissa Mayer). 

So here’s why the Yahoo - Summly deal kinda makes sense: in order for Y! to become a great company (again) they need great people and Nick will now attract a lot of smart, young people towards Yahoo! Is that worth $30M? I’m not sure. Is it worth trying, given Yahoo!’s size and ambitions? You bet. 

There are very few places in the world where you could say that without it sounding like a total joke. Bucharest is one of those places, according to the many foreign friends who’ve visited my hometown. So 12 months ago, together with a few amazing people, I decided to take advantage of it and helped start the Digital Catalyst Fund, a seed fund that finances entrepreneurs and helps them build their technology in Romania.

Fast forward 12 months later and we’ve funded a handful of amazing ideas. We’ve also created a software company owned by the fund (employing about 30 developers), and hired a CEO to run it (this helps us source awesome talent for the awesome startups we invest in). And we’ve even gone so far as buying and decorating a 6,000 square building to host our entrepreneurs. Accelerator-style. 

This year, we’re also announcing the Student Summer Boot Camp, an initiative that encourages students to create a startup. Over the next couple of months, we’ll be selecting a number of ambitious young individuals and cover all their expenses to fly, live, build a product (and party) in Bucharest for three months. We’ve even hired a chef who’ll cook for the winners (we don’t really like burgers in Romania). 

So if you have an idea and need help building it, apply now. You’ll enjoy Bucharest, you’ll be amazed by our engineers and fall in love with our women. 

Later edit: I’ve been told that this post has a misogynistic tint, so I’d like to let you know that we also have plenty of women engineers in Romania. I’m sure you’d fall in love with them as well. 

When it comes to technology, size does matter - the smaller, the better. 

I love the iPad. I think there’s no comparable device on the market yet, and doing what I do I’ve tried all of them. For the past few weeks, I’ve been using the iPad mini. It’s awesome, so much so that I’ve stopped using its older, heavier, larger predecessor - the iPad.

There seems to be a trend in technology: it’s becoming invisible. Google Project Glass, the Pebble watch, the artificial retina are great examples. I dream of a world where I can use, touch, speak to technology without actually seeing it. And I dream of a world where all this invisible technology is connected to the internet and interconnected with all my devices. 

What’s even more exciting is that the hardware for turning all these products into reality is not tens of years away. It’s here. The software isn’t yet, but it will catch-up. We live in the future and I love that I get to be a part of it. Just wanted to put that out there.

It will come to no surprise for many of my friends that I’m a big fan of Elon Musk, which makes me somewhat biased writing this post. But I’m also a big fan of The New York Times and think that they’re good guys, most of the time. This week, however, they fucked up. Big time. 

For those who haven’t followed the saga, the NYT wrote an article about Tesla’s Supercharger network in the US. No need for you to read it - the main takeaway is that if you buy a Tesla Model S you’re going to run out of juice in the middle of the street. Except you won’t, as the CEO of Tesla fired back in a post on the company’s blog, in response to the (unequivocally fake) NYT article.

Now, this is not the first time a big media company trashes a technology company for eyeballs, impressions, and making a point (albeit a wrong one - remember all the negative reviews of the iPhone, anyone?). Except this time, the NYT didn’t go against Elon Musk. They went against a robot. Because for all intents and purposes, the Tesla Model S is a robot. And one of the things robots do is collect data. Lots of it. 

This is a very unfortunate event for Tesla, but it sets a great precedent: in the digital era, journalistic integrity can be confirmed or destroyed by using data. I have no shade of doubt that mr. John Broder, the author of the appallingly erroneous article, will find it troublesome to be taken seriously when reviewing cars in the future. As for Tesla, this little event has  just made its many fans become even more devoted to the robot that many are calling the iPhone of cars: the Model S.

My take away from all this is to spend more time making sure we collect all the data we possibly can at Brainient. And so should you. 

There are many reasons why I’m a big fan of distributed teams: cost savings (the cost for a developer in Romania is three times lower than one in Silicon Valley), 24 hour work-cycles (if you have developers in the Valley as well as Romania, you could basically build product non-stop because when one team finishes, the other starts), cultural impact (people from different sides of the world will look at the same problem differently) and many, many more. 

However, there’s one thing that makes it difficult to manage distributed teams and that’s face time. Or lack thereof, actually. At Brainient, we do R&D in Bucharest, Management in London and have clients all around the world. And over the years we’ve built quite a strong process for keeping everyone connected and everything in check. I’d like to share some of our learnings for those looking to build a distributed team. 

Weekly catch-ups for each department. Every Monday morning, I start my week with a management meeting, which includes sales, product and finance. We spend an hour going through the most important topics for that month and week. Each manager has similar meetings with their team. We do this over Skype or Google Hangouts, as three members of the management team are in Bucharest and two in London. This ensures that everyone is aligned to the same objectives for that week. 

