The following interview is a conversation we had with Zack Rosenberg, CEO & Founder at Qortex, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $11 Million Raised to Build the Future of Video Analytics.
Zack Rosenberg
Never enough. Brett, thanks so much for having me.
Brett
No problem at all. Let’s go ahead and just kick off with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Zack Rosenberg
Sure. So I’ve had the pleasure of leading Cortex over the last four years. Got our first outside investor in 2020. Prior to that, I was working at a content marketing startup now called any word, where I led a sales team and been in startups in New York City most of my career very early on at Buzzfeed and a couple other companies. And I have a passion for advertising, have a passion for marketing, have three boys married, live in New Jersey. And that’s my quick summary.
Brett
Tell us about Buzzfeed. I see you were there in 2010. When was Buzzfeed founded? Was that very early in the journey?
Zack Rosenberg
Very early. I think I was employee 16 or 17 at the point where I actually joined. And being there at that time was so interesting. Not only did they have an incredible formula, obviously, for garnering attention, making headlines, understanding headlines, but the founder, Jonah Peretti, was also the founder of Huffington Post before he started Buzzfeed. So a lot of the people who were there very early on came from there as well, and very, having been their chief data officer, whether that was official or not, he was able to get all these publishers to implement his code, and that code was supposed to help them understand what content was going viral and what content wasn’t. And it was a really interesting analytics platform, but guess what that was used for.
Zack Rosenberg
So all of a sudden, the most viral content that was appearing across this publisher network was also being created across Buzzfeed. And so that was the flywheel that helped us really grow. But from the sales side, we did not sell off the shelf products. We only sold branded and custom content packages. And so I was walking into agencies to 22, 23 year old media planners who had never heard of us. Right, this is Buzzfeed, and they’re 22, 23, and they’d never heard of us. And then you go in and say, hey, we’re selling these completely custom, not off the shelf packages. And boy, was that a challenge.
Brett
I can definitely imagine. Now, a few other questions we like to ask, and the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick. First one, who’s a founder that you really admire, and you see their journey and you think there’s just a lot of lessons that can be learned from them.
Zack Rosenberg
Can I give you the sappiest answer of all time here? Which is to say, both of my parents, having grown up in a family, watching two entrepreneurs has led myself and my two sisters to also become entrepreneurs. So whether the amount of things that I can tell you that I learned from them, but one of them was never bring it home. And I think that’s something that I’ve grown to appreciate going through this journey a lot, is whether they had a great day, whether they had a terrible day, they came home and it was about the family and it was about us, and it was about all these other things outside of work.
Zack Rosenberg
But boy, being in this position that I’m in now, I know how much it eats away at you every moment of every day, thinking about the business, all the things that need to get done, the people you have to get back to. But I really both admire that never happened at home. But second, impressed by what they’ve both created. So it’s withstood the test of time. Both of their businesses, my father still involved, my mother no longer, but have lasted for over 40 years. And I don’t know how many people get to say that about their parents.
Brett
You mentioned there that you have three kids. I have my first one coming in about four weeks. I’m already entering into panic mode pretty much from what you just said. I’m going to have to learn to turn off my business brain and turn on family brain in a way that I’ve never had to do before. I think a lot of founders listening are probably in a very similar position. What advice do you have for people like me and the people listening in who are just beginning to experience that, where they need to turn off that switch?
Zack Rosenberg
Well, the good news is you don’t have to worry about it because it’s coming whether you want it to or not. Right. So you’re going to have so little sleep, it’s going to be completely adrenaline, especially for the first six months or so, but then here’s the secret, Brett. You’re going to want more, like a lot more. And you’re probably sitting here thinking again, panic just by having the one. But they will bring you so much joy. Even when they’re bringing you anger, they will bring you so much joy, it becomes an addictive drug in many ways. Now, the other piece of advice that I would give you is that you will become a human jungle gym. Boy or girl, does not matter who become a human jungle gym.
Zack Rosenberg
So your physical exhaustion, your lack of sleep, the adrenaline going, you’re going to find yourself to be a hundred times more productive because you have less time to devote to all these other things. So overall, it is a benefit that.
Brett
Tracks well with a lot of the other advice that I’ve had. It’s funny, this podcast has turned into like a parenting advice thing. A lot of guests that come on, they’re giving me all these awesome insights. So anyone listening in, hopefully it’s addicts of value to them outside of our normal go to market conversations.
