To kick off season 2 of the Superpowers podcast, Bill and Chris invite Beeswax CEO and AdTech pioneer Ari Paparo to discuss how his whit, transparency, and skillful communication have guided him to extraordinary success at both start-ups and tech giants. Ari shared his story, starting with his upbringing in New York and college days at Georgetown, followed by his time at Double Click and Google, then the runup to his founding of Beeswax, a first-of-its-kind AdTech product for large enterprises. Like most innovative ideas, Beeswax began with the identification of a problem. During his time at the AdTech firm AppNexus, Ari “kept hearing the same thing over and over again which is, ‘It’s great what your platform does, but I kind of want to own my own tech’… I said to myself, ‘Well… what can I build that would solve this problem?’” Ari took on the challenge and developed a product called “Bidder-as-a-Service.” “It was a full AdTech stack in the cloud. So, we founded the company, Beeswax… It’s a buy-side solution for buying ads, it’s very customizable. We have customers that write their own algorithms.” In 2014, Ari and his two co-founders raised $1.3 million in seed funding to start building Beeswax. To make the most out of that money, Ari and the other founders didn’t take any salary. As Ari put it, “it was just going to increase our burden enormously to have three high paid employees.” By 2019, Ari and his team had raised $28 million in total. With real resources in tow and a highly skilled team with experienced leadership, Beeswax is off and running. “Now we have 91 employees and about $30 million in revenue,” Ari told Bill and Chris.
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