Company-wide catch-up at the end of each month. This is a 15-30 minutes presentation from myself or our COO on what we’ve achieved that month and what we’re planning to achieve in the month to follow. This keeps every member of the team informed about the big picture. 

One-on-ones. We do a lot of 1:1 video calls at Brainient. Some of them are regular (each week at the same time), some of them are ad-hoc. Usually if there are more than five emails back-and-forth on a certain topic, a 1:1 is organised to clarify things.

Managers fly over every 6-8 weeks. Myself and our COO fly to Bucharest to spend time with the R&D team every 6-8 weeks. Members of our R&D team fly to London to spend time with the management & sales team just as often. This ensures that there’s enough in-person contact to maintain fluent communication. I’m not sure this is scalable or necessary as our team grows, but if works for now. 

Company annual retreat, once a year. Every January, we fly all our teams to the Carpathian mountains in Romania. We spend four days planning, discussing, coming up with new ideas and having fun. It’s by far our most important company-wide activity. Each time we do it we come back buzzing and energised. 

All in all, managing distributed teams is all about managing face time. It’s not as easy as having the entire team in one place, but the benefits of having a distributed team are immense and I can’t recommend it strongly enough. 

Everybody in the tech scene is saying that 2013 is the year of mobile and I find that to be true in video as well. Since the beginning of the year we’ve already had 80% of our clients at Brainient ask for mobile demos of our interactive video ads.

We’ve been running interactive mobile video campaigns since 2012, and we’ve already seen serious uptick this year. But there are a few problems with mobile and video that brands and agencies should consider when planning their interactive video campaigns:

1. Mobile ad delivery standards are not fine-tuned. The main standards for delivering interactive video ads on mobile are MRAID AND ORMMA and Brainient supports both of them, but they’re not fully baked and often have issues (mostly in terms of tracking impressions, clicks, engagements, etc). Make sure whether results stack up right after you start the campaign.

2. Personalisation matters. What works online doesn’t necessarily work on mobile. We’ve had campaigns at Brainient that performed incredibly well online but poorly on mobile, because they were too “heavy” in terms of execution. We’ve also had mobile campaigns that outperformed the online version by an order of magnitude. Mobile interactivity needs to have a life of its own, not just be a replicate of its online version.

3. Make sure the media owners set the campaign properly (and support MRAID / ORMMA standards). Video ads on mobile is still quite a new concept and most media owners (think: apps & websites with mobile traffic) treat mobile video ads as display banners. That’s wrong, and you’ll have issues in tracking the right events. Ideally, do a test before signing a new mobile media owner.

All in all, with the right creative execution and the right audience targeting, we’ve seen mobile campaigns with stelar results in terms of brand recall and brand engagement. But it’s not as straightforward and easy to execute as it is online so make sure you get the right partner on board ;). 

I first met Sherry Coutu as I was raising Brainient’s seed round back in 2010. The round was almost subscribed but I wasn’t thrilled with our option for the lead investor, and Alex Van Someren (Amadeus Capital) made an email intro to Sherry and suggested that we meet.

It was just about springtime in London and we met at Morisson & Foerster in The City, where she was giving a presentation. We went to a little coffee shop nearby, I popped out my laptop and started pitching. About 15 minutes in, she said that although she likes what we do, video advertising was not something she had experience with so she won’t invest, but offered to connect me with someone who might make a good lead investor and would be interested. That someone was Thomas Hoegh of Arts Alliance, the venture fund that became our lead investor in the seed round. And a few weeks before the round closed, Sherry called me and said she would like to participate as well. 

In a way, if it weren’t for Sherry we wouldn’t have been as far along as we are today with Brainient, and I’m sure that this is just one of the many moments when she’s been instrumental to a startup’s success. So it comes with very little surprise and much joy that Sherry has been awarded a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) on the New Year’s Honours List 2013. I really can’t think of a better choice they could have made. Congrats Sherry! 

It’s that time of the year again, to look back and marvel at how quickly another year has passed. And as the hard-core numbers buff that I am, I thought it would be a good idea to share some Brainient numbers that make me proud of what our small team has managed to pull off this year.

• We ran between 50 and 75 campaigns per month for our clients. That’s up from 100 campaigns for the whole of last year.
• We went from working with a handful of customers to serving 50+ agencies, brands or publishers including amazing brands like ASOS, Disney and Coca-Cola.
• The average engagement rate for our interactive video ads was 8.7%, which is 8 times higher than the average click-through rate on a non-interactive video ad.
• The total time spent with our interactive units across all our campaigns (so far) is 3622w 2d 2h 54m 15s. That’s about 75 years of free, earned media for our clients. You do the math…
• We’ve doubled the size of our team from 12 people to 25.