Zack Rosenberg
Well, and here’s the last thing I’ll say, which, you know, nobody ever listens to me, but a baby nurse, look into that. It will change your life.
Brett
Like a night nurse.
Zack Rosenberg
Well, a baby nurse actually is with you for 24 hours. A night nurse only comes in the nighttime, but they cost the same. I don’t understand why no one else thinks this way, but they’re going to cost the same and work twice as many hours. Doesn’t that sound nice?
Brett
It does. Let’s talk about books. So how we like to frame this. We got this from Ryan Holiday, I’m sure you’re familiar with. He calls them quickbooks. So a quickbook is a book that, like, rocks you to your core, really influences how you think about the world and how you approach life. Do any quick books come to mind?
Zack Rosenberg
How much time do you have for this question? So the short answer to your short, quick question is, the fish that ate the whale is a book that just fundamentally changed who I am. I read it several times now by Rich Cohen, and it’s about Sam the banana man. Why do we have bananas in this country? They’re not native to this country, but you can’t go to a single store anywhere and not find them. And that is due to Sam the banana man. Without giving away too much. In chapter eight of, I think, 19 chapters, he hires a mercenary army to overthrow the government of Honduras, who had planned to add a penny tax to a bushel of bananas. That’s chapter eight. This man’s life was incredible.
Zack Rosenberg
And a lot of the tactics that we use in business today stem from this one Mandev, and it is an incredible journey through his life and the hardship, the ups and downs, and really the invention of a lot of tactics, as I said, that we see today.
Brett
I read that book maybe seven or eight years ago, and I loved it, learned a lot. And now im on a big kick listening to the Founders podcast. Do you ever listen to that?
Zack Rosenberg
Yes, I have.
Brett
And I just listened to that episode a week ago. So its very top of mind. And I think it was the secretary of defense went to him, right, and begged him to, like, not do what he was going to do and not overthrow a government. Something along those lines.
Zack Rosenberg
Talk about power, huh?
Brett
Yeah. Insane. What other books you got? What are some other ones?
Zack Rosenberg
Boy. The founders about the invention of PayPal and how that came to be, where Elon Musk was obviously leading one side of it and Peter Thiel was leading the other side of it, ultimately combining to form PayPal, I thought was an incredible read about some incredible minds and how to make that work. Right. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, you have all the same problems. And so listening in great detail about how they handled one challenge to another and a lot of egos in the room, and obviously since have all gone on to do such incredible things, I thought that was another really great read about how to start from scratch and take on big challenges and walked away completely motivated for a long period of time after that.
Zack Rosenberg
And then the next book that I’ll say I thought was just really kind of life changing was Chris Voss has never split the difference. And I found myself using a lot of those tactics. And I don’t know if you know Chris Voss in his work, but he’s the former chief negotiator for the FBI. He was there for 20 years. I don’t know how long he was necessarily the top cop, but he talks about how in negotiation, it’s not like he could get half the hostages back, right. That was never an option. So he had to devise all these tactics on how to win negotiation with people who are in really high pressure situations. And obviously, not every single one turned out successfully, but more often than not, they did.
Zack Rosenberg
And about the applications of that in the business world, and I’ve just found it absolutely fascinating and started to use several of these tactics and kind of my everyday and noticed them being used against me in a lot of interesting ways. So I think Chris boss has never split the difference is another one I really highly recommend for negotiation.
Brett
What’s a random one that would be very surprising. That’s not related to. We can call it personal development, professional development, business. What’s like a random book that’s had a major impact?
Zack Rosenberg
So many. I really enjoyed Disney war. I thought that was a really interesting book. Talking about the inner workings of the Michael Eisner Disney World board politics, the Disney family, coming after Michael Eisner, 20 years of growing this kind of small, interesting company into a global behemoth, and everything that went up and down along that, I thought that was a really interesting book. So, yeah, Disney war, I guess it’s related to business, which is not outside the realm of what you were talking about, but I would say tangential to what I do. I thought that was a really interesting read.
Brett
They’ll have to write another one now. I think Bob just won another big war. I think that was yesterday, right?
Zack Rosenberg
Yeah, it was. But I don’t think his battle is over yet. So we’ll see what happens next.
Brett
Let’s switch gears now and let’s dive deeper into the company. So at a high level, what are you building?
