We believe success results from dedication and perseverance with a trusted team — and that trust is a two-way street. On our ultimately successful path, we experienced our share of setbacks and a few outright failures. But because we worked collaboratively with some of the best people in the world, we’ve achieved outrageous gains with very limited initial resources.
We met at Ereo, an image-search tech startup where Mike was hired as CEO and Steve as the CFO. Like many dot com startups in those days, Ereo was a ‘cool’ company with plenty of ambition, but lacking a business model or clear value proposition. This was one of many lessons learned during this chapter of our careers.
We decided to start our own company, the first ever image-based pay-per-click platform…. during the dot com implosion. Raising money at this time was virtually impossible, particularly for an online advertising venture. Fortunately, we had houses we could sell or refinance, and we had family and friends that wanted us to succeed. One such friend owned a Lamborghini and gave it to us as his investment.
With friends and family funding in hand (and having sold the Lambo), we launched Booyah in April 2001. The company roared out of the gates with nine employees, only to have to lay everyone off by year’s end. We managed to keep the doors open, thanks to the grit and loyalty of our small circle.
Over time we gained traction thanks to key pay-per-click search traffic deals with Yahoo and AOL, among others. The business grew rapidly and eventually was ranked in Inc’s 500 fastest growing companies in the US. But even then, we saw the writing on the wall as tech giants like Google stood poised to take over the pay-per-click game.
With longevity in mind, we invested every dollar of heyday profit back into the business to develop new services that would distinguish our firm. Before long, Booyah successfully morphed into a search engine marketing agency.
With Troy Lerner at the helm, Booyah thrived as a search engine marketing agency, even as the pay-per-click business steadily declined.
Booyah launched the first-ever video ad exchange called Booyah Broadcasting Group (BBG), where buyers could bid on video ad inventory using our newly invented Pay-per-Video-Commercial (PPVC) business model.
Booyah renamed BBG to SpotXchange, spun the company off into its own corporate entity and raised $1.4 million in funding from individual investors. This funding, along with Booyah’s profits loaned to SpotXchange, enabled all the technical, sales, marketing and development activities of SpotXchange for the next several years.
Having been funded in 2007 by the angel round and Booyah loans aggregating $6 million, and now breaking even, SpotXchange raised $12 million from HIG. By the end of 2010 SpotXchange had approximately 40 employees and $6 million in net revenue.
With continued innovation and expanded services for buyers and sellers, SpotXchange enabled the industry’s first programmatic execution of video ad sales. Sales offices in Europe and Asia Pacific soon followed. SpotXchange was renamed SpotX, and launched a Supply Side Platform to complement the exchange. Revenues began to grow exponentially, as did the staff.
SpotX entered a competitive process to sell the company, which resulted in RTL purchasing two thirds of SpotX at a $240 million valuation. Growth continued in services, team size and global footprint.
RTL purchased the remaining third of SpotX at a $400 million valuation. Still believing in the vision and teams at SpotX, Mike and Steve remained onboard to run the company as an independent division of RTL.
With Mike and Steve serving only as advisors through monthly executive meetings, Troy and team had built The Booyah Agency into a thriving full-service digital agency with 50+ employees and marquee clients. Eventually, Mike and Steve sold Booyah to Troy Lerner and the Booyah management team.
Mike and Steve continued to run SpotX and were charged with selling the company again on behalf of RTL. Through a competitive process, SpotX sold for $1.2 billion to Magnite. At the time, the company had over 400 employees in 15 offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Over $1 billion in media was trafficked annually on the platform by some of the biggest media companies in the world including Disney, Roku and Discovery.
In its entire history, the company had only raised $13 million in primary capital, which included a Lamborghini. Many millionaires were created, and many of them remain employees of SpotX and Booyah. We couldn’t be more proud of the friendships we made and the accomplishments we achieved together with hundreds of people over the past 20 years.
After a bit of a breather, Mike and Steve are back at it again with Roster Capital.
