Dave Morgan is the CEO and founder of Simulmedia, a targeted television advertising company that provides a fully scaled digital ad targeting platform for linear televisions. My father had won a case in the US Supreme court. Yeah. In some ways, both of the early businesses had smaller original expectations that grew into bigger things. Dave:                I'm from a little cold town in Western Pennsylvania, and by that I mean literally to the West of Pennsylvania. Dave:                So I needed money. I was going to go back home, but they were paying me more than my father was making after 30 some years. blog post . I've been reading about it. Dave:                It was great and I went into Time Warner, AOL with the opportunity to stay or not. Dave:                I tell [00:04:30] people like Pittsburgh, it's in affinity, but we would only get to Pittsburgh every two years maybe. And we were talking about structural issues. You're going to get married where her family is. Yeah. Julie:                Okay. Quit and really jump in." I lifeguarded. Everybody [00:05:30] was leaving. Education. You're still ... it's a big company, right? It was terrible. Okay. Right, your chopped off head up and down the aisles. Interview by Ross Benes | Feb 2, 2018. Dave:                And so I waited until the end of the year and I didn't know what they wanted to do, but they'd been overpaying me. That was a big one, right? And then I got a contractor too. How does it feel different? Julie:                And [00:33:30] you kind of already knew it instinctively, just like you knew it there, right? Julie:                Well, [00:28:30] at least for profit. Who were aged significantly in those three hours. Julie:                You're convicted. Dave:                I'm very focused on the hundred people in those a hundred families and what happens to them when we do well. Yeah. It's really a fast read for anyone who hasn't read it in a while. Julie:                Welcome back to another episode of the conversational. My father had been born nearby, but he went to Penn State, then went to Penn, and went to law school there. That's fine. Terence Kawaja @tkawaja. Dave:                Yeah, and I think understanding it matters [00:41:00] and then designing for it matters. We like you, you're nice, you're smart, but this isn't for you." Julie:                You didn't need one to get from your town to Philly in [00:19:00] those days. So you actually have a lot of flexibility, where everybody else that's come in the company has to take their time moving up." It was smooth. When I hire people that come out of big companies, we always [00:30:00] have open space, open planned spaces-, Dave:                ... lots of open space, open plan spaces. It was a murder case that had happened in the 60s where a school teacher apparently had raped and murdered a student and it was at the same time when Miranda happened, which you have to tell somebody that they have a right to a lawyer. And they were talking [00:31:30] about different people, whether I had met them and then they said, "You know the Prince." Tweets; Tweets & Replies ; Media; Search; Dave Morgan retweeted. More from Media Insider. I mean, I know it was [00:27:00] better established, but that's hours and hours of ... Dave:                And we were lucky there because we signed contracts on September 3rd and September 8th of 2001. Dave:                And I'm like, "No, I get it." Younger Sports Fans Want More … And he's like, "We're not firing you but you better move on.". Thanks for your thoughtful comments Ed and John. And we did it early enough in the cycle that a lot of them ended up working in places like Google, who was hiring into that cycle. And you have to either ... you can be moved into any level in the company as long as you're ascending and you're part of the new regime. And when you get into the big companies, you only know some of that. I thought I was going to make a real difference in the world. Union square Ventures was created out of my second company. Dave:                He was behind it. Okay. After the sale of TACODA, Dave served as executive vice president of global advertising strategy at AOL, a Time Warner company. So then now you've got sort of this juxtaposition-. But this ain't for you.". And then soon after that, the Newhouse family invested and they're just amazing people and investors. Julie:                That's the stuff your dad taught you, right? I've not had a passport. from Dickinson School of Law. I'm going to need full flexibility.". That's a great ... Oh, see that's a great ... Yeah, you put the people first and you can beat the big guys. So going back, I've lived in 12 states, but I was born in Wisconsin. Julie:                [00:37:30] That's fascinating. Dave:                I was exiting because they were like, "Look. New York, NY. And as much as there's a draw, places like that, you don't leave. Only two contracts at that point. Julie:                Yeah. Like does this mean I got to run away in a month? You're going to have media content, like a newspaper website that will have high degree of content that will appeal to a lot of people and you can change the ads to different people. I was trying to do an ad deal. She said, "Well, [00:32:00] you are the hereditary prince of the capture Principe. Connecting decision makers to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas, Bloomberg quickly and accurately delivers business and