Zack Rosenberg
So, cortex, the name derives from, obviously, the part of the brain that helps make decisions, and that’s exactly what we see ourselves doing for video. In particular, we are trying to tie advertising outcomes to video content. So imagine a scenario where the piece of technology identifies an airplane in the video. You go to Delta Airlines and you say, hey, we’ve got this whole slew of videos with airplanes in it. Delta Airlines is going to say to you, well, that’s great. Are those planes taking a family on their way to Disney World, and they’re really happy and excited, or did something tragic happen? And the answer is, nobody knows unless they watch it. But if you were to sit here and try to watch every video on the Internet today, it would take you 17,000 years to do back to back.
Zack Rosenberg
And that’s if everyone stopped uploading right now. That’s an impossible feat to try to watch, obviously, one one. And so a piece of technology has to be created to scale and understand video at its deepest level. And that’s exactly the mission of Cortex and the applications that derive from that deep understanding of the content.
Brett
Take us back to the early days, the founding of the company. What was it about this problem that made you say, yep, that’s it. I’m going to go spend the next 510, maybe 15 years of my life that’s solving this problem.
Zack Rosenberg
Do you want the version with tiers? Or without.
Brett
Give us the tiers.
Zack Rosenberg
Okay, here we go. So I’ll start by saying, I don’t know that I set out to solve this particular problem. And I think a lot of founders obviously feel the same way. Right? You get in it, you have a very clear vision of what it is that you want to accomplish, and then reality hits you in the face. And certainly we made a number of lefts and rights along the way. But ultimately, where I started was having worked at that company, any word at the time, it was called Kiwi. I worked with a number of publishing clients and helping them drive incremental audiences through social channels. And I started to recognize, at least I thought, that there was an enormous opportunity to build, let’s call it the ESPN of tomorrow across social channels. So Facebook, Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, so forth.
Zack Rosenberg
How could I acquire the rights to very small, independent, niche sports leagues that could find their audience across these massive social channels and work with people to build these sports talk shows that, again, could cater to very interesting, special niches? Because within social media platforms, you could find anybody. And that strategy had some legs. Very early on, we started to garner an audience around ultimate Frisbee and major league eating and these talk shows about gaming and other, again, at that time, pretty niche categories of content. And we started to attract about 600,000 viewers a day across these channels. And you think to yourself, wow, 600,000 viewers a day. If this were on national television, that would be a number one hit.
Zack Rosenberg
But because were across social channels, were making at best $11 a day in revenue, clearly not enough to afford the rights to a lot of this content, let alone buy a cup of coffee. And so what we did was we built this set of tools where bars and restaurants and kind of more local advertisers could embed their messaging into our video content across these channels, which was, I believe, still to this day, allowed by the social platforms, because they don’t allow you to run the 32nd video ads or anything else like that. So all of a sudden, went from making $11 a day to $1,000 a broadcast. And that aha. Moment of, wait a minute, this is way more interesting than what we’re working on today. Perhaps there are broader applications.
Zack Rosenberg
And as I went back to many of my clients and said, hey, how do you monetize this video, live video, on demand video across all these channels? And of course, the answer was not, well, okay, I’m onto something. So that journey, as I said, certainly took a lot of twists and turns. But by late 2019, I had convinced CB’s, iHeartMedia and news twelve, along with a couple of small advertisers, to give this a real test. Could we help monetize and bring a new revenue stream to their videos across channel? By embedding a brand message into aligned content that allowed us to get into an accelerator program called Quake in 2020. And from there, were able to raise additional capital and become the business we are today.
Brett
Now in the media, there’s obviously a lot being talked about the decline of legacy media. There’s a lot of layoffs that have happened. Is that bad for you or does that create an opportunity for you? Because I’m guessing all these brands aren’t going to go anywhere. They’re still going to be around. Maybe someone else will acquire them. But then top of mind for the people who acquire them or whatever happens with them is going to be drive more revenue. How do we make more revenue? So is that an opportunity or is that how you view it?
Zack Rosenberg
I see it as a cycle. And I’m going to pose some of this question back to you, Brad, because you’re an individual creator, right? You’re not a major media company. And I imagine you often think to yourself, boy, wouldn’t it be great to have. And then you start listing all the things that major media companies can offer, right? Editors, producers, directors, ad salespeople, account managers, right? Who’s booking your guests and all these sorts of things. So there will be a, in my opinion, a rush back to premium, to quality and to media houses in one shape or form. I think that certainly it is kind of grim times for a lot of publishers, but certainly those who didn’t have the foresight around how to build an audience, how to own an audience. And you’re also seeing kind of the growth.
