Ted Dhanik
speaker
84 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Ted Dhanik’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Two minutes and we have like 34 minutes, 34.5 minutes left to go. You know, let's go. There's no pressure here. Thanks, Dan. Dan's been doing this to me for a long time, many, many years. We've worked together for like, I don't know, like 15 years now or maybe something like that. It's been a long time. Anyways, so yeah, so I started my career in the mid-90s in Silicon Valley.
Worked for a lot of companies back then. They were called the dot-com boom. Some went boom, some went burst, and some did well and some didn't. And so, ended up in some good ones and then moved to LA. And... ended up at some really good ones, was one of the early original guys at a company called Lower My Bills, sold it to Experian, did really well.
Interesting company because it was the largest lead gen company or creator of, developer of leads for the mortgage business or personal finance. in the world at the time, sold to Experian. They thought it was a really interesting business. Shortly after, it jumped on Myspace at its early days and stayed until about 2008. 2009, I wanted to solve a problem that Myspace faced.
It had about seven billion ads a day. They're going under-monetized, so I built a company
an ad tech company to service that just myspace and then within six months we're servicing the top 50 publishers on the web from cnn to dictionary.com reference.com etc and then took that company public in 2017 in an ipo ran it until about two years ago sold it merged into something else and then i've just been out of tech for two years so you know i got non-tech businesses not so elegant but you know i don't have the itch yet but i will
When I get the itch to enter tech, it'll be somewhere that's not super consolidated, not saturated. Somewhere there's, you know, it's kind of wide open. So that's who I am.
Yeah, so at the time, you know, it was interesting because MySpace didn't really have to attract talent the way that Lower My Bills and some of the other startup companies that I worked for did. I mean, they'd have all kinds of really interesting gimmicks, like somebody's coming to massage you. It's kind of like a poker game, right?
They didn't look like the masseuses in the poker game, though, I'll guarantee you that. But they were, you know, they had things like that. They had a massage room. They had like these really cool, like, you know, weird things, you know, and we cater lunches every day and we had really great benefits and all that stuff. And that was interesting there. And then I was like, lower my bills.
And then... On the other side, for Myspace, it's like Myspace blew up really fast, so people just really wanted to be part of a rocket ship. So you could be a rocket ship, and people are attracted to your energy because you're crushing, and people always want to be part of something that's crushing.
Or you could be part of a company that's got a lot of perks and a lot of really interesting things, so you could attract employees that way. I always feel that the CEO and the executive team should be able to illustrate the core values of the business and the mission really well and that can attract the right people initially. We always had really pretty deep interviewing strategies.
So we did like seven interviews for a lot of candidates and that we'd find the right people. We use Craigslist a lot back in the days and there are a lot of recruiters that you'd hire. We hire recruiters in-house. would hire recruiters in house and that would be the best way to attract talent.
But typically we'd go after competitors and people that work for competitors that have a track record or people that have existing experience in the same industry because we really don't want to pave roads again and teach people the whole framework of the business because we wanted to run fast, right? And when you want to run fast, you want to hire somebody that knows what you do already.
Well, you know, there's two states of mind. Like one person will say, and I've talked to a lot of CEOs because I'm in these really awesome masterminds that you created. And I keynote at some of those. So it's really exciting. So I met, you know, we were mentoring these seven figure and eight figure company CEOs for years. And, you know, they had asked the same question. When is it time?
A lot of times people say, you know, when you hit this apex or when you hit this wall of revenue and you need more financing or something, instead of raising financing, you could sell the company. That's one. But I like the other side when you're when you are in rocket ship mode and when you're growing as fast as or faster than you ever have.
I think that's a good time to consider a sale because you're adding a lot of value to someone by giving them a rocket ship instead of giving them something that's potentially going to become stale over time.
You know, it's a natural progression. I didn't anticipate doing that for, you know, it wasn't my like mission in life. It was really, I saw an opportunity and I had the experience and background. I built self-serve kiosks and monetization solutions. I was head of business development and revenue at Lower My Bills.
So I did that stuff there and I did really well and it monetized well and it drove it to, you know, over a million dollars a day in revenue. And then at MySpace towards the end, I was tasked with something similar. We had 7 billion ads a day and we needed to build a self-serve platform. It was called MyAds and I had a lot of input on that as well.
So from that standpoint, I saw, you know, I saw the opportunity and I said, you know, there's another way to monetize this better and I know how to do it. So I'm going to leave and I'm going to start this business. You know, I didn't, voluntarily leave, we got left at the end of that because the contracts expired in 2008 and it was time to go at MySpace.
We had a run and now Rupert Murdoch continued destroying the business and he did. We started doing whatever we all needed to do. A lot of us retired, but I said, there is a huge opportunity here. I have the experience. Let's build a business out of it. And that's what I did. And within 60 to 90 days of starting the business, we started to crush. So it was a good opportunity.
And then from there, I learned a lot, too. I always look for places where I have some intelligence, when I have some experience, and I can see an entry point. I can add some value here.
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