financial information, news and insight around the world. Dave:                And then I was just like, "Heck with it. He ended up ... because it was so high profile, they couldn't seat a jury. And so when I said demystify, it's really changed how I think of things. You know your numbers, you know your profit, you know your sales, you know everything. Founder/CEO of @tacoda. Julie:                Yeah. Yeah, it seems bigger I guess when I think about it. Dave:                It was [00:24:00] the second one. Yeah. And I said, "Look, let me do the laying off. I went to college at Penn State, which was a bit to the East. Dave:                My father ultimately as the district attorney in the town argues that that is fair, and ultimately the Supreme court held that up. Julie:                So like in Wisconsin, it was the bubbler. Got it. Simulmedia serves agencies and advertisers throughout the United States. You hear about the late 80s, mid [00:06:00] 80s, late 80s there's optimism and people are hiring. Morgan said that Simulmedia has never been as busy as they have been the past two weeks. Yes, I remember. And so I just left and I said, "I don't know where I'm going to go." Dave:                Definitely for us, it's like the Allegheny Mountains, Northern Appalachians, everything West is pop in Midwest. They're like, "You leave." And so part of me now is very mission driven, because fortunately the [00:40:30] economics have worked out really well for me in the past. You kill the one that doesn't work. Dave:                ... because at that point [00:13:30] we'd lost our us Senator John Heinz in a plane accident, and Dick Thornburg was going to run and then Harris Wofford was running against him. 1964. He has a wife, two daughters. And he liked the idea and he said, "Come to Switzerland. I thought I might want to be a writer. “It’s been something we’ve watched from the sidelines as a spectator,” Morgan tells Beet.TV. Dave:                It's out of your control. Because everyone was aware of this person, in a small town, small County. Okay. Julie:                So who did back it? So when I tell people like Pennsylvania is two states. He didn't really like the idea, but he liked the idea enough that he let me follow him into the cocktail party and we kept talking about it at this conference where I was. That's right. But instinctively, I knew I wasn't a good fit, I wasn't happy. Dave:                And then I think once you're back outside again, then you realize there isn't this ... we've created in many ways a business culture, which so glamorizes people, depending on what level they ascended, what size of the organization. Julie:                Although you are on the beach. ", Dave:                And here we're going to buy a longterm [00:26:30] non-compete from me. What are you doing here?". The difference. So while he didn't back it, he became an important mentor and friend. So there were real questions about whether this person was fairly given his notice, and he admitted and confessed that he had raped and killed the student. Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan Andreas Rentz/Getty Images for Hubert Burda Media This story is part of a group of stories called . So you've still got that dichotomy, but you-. Dave:                That business ended up being sold in '01. But you only know pieces of it really well. advertisement. Dave Morgan from Simulmedia replied, January 29, 2021 at 6:49 a.m. James, excellent points. Mine was only a million dollar idea. Embed Code. AlleyWatch chatted with founder and CEO Dave Morgan about Simulmedia’s plans for the future of TV advertising and its recent funding round, which … Dave:                And I tried to actually in some ways be efficient and very software driven-. What did your parents do? It wasn't easy, as you'll hear from Dave, but today he's the CEO and founder of Simulmedia, which is the leading TV ad platform that enables predictable, scalable [00:00:30] performance. It's surprising because usually a Hispanic family means generations and sixth and seventh cousins [00:25:30] all the way around. And then eventually I met a guy at a dinner who was Swiss, who was at a company called Publicitas, Publigroupe, invented the ad network in the 1860s in print. Dave:                I had to bootstrap it. I'm much more patient than I used to be when I need to be. And they needed a lawyer to come in and help do deals between newspaper companies and TV companies and telephone companies and early online services. So I had an unusual track. The kinds of things they needed to justify were as much what they needed to justify to each other. The smart thing is to get out before that happens like you did. The Relevance Conference Santa Barbara, a leadership series presented by Xandr, an AT&T unit Tagged Simulmedia, Dave Morgan, at&t, Xandr, Randall Stephenson, TransparentTV. And then we did another round in two months. You don't want to get the front of the business section with a teaser on the front page of the paper on Christmas Eve day saying, "Dotcom start up has a nasty Christmas gift for employees.". I know she's a journalist and a lawyer. Amazing. Ed, I agree that it's not the ARF's fault. Dave:                Well, only a hundred. Yeah. And literally elevator pitched an idea in an elevator in late '94 in Dallas, Texas, 14th floor to the ground floor at the Hyatt to a guy named Brad Burnham who had a tag [00:16:00] on that said he was from AT&T Ventures. And the