Zack Rosenberg
I mean, look, two years ago, especially during COVID all of us were talking about how fast Disney plus and Netflix and all of these content companies were growing, right, by having both a subscription set of revenue as well as an advertising line of revenue for a lot of those platforms. So certainly I don’t think media is going absolutely anywhere. And while I do think that there are obviously layoffs going on in the industry, you got to imagine that there’s going to be a rush back to consolidate lot of content. Right now there are so many streaming platforms, so much content, so many places to find it, that it becomes nearly impossible to do so well. How do you change that? You bring it all together under one roof. And so I think that will be the ebb and the flow.
Zack Rosenberg
I think that because there was a new opportunity for anyone to become a creator, a lot of people have. But ultimately, if you want to make that sustainable and keep it going, you’re going to have to band together. And that’s called a media company. Right.
Brett
It’s such an interesting point there on this being a cycle, because I think that happens a lot, especially when you read these headlines like the death of XYZ. Normally it’s not like the death of anything, right? It’s like there’s an evolution that’s taking place. And yeah, the market is evolving, but I think that aligns with what you’re saying there. If it’s just a cycle and there’s low points of the cycle and there’s high points of the cycle, but that’s just how cycles work.
Zack Rosenberg
That is how cycles work. And I think we’re looking at it in a very short timeframe. Again, it wasn’t all that long ago. A couple of years, were saying, wow, they’re on top of the world. They’re growing like crazy. Viewership is up, advertising is up, all these sorts of things. And now, two years later, it’s like, oh, no, run for the hills. It’s going to be okay.
Brett
It’s all going to be okay.
Zack Rosenberg
Yeah.
Brett
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Zack Rosenberg
Yep.
Brett
When did it start to really feel like things were moving in the right direction?
Zack Rosenberg
We didn’t get the product out into market until about January 21, and we got some very large media publishers on board very early. And I think part of the honest answer to your question is a lot of false starts. We thought were running in the right direction. We thought everything was going great. We were signing up these big publishers. People were very curious about this product and how it works and its benefits and its opportunities. Then by the end of 21, weren’t that much further ahead. In 22, we retooled the product, saw then completely different results. Call it a mini pivot. To some extent it was still the same product, but clearly it hadn’t found the market fit that we had thought initially, based on just the traction we had from the partners, were able to sign up by 22.
Zack Rosenberg
I’ll say sometimes summer ish, when those clients not only were sticking around, but were happy because of the changes that we made, because of listening to their feedback, is when I really thought to myself, okay, were going to be all.
Brett
Right, take us back to those changes and the decisions that you made to make those changes. I would have to assume that they werent just easy, quick things to decide on.
Zack Rosenberg
No, it changed, which I think, going back to some of your questions earlier, positioning is probably the most important skill of any entrepreneur. You can have the same product, same marketing, same everything, but the way that you position it could change the market you go after it could change the pieces that go into place. There are a lot of benefits to understanding how to position yourself. And I’d say that was a big moment in time where we sat to ourselves and thought, well, if we do this and we make these small changes, it has this impact. Is that good? Is that not good? Is it okay? Does it exclude maybe some of the partners who are our biggest partners today by going down this route because they really like what we got at the moment?
Zack Rosenberg
And so, of course, there was a lot of back and forth. But startups don’t work on indecisiveness. It’s okay to sit there for a day or two or three and usually even a little bit longer than that, but you got to pick the direction and you got to have conviction once you do, and feedback is great, but you’re the one who got you here. And so it’s just got to be go, go, whatever decision you make, and you got to own it. And I’d say that was obviously the big debate at that moment because it changed a lot of what people were doing, even though it wasn’t necessarily a huge change technologically, but that positioning ultimately got us to where we are now. So, yeah, I do not think we would be here without it.
Brett
Have you read that book from Al Reese on positioning?
Zack Rosenberg
I haven’t, but it sounds like I should add it to my list.
Brett
Yeah, he’s like the pioneer of positioning, and he wrote this in like, I don’t know, I’ll probably get it wrong, but I think it was like the seventies or the eighties. And the whole book is called positioning. The battle for your mind. And he just talks about, oh, in this world we’re living in today, people are bombarded with so many messages and like, this was written a long time ago, and I think you’d have a heart attack if you knew how many messages people were being bombarded with today.
