Ep. 146: Where Investors See Opportunity with Josef Najm of Thomson Reuters Ventures

AdTechGod (0:00)

This episode is brought to you by The Build, a new podcast from the guys behind Sincera, Michael Sullivan and Ian Myers. They built their company by figuring out clever solutions to a few important ad tech problems in our industry. And that's exactly what the show is all about. Mike and Ian interview some of the smartest tech minds in the biz to hear about how they identified opportunities, solved those hardest challenges, and grew their business in the process.

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SPEAKER_2 (0:29)

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AdTechGod (0:59)

Welcome to the AdTechGodPod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTechGod.

Welcome to the AdTechGodPod, where we speak to the investors in our industry.

We're joined by the one and only Joseph Najm from Thomson Reuters Ventures. Joseph has been with the company since 2019, but is absolutely no stranger to the ad tech industry, having started his career at MediaMath and worked at companies like L'Oréal and Diageo prior to moving there. I've heard a lot of great things about Joseph, so I'm looking forward to getting to know him. I think for all of the startups and established companies interested in investments or looking to understand what investors are looking for, this could be the podcast for you. Joseph, thank you again for joining me today. Welcome to the pod.

Josef Najm (1:50)

Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

AdTechGod (1:52)

Your profile gives you no justice on your knowledge of the space. We had a nice pre-chat prior to this, and I was not aware that you had worked in AdTech prior to getting into investment. So I'd love for you to kind of share that with the audience, your background at MediaMath, L'Oréal and other, and what got you to Thomson Reuters today.

Josef Najm (2:13)

Yeah, of course.

AdTechGod (2:14)

Not happy to.

Josef Najm (2:16)

It's definitely one of those examples where it's not a linear path to where you end up, and I love it for that. So I started my career like anyone does going to school, and I went to Catholic University in Washington DC, and I studied political science. I was actually, when I was there, working for an early stage aggregator of DSPs, targeting constituents for democratic candidates and progressive organizations. So that company was called DS Political. They're still around today, and this was very early in the AdTech space, like stitching together different DSPs, and then combining voter files, target constituents to get a vote was very new, and it was very cutting edge. So I felt like I was learning a lot, and while I was there, I was looking for my next opportunity, and I knew I wanted to get out of DC and move to New York City. There's a gentleman by the name of Mike Novosel, who's still in the industry. He works at StackAdap now, and he was a seller then selling our company on a company called MediaMath. And so what I did, like any good young professional would, was I stalked him back on LinkedIn, and I asked him for an opportunity to work for him at MediaMath. And what ended up happening was rather working for him right out of the gate, the smart leaders at MediaMath like Joe Zawadzki and others had established a program called the Marketing Engineer Program. And what that was basically a program which brought in a cohort of 10 to 12, where you learned AdTech from MediaMath. And they built a school basically in the business that educated you at all things AdTech.

And then after that program, which was a three month paid program, you had the opportunity to interview and work for MediaMath after that, or go out to the ecosystem and take the learnings from MediaMath and the Marketing Engineer Program and bring it elsewhere. And what ended up happening was I got the opportunity to be a MEP, called MEP Program. And I went from becoming a MEP to joining the engagement team at MediaMath, which is client success. And from there, it was off to the races. So I worked for MediaMath holistically about two years, including that Marketing Engineer Program. And I was itching to continue to expand my ability to learn and bring what I learned outside of the ecosystem. And right around that time, in-housing became a new trend. And that's when I was, again, pinged on LinkedIn for an opportunity with L'Oréal, where they kicked off their first in-house iteration of their programmatic trading team in-house. And I joined there as a consultant. I worked there for about a year and a half until I went to Diageo, where I kind of led and steered the ship a little bit in partnership with a few folks like John Donoghue, Jason Acker, and a few others where we brought Trade Desk into their buying and media operating process in-house and globally expanded that. And then after about a year there, I found myself kind of enjoying the buy side, but a new opportunity presented itself to join the Reuters business. And so from being on the buy side where I was controller of media spend, someone asking the really tough questions, I joined Reuters as a professional from AdTech and MarTech, who came to kind of look under the hood, see what was going on, how we can quickly make things more efficient from an op side, but quickly became commercial and became someone who is now selling on behalf of Reuters, which is the largest news agency in the world. And over a five-period year time, I quickly kind of, I make the joke, it's like whatever the sun touches in terms of biddable media, I kind of managed. So I controlled and partnered with anything that was on platform and off platform. So that include our partnerships with YouTube, Meta, Axe at the time, and a few others where we were really just trying to ensure for every commercial opportunity. It wasn't just about, hey, you're going to get engagement back to the site, but how can we earn a dollar for the great journalism that we were doing via an advertising partnership or method, whether it be indirect or direct?