best part of it was I got to do something I understood well, and I loved doing the [00:15:00] law for newspapers and media law, advertising law. And that was the pitch. Dave:                I found a lot of excuses to do a lot of business in Mexico for that six months and then convinced her to move to New York. And the New York Times ... You typically want press. United States. We hadn't taken any money. How to Scale on TV Playbook . I mean, I'm not saying it's an accounting issue. I never ... Dave:                I'm 33 years old. I believe he's guilty, but I can be convinced otherwise and I'll be impartial." Julie:                Oh. Dave:                Yeah, that and lots of cases. Dave:                I mean, I graduated and went to college in '81 and so I'm in law school in '85, so steel industry collapsed. We have change doctors." And she's like, "The book," and I'm like, "Machiavelli?". The peak. To get to a town of any kind of size bigger ... we were about 6,000 and most things around were about two or 300, you drove for more than an hour to get to Altoona. Julie:                Like what was your thought? It was, without question, the best thing that ever happened. An interview with: Dave Morgan … That's where I'm in the middle of." Dave:                I needed money. I mean, you were doing these startups and now you're in this big behemoth. What's interesting, what I found was one of the reasons why the big law firm didn't work out for me was it was an industrial version of what I grew up in. And a lot of people don't want to leave towns like that, so there was a bit of a different kind of-. So you stayed there through high school, I understand? OTT, Linear TV, or Both? This is because there has been a general growth around advanced advertising and there have been significant cancellations in live sports, so billions of advertising dollars … And [00:03:30] my mother ... we'd always talked about this, and so it's funny now living in Manhattan for almost 25 years, I drink soda, my mother drinks pop now. And if you're not, then your head has to be taken off and dragged up and down the street to show what happens if you're not. Julie:                Yeah. Dave:                Oh, it is. I probably attack it more like a marathon runner than a sprinter, but I know when I need to sprint. How Simulmedia Helps Bra Julie:                Yeah, that's amazing. And a friend of mine who did international [00:24:30] trade law, who I went to law school with, said, "I'm working with somebody and she's back in Mexico. So I sort of knew how tech worked. We had talked a little bit about in another moment. It's like my whole being was wrapped up and you don't know in this professional image that I'm a corporate lawyer and wearing my suit and my tie and everything and yeah, it was devastating. This had bigger expectations. That's true. Dave:                We bought an apartment in New York in '06. And I'm like, "Well, in high school." Tweets 12,332; Following 1,946; Followers 10,226; Likes 11,357; 590 Photos and videos. Dave:                But the good part was we did it early enough that the company [00:23:30] survived and we were able to make it a profitable business. It's harder to take my people away. I mean, if I'd do it again, I would have taken the too much money I was getting paid and paid off the student loans and things, but I didn't. And when they asked the juror, "Can you be impartial? You sold-. Julie:                [00:38:00] Right, no. They had a $10 million idea. She's now working for Telvista." Julie:                Most likely to succeed kind of, right? Both sides of my family, born and raised, five generations, same town in Wisconsin, and everything was pop, same thing. And so they met there and they eventually went back. Where were you born? So talk about Holy shit moments. I was like, "Who is that? Dave:                Well, where they write opinion and publish and say ... they'll just say, "This one [00:07:00] won or this one lost," most times, because when the Supreme Court writes opinions then it's essentially making law in common law, and rarely you have dissents where you have multiple justices disagree. When you tell the story of the bootstrapping and these people, it's not just that your company's going to go down, you're worried about these people on Christmas Eve about to have their Christmas ripped from them and their jobs, and you've always had a great sentimentality for your employees, which is wonderful. Julie:                Yeah. But I'm focusing more on impact, how I manage people, and probably a lot more focused [00:38:30] I realized, I think. I mean, [00:12:00] he knew I wasn't really engaged and they could tell I wasn't going to be on a path to making them lots of money. Dave:                I had to meet one of the heads of the top movie studios, literally in Tucson at 9:35 in a bar, [00:37:00] at a place where I was going to be allotted 20 minutes for a drink. And you could go in those days, well, at least you go to Mexico and Canada on a driver's license. Dave:                You know who had a little classified ad server selling in a newspaper companies at the same time that we had our display ad server? But we knew that if the 50,000 in show up by 5:00-. Dave:                [00:33:00] And it's totally right. There's no money in the campaign. Julie:                But it was not easy sailing as I recall. Dave:                And so eventually, to get a jury, the judge sent sheriffs out