Zack Rosenberg
It’s probably slightly more. Yeah.
Brett
How did you get good at positioning then? Was it just spending a lot of time thinking about it? Did you hire an agency or a consultant to help you? Did you bring on a marketer who’s an expert in positioning? Can you unpack that for us and how you got that right? Because like you said, positioning really is, it’s everything.
Zack Rosenberg
I don’t think I knew that. And I think that this process that I always take is before I even get on a sales call, I will often ask myself if then right, if I’m asked this question, how do I respond if this person says this, what’s their motivation? If this happens, why was that outcome? And I think that’s obviously the approach that has helped me to where I am. And so as were looking at these problems, trying to understand each one of those different directions and the potential outcome or impact and who would say what was very helpful exercise to ultimately picking the right direction. So would I say that I’m a positioning expert? By no means.
Zack Rosenberg
I think the best thing I can say is that I’ve been able to find people who are experts, but I don’t know necessarily what my expertise is at any given moment. And certainly as the company goes from one size to the next, my expertise had to become one thing very early on, and now it’s got to be something completely different. So my lack of expertise is kind of my expertise at this point. But when it came to positioning, it was just trying to think in their shoes. Would I use it? Would I want it? Would it make my life easier? And if I could answer yes to those questions without a thousand rebuttals, that was probably the right direction.
Brett
What are you working to become an expert in now or what’s mission critical for you to establish expertise in right now?
Zack Rosenberg
And this is a big difference from honestly three months ago or six months ago. And as I said that the phases certainly kind of dictate that I’d say what my fundamental job is at this point is to feed my organization, which, as I said, was very different than where it was three months ago. And what I mean by feed the organization is that we’ve been very fortunate to raise money and bring in a lot of really excellent talent. I mean, some of the best I’ve ever worked with in the industry. But they are bogged down in building foundation when they’re entering their role. Very likely, nobody here has ever done that role before. So while they’re experts in bringing in new business or product or whatever the case may be, they have to start from square one.
Zack Rosenberg
And so my job is to make their jobs easier. What do they need? Who do they need to talk to? What will help them? How can I go out and find more of that for them? Whatever it is, new business partners, whatever the case may be, it’s about tapping that network, expanding upon it, and then bringing in whatever resources they’re lacking. And so I see that as my primary focus in this stage of the business. And I think you’ll find this pretty interesting, Brett, but I often like to ask entrepreneurs, what stage of the business are you in? And when I ask that question, I mean it in hours, days, weeks, months, quarters. Very few of us get to the stage where we get to really plan out for a year or longer. Right. My wife works at Fortune 500.
Zack Rosenberg
Sometimes she gets to plan out three years in advance. Thanks. That’s a luxury I’ve never experienced in my career. But I also remember back to the early days when I was hour by hour, you’d send out five emails, you’d get a response and be like, oh, my God, I got a response. Somebody wants to talk to me. I’m not in that stage anymore. Now I’m moving from month to quarterly. I have predictability. I know what I’m going to be working on next month. I kind of have a sense what revenue is going to be next month very different than, again, the day to day or the week to week phase. And so the skillset really does have to adjust to where you are in that timeframe, because you can’t plan out six months ahead if you’re only thinking week to week.
Brett
The idea of being able to plan three years ahead is so comical inside of my business and inside of my brain.
Zack Rosenberg
Funnier story.
Brett
Yes.
Zack Rosenberg
Product. And I don’t have to get into details, but the product that they were working on for three years in planning failed within six weeks. Was it, was the lip on this company’s radar, right? It was, yes. They invested quite a bit in terms of marketing dollars, but in the grand scheme of things, it impacted their revenue, 0.2%. But beyond that, could you imagine planning for anything for three years and then six weeks tanking it? Just unbelievable.
Brett
Was it, Quibi? It sounds like, it wasn’t. Sounds like a very similar path that they followed. And I watched that happen. I’m like, how can so many incredibly smart people with unlimited money just not succeed so fast? Like, that whole watching that from an outsider’s view is just a really fascinating study of business.
Zack Rosenberg
I think maybe it was just too early because I think about them still and how, what they were trying to achieve of this mobile first viewer experience and how if you flip the phone horizontal or vertical, it would change what you were watching and the interactive nature of that. Maybe they were just a bit too early.
Brett
Yeah, I think so. Have you ever watched that documentary about the people who invented the iPhone before the iPhone?
