David Naffziger

So if you made a purchase online,

and let's say you were shipping it to Miami, you're physically sitting in Austin, but maybe you were accessing the internet from Kazakhstan, that might be a sign of something about to happen.

And you might want to give that person a call or talk to them a little bit more.

So along the way, I kind of really met a lot of people in the fraud teams of these typically e-commerce companies and got a real appreciation for kind of the thrill of the chase to some extent and the bad guys that they catch.

Fast forward to a company after that where I ran an engineering team for a company called Duty's Book that was a once upon a time Yelp competitor.

And we became an affiliate.

It was one of the ways that we made money.

And we were active in the Gap affiliate program.

And we began to get purchases from customers who would visit a review of a Gap store and then go and make a purchase online using an affiliate link or something like that.

So our marketing team began to think about, oh, how do we...

get more money from these pages.

So is there an opportunity there?

Yes.

So they began buying paid search ads to send users to those pages that we made money from.

And within a day or two, the GAP affiliate manager contacted us and said, hey, you're not supposed to do that.

That's against our terms.

And we had no idea, but we instantly pulled down the ads.

But from where we sat in Seattle, we saw lots of other affiliates doing the same thing.

And so we asked the affiliate manager, what would we need to do to get the same permission that everybody else has?

And the affiliate manager's response was, there is no one else, just you.