into the street of the town and just said, go get people off the street and tell them I'm paneling them in a jury because they needed jurors. Dave:                Yeah, and then I think, because a lot of my career has been working to enable big companies to navigate through the [00:34:00] digital world, it really taught me a lot more about how decision making happens in those companies. One, amazing people. Julie:                Yeah. Which is a bit against you are innocent until proven guilty. I love doing these. And basically he was intrigued enough by the idea, he told me to come to New York and talk to him. We only then were about 20 some people. So we're not-. I mean you're so ... Because you have to be, you have to know your customers, you have ... to your point, you're following the market, what do they need, who's coming in. So they were there. And Netscape was going to license our software and use it inside their publishing for their ad serving. It's not too dissimilar to your I-was-a-lawyer-in-a-firm story and somebody's like, "Hey kid, you're a nice kid. Right? There was certainly no business in ad tech digital [00:27:30] for a year. Yep. And it's great because for our daughters, we're in Mexico a lot, so I thought it was important no matter what, that they might be as much American Mexican as Mexican American. And [00:21:30] they had told us that they were going to sign the contract and wire the money. He's like, "Show me. So you've had all these learnings and now you're head of this ... Simulmedia, this big company. Do you know enough [00:17:00] assuming it's a 30 second kind of ... Dave:                Yeah. What year was it that you finally sold? Dave:                So that's hard. Dave Morgan from Simulmedia replied, April 15, 2019 at 8:41 p.m. I found a lot of times, some people might've seen them as detached, and I have to say those senior leaders, some of them may not have fared as well [00:34:30] in the way people think of them, really strong, really smart. You're probably are more than you know, right. He previously founded and ran both TACODA, Inc., an online advertising company that pioneered behavioral online marketing and was acquired by AOL in 2007 for $275 million, and Real Media, Inc., one of the world’s first ad serving and online ad network companies and a predecessor to 24/7 Real Media (TFSM), which was later sold to WPP for $649 million. And so tiny little town, a lot more deer than there were people. Dave:                I'm used to not being intimidated that you don't know an answer. It was at a cocktail party, it only could happen in New York. I thought it would be a business of six or eight people and at one point I have 600 people and 14 countries around the world. And they did okay. He previously founded and ran both TACODA, Inc., an online advertising company that pioneered behavioral online marketing and was acquired by AOL in 2007 for $275 million, and Real Media, Inc., one of the world’s first ad serving and online ad network companies and a predecessor to 24/7 Real Media (TFSM), which was later sold to WPP for $649 million. So I liked that part of it. All my college buddies and others, I just go hang out with them, go skiing, go LA, go surfing. You're managing to your customers, you're managing to your suppliers, you're managing to your employees. Dave:                This was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And I used to run into James Carville most days-. It's very different East than West. So by Mexican standards, that's not a big wedding. Julie:                Where did your parents get their graduate degrees? Julie:                Oh, Harrisburg. To take away copays, to add optical insurance [00:42:00] and your extra dental insurance and some other kinds of insurance, you're going to make it so they don't have to worry as much at home. DAVE MORGAN, CEO, founder, Simulmedia. Yeah. Dave:                He basically gave me two minutes to say that. Career Highlights. So I was giving legal counsel on the side. Dave:                No. And then I went to law school. I mean, you were still in startup. So, that case, did [00:09:00] that have an effect on you? To find a collection of so many people so accomplished, so credentialed accomplish too, tons of them. I think people are going to love to hear how a lawyer becomes a big old digital media mogul. Founder of Real Media, TACODA and now Simulmedia. Very few even get an argument, and then of those that get argued, very few get decided, I mean, they will get decided, but those that get decided rarely have opinions. Basically said, "Yes, I'm going to put you in touch with this person. So I met her not long before having to do that. I literally had never seen a help wanted sign. Why? And then my father was running in a political campaign, actually running statewide. So somewhere along the way, you met your wife, right? Julie:                Yeah, they did all right, those people. I mean, I was being paid a lot of money, more than I was worth, working on these fun cases [00:11:00] and with a limited amount of oversight, and I wasn't really into it. You want to get the front of the business section. Because if they can't watch people and see who's watching them, and people from big companies, all they do is watch other people. [00:29:00] Super smart. And so I think this must be more of like a rural thing, and then the water ... what did you call the thing that you pushed the button and reach over and drink water from?