Zack Rosenberg
No, I haven’t. Do you know the name of it?
Brett
I’m trying to think of it. I’ll send it to you after the interview. But it’s just fascinating. They go through this whole story. I think it was like the late nineties. I have the name. General Magic is the name of the company. And it’s like the most famous company that you’ve never heard of is kind of like the tagline. They just go through and they’re, I don’t want to spoil too much of it, but it’s like in the early nineties and they nailed it. They have the vision. They have this master plan for the iPhone. They have, like, the team that came from Apple after Steve Jobs left. Like, everything was, like, right there. They went public, blah, blah, and, like, they were just too early. And that was, like, the reality of it. But it’s definitely a fascinating documentary.
Zack Rosenberg
And look, there were plenty of products that came before it. It was just right time and marketing magic, right? Yeah. I mean, it’s certainly impressive. I actually was just reading recently about the Zune from Microsoft, which I had, I didn’t have the iPod, and it was basically the Apple team saying, oh, we know it was a million times a better product. Didn’t matter. We had capitalized on the fervor on this, on that, the compatibility. It wasn’t about just the product. It was about the aura of the product. And sometimes that’s all it takes and the messaging.
Brett
Right. It’s like they were talking, coming back to that.
Zack Rosenberg
Right.
Brett
And what was their famous tagline that they introduced? It was like a thousand songs in your pocket while Microsoft and all the others were talking about these things that, like, consumers couldn’t even wrap their heads around or didn’t even understand what they were talking about in terms of, like, storage size and things like that.
Zack Rosenberg
And that makes perfect sense. Right. And look, I remember talking to an entrepreneur about how to find your voice, and I thought this was a really interesting perspective on it, too. His name is Ben Lehrer. He was the founder of Thrillist. And every time I read a thrillist article, even though I didn’t know him that well, I always felt like he was the one speaking to me, even if it wasn’t him who wrote the article. Right. It just had a very unique voice that I resonated with. I asked him, like, how do you find that? And he talked about this pendulum about how you could be five degrees off and completely miss your audience, and then you adjust backwards and you’re seven degrees off next time.
Zack Rosenberg
And again, you’re just completely missing the boat again and really being able to then hone that over time in your language till the point where it just rings through. I mean, even today, you mentioned some of the taglines from Apple. I still hear Steve Jobs voice, even though it’s Tim Cook or a hundred other people who are talking about these products, I still hear his voice every time there’s a big announcement. And I think that, again, speaks to really hitting home on your audience.
Brett
Apple is such a fascinating company in general. I feel like it’s so uncommon for that to, like, continue long after the founder has either passed away or he’s no longer there. Or she’s no longer there. Like, normally that stuff seems to kind of transition out with the founder, but somehow Apple really, like, injected this into their products, and you can still feel it. Like, I don’t know why. Like, every Apple product I have, I just love. I couldn’t explain why I love it, but I love it. And it’s hard to say, like, you love any other, like, consumer product. Like, that’s nothing common language to use, but that’s how people describe Apple products, which I think is just so fascinating that they were able to pull that off and sustain that for such a long period of time.
Zack Rosenberg
I think it has a lot to do with clearly just it being foundational. Whatever process or applications or whatever they’ve put in place to make that kind of foundational. But the other part of it is, I think it’s really just tied to your memories, right? When’s the last time you didn’t have an iPhone in your pocket and all the things that came with it? And then you can talk about that with other products of theirs, too, right? You remember whether it’s going through college or your first job or this or that, it’s foundational to your story in quite the same way it’s foundational to theirs. I think that’s the stuff that makes it last forever.
Brett
What are you injecting into cortex to make it be foundational?
Zack Rosenberg
Curiosity. That’s certainly what I hope every one of my colleagues leaves this company one day and thinks about, is really just trying to push curiosity. I think it is so core to the foundation of trying to solve people’s problems, of trying to be an expert, of trying to be more than just a salesperson. If you are curious about them and their lives, they will invite you to their weddings, and the relationships will last longer than the jobs. So curiosity, I think, is truly foundational to what we’re building. And I think that’s really where the term cortex kind of comes from. It’s not just about decision making, but it’s about the inputs into those decisions, which comes from curiosity. And so I do hope that is what everybody thinks about when they think about their time here.
Brett
How do you operationalize that? How do you build a culture that’s more curious? I’m guessing it’s not just throwing up some words on a wall, and then everyone just internalizes it, and then boom, you have a curious culture. How do you inject that, and how do you operationalize that and make that real?