By now, I’m presuming that many of you have seen this year’s Mary Meeker presentation on the state of technology, digital and the world. If you haven’t, do it now. It is breathtaking. Unsurprisingly, according to Meeker 2013 will be the year when the smartphone + tablet installed base will exceed desktops + laptops.

Also, it seems that 10% of the total media consumption time is now on mobile & tablets, but just 1% of ad spend is going into mobile. That means 9 out of 10 times we’re consuming media on a mobile, there’s no ad. So over the past few days I’ve been looking at campaign data we have at Brainient in order to see whether this discrepancy exists because mobile doesn’t perform or because it’s just a new medium and it takes time for advertisers to ramp up their spends across mobile.

According to a campaign that ran in Nov + Dec across a multitude of media owners online and on mobile, here are the brand stats that we’ve collected:

Mobile: 63.3% engagement rate, 1.4 engagements / user, 19.8% video completion rateOnline: 9.5% engagement rate, 2.7 engagements / user, 33.3% video completion rate

Now, this data is very interesting. Engagement rate is 6 times hire on mobile than online (touch, touch, anyone?), but there are less engagements per user and less viewers watching the entire video (probably because videos are slow to load over 3G). If the videos would load faster, I’m certain that completion rates would increase as well so as LTE / 4G technology will be released by operators in 2013, completion rates should increase. Combined with the amazing engagement rates we’re already seeing, it will make mobile the perfect medium for delivering brand-centric interactive video campaigns. Together with the fact that we’ll finally have the same number of mobiles + tablets as desktops + laptops, I think it’s quite obvious where advertisers should be putting their money next year.

I’ve been reading a lot of biographies recently. Steve Jobs, Einstein, Jeff Bezos, Karl Marx and, most recently, the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (which, if you ask me, should be compulsory material in college regardless of one’s academic major). Franklin’s entire biography is a wonderful read of wisdom and inspiration, but this one paragraph has really stuck with me over the past few days:

“In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride.  Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.”

Over the past decade, entrepreneurs, investors and the media have stressed how important it is for companies to specialise on one thing and do that thing really well, better than anybody else in the world. From a pure theoretical standpoint, it makes a lot of sense: the less you do - the higher the chance you’ll do it really well.

But there’s a saying in Romania that sounds something like “the reckoning you make at home will never match the one at the market”. In other words, what sounds good in theory is highly unlikely to be true in practice, especially when there are more than two parties involved.

I’ve experienced this first hand recently, in an interactive video campaign we’re involved with at Brainient. The parties involved are: a big global household brand, a media agency, a creative agency, a production agency and Brainient. Each party had at least two people involved in all conversations. It started off well, with everybody understanding what needs to be delivered, when it needs to be done and what Brainient needs in order to be able to create the campaign. We delivered the first iteration of the campaign a day before deadline, and then all hell broke loose. Feedback started coming from all fronts. One email thread turned into twenty. Everybody started freaking out that we’ll miss the deadline. None of the assets were sent on time. The client had no idea where the project was or whether it was going to be live on time. It was very painful and required a lot more work than it should’ve, but we ended up delivering on time. The launch went great, and everybody’s happy. But it made me ask myself whether the best way to build a business these days is by being integrated (doing everything yourself) or “specialised”.

The strongest case for integration is, of course, Apple. They’ve always tried doing everything themselves, from hardware to software to distribution. It’s worked quite well, I’d say. Then there’s Microsoft, who’ve recently announced that they’re going all in and focusing on launching complete products, not just software: Xbox and the Surface Tablet are good examples.

Then there’s the case for complete decentralisation & specialisation, like Facebook. They’re not building any hardware, not doing any content deals and not even building all that many apps. They’re all about being a platform that others integrate, one way or another. Or Oracle, who build the database & tech stack technology that you can build on top.

And then, of course, there’s the case for the consumer (or customer if you’re in enterprise sales) who wants either specialisation or complete integration, depending on trade-off for quality / price. If the price is similar and the specialised product doesn’t provide a major advantage compared to the integrated one, customers will always go for the integrated version that provides a wider range of stuff. Think about it: unless there’s a 15%+ difference in price, we make most of our online purchases on Amazon because it’s integrated (it has your card details, your address and you know exactly what to expect when being delivered something).

This will happen to the ad-tech industry over the next 18 - 24 months. There are too many suppliers, media owners and tech providers servicing media agencies and brands so these guys are looking to integrate everything. It’s why the agency trading desks and DSPs have grown so quickly. So if you’re an ad-tech startup, it’s OK to be specialised but you also have to be deeply integrated into the ecosystem. It’s something we’re doing more and more at Brainient and it’s really difficult but it pays off big time.