Ric Elias

We raised $2 million from our friends.

This is the frenzy of January 2000.

This is before the first internet bubble implosion.

Raised money on three PowerPoint charts on the dumbest of ideas, basically a paper-based search engine where we were going to help online companies use offline media.

And by November, we had $117,000 left, no revenue.

And this crazy thought of like, I will never attend my reunions because all the capital came out of my business school friends.

And I'm a proud guy.

I'm like, I can't.

So we literally just hunkered down, hustled, sold marketing programs, sold anything, anybody to hire us to do consulting things.

And we knew a lot about direct marketing at the time.

And for a couple of years, just muscled our way through it.

In 2004, we had enough money to pay our investors back.

And we said, look, we made a commitment to you.

Here's your money back times 10%, but we're done.

If you keep your money in here, it's at your own risk.

And I hopefully hope you take the money back because that burden of taking someone's money was a lot.

And in no 405 was when Google was becoming the de facto aggregator of intent.

They had this rule where you could not double serve as a brand.

And we started thinking, wow, brands are going to need somebody to kind of help them defend themselves in this environment that's aggregating intent.

And customer acquisition is the life being of all budgets and is actually a line that is not in the operating budget.