Zack Rosenberg
So every Friday, we have an all hands meeting. And each all hands is geared towards some aspect of curiosity. Give one example. On one Friday each month, we invite in a guest speaker on a topic that people have been talking about in the office, about a company, about a space, somebody in the news. Who can we get where we can in a safe environment? Ask tons of questions about their job, their life, what got them to where they’re at? We also have something called a dream meeting, and it’s, in essence, a brainstorm. But people submit a lot of things that are on their mind that they’re either curious about or questions about, or have thoughts on how to solve. And then we pick a couple of those ideas and we address them as an entire company once a month.
Zack Rosenberg
And it’s instilling it that way. We have a slack channel based on great books and culture and things of that nature that stems curiosity. We have a book club that we started doing. He’s been sharing books around the office. So wherever you can see curiosity, foster curiosity.
Brett
Love that advice. What about your market category? Are you creating a new category or transforming an existing category?
Zack Rosenberg
I think anybody, my opinion, anybody who is trying to create a new industry is going to struggle for a lot longer than they’d like, and it’s much easier to evolve industry, and I feel that’s where we’re starting. It doesn’t have to be where you end, but I feel it’s where you have to start. So we often talk about our first product on stream, which is a set of in video experiences tied to what you’re watching. And there are companies who have tried to do in video experiences before, and they tried to fundamentally change the way that everybody was behaving, both on the media company side, as well as the audience, as well as the advertisers and those companies you’ve never heard of before.
Zack Rosenberg
So we knew if we wanted to be successful, we had to make or convince people that were only making a 5% change. We’re actually making a 500% change. But you had to convince them that they only have to change about 5%. People are willing to change 5%, but nobody’s willing to change 50%. And so even though it’s not taking necessarily different components that people hadn’t been working on before, did combine them in a unique way where it was fundamentally different. And that allowed us to get adoption very quickly without a lot of friction. Now that we’re embedded, we have a relationship. Now we can start to introduce the products that fundamentally change the way that the industry works. But if you start there, I always talk about this example with Uber. They have a vision for self driving trucks.
Zack Rosenberg
Could you imagine walking into the very first investor meeting and saying, hey, we’re going to create self driving trucks, but first we have to do these 19 things. That meeting would have been very short. That was ultimately where they wanted to get to. But they didn’t have to say that initially. There was certainly a big enough opportunity and big enough market cap in just what Uber does today without having to get to where they want it to be, 1015 years down the road? And so that would certainly be my advice to most founders, is you certainly have a big vision, but you can’t necessarily sell that big vision on day one.
Brett
But you can right now, because that’s our final question. What’s the vision? What’s the three to five year vision that you’re building?
Zack Rosenberg
What a perfect tee up, huh?
Brett
Yeah, you set that up perfectly.
Zack Rosenberg
My vision is that we are in the golden age of video. And I think you had mentioned certainly earlier on the conversation that media companies are having a rough time. And I think that is going to turn around very quickly, because as the world changes, so too will the way that advertisers and consumers have to work with video. Video is ubiquitous. It is about 86% of where all people’s time is spent, yet we know the least about it. And so my vision, 510 years down the road, is that you’re able to have a tailored, personalized experience that matters to you and is based on what you’re watching without the intrusive nature of cookies and trackers and all these sorts of things. I know that if you’re watching golf, you have an affinity towards golf.
Zack Rosenberg
I don’t need to know if you’re old or young or what gender or religion or any of these sorts of things. It’s not impactful to your curiosity and to your interests. And so we have the opportunity right now to bring value to content and what you’re watching and what you’re interested in a way that it’s been done in search for 20 years, but we never had the capacity to do it in video. And I think that’s an enormous opportunity, not just for us, but for the rest of the world, too.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision, and I really love this conversation, and I know the audience is going to as well. We’re over on time, so I don’t want to hold you any longer here. Before we wrap up, if any founders are listening in and they just want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Zack Rosenberg
They should go to Cortex AI. That’s Qortex AI, and my email address is just Zach Qortex AI. Z A C K. I’m happy to have a conversation with them and hopefully scare them into what they’re doing.
Brett
Awesome, Zach, thanks so much. This has been a lot of fun.
Zack Rosenberg
Nice meeting you, Brett. Excited to be here. Thanks so much.
Brett
This episode of category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit Frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for category visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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