Michael Walrath
speaker
398 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Michael Walrath’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Great.
So Yext, the best way to describe Yext is we're a digital presence platform.
We help companies maintain and optimize their digital presence using a suite of products that range from listings, data syndication, reputation management, website pages, landing pages, social media management, and increasingly one-to-one communications, primarily through, today, the financial services vertical, although I think there's a lot of opportunity outside of that vertical.
And look, the best thing to know about Yext is we've been at the forefront of helping businesses manage what happens when landscapes of digital presence fragment.
Since the mobile device fragmented the digital experience layer very meaningfully in kind of the late 2008, 2009 timeframe.
And we also have a lot of experience with what happens when markets defragment, which is kind of the situation we've had for the last, call it, decade or 12 or so years.
So we went from a highly fragmented environment to a highly monolithic environment where Google became sort of the center of everything.
And I think what we're seeing now is a much more rapid than expected refragmentation being driven by generative AI and the promise of that as the search technology of the future.
Yeah, I mean, so I have an interesting lens on this, which I'm happy to share.
So my first company was a company called Right Media.
It was a digital ad exchange.
It was the first sort of at scale digital ad exchange.
I sold that company to Yahoo in 2007.
And I joined Yahoo at that time running initially the display advertising exchange and was quickly asked to take over oversight of the search advertising marketplace as well.
So
By the time I'd been there for about six months or a year, I was kind of overseeing all of the advertising marketplaces.
And what that meant was that I was in charge of monetization across the Yahoo server page.
And we had an innovator's dilemma, or I don't know if we were considered an innovator then, but we
a dilemma.
And that dilemma was we could extract a lot of money off that page.
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