Taboola $TBLA CEO Adam Singolda - AI powered content discovery

Adam Singolda is the founder and CEO of Taboola (NASDAQ: TBLA), a content discovery platform that powers recommendations for Apple News, Yahoo, and other major publishers, reaching over 500 million daily active users. In this episode of World of DaaS, Adam and Auren discuss: The war for internet user attentionWhy Apple and Amazon are becoming ad companiesBuilding a discovery engine for the internetThe future of AI-powered advertising Looking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Hea...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Auren Hoffman?

  Hello fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdas.com. That's world of das, D-A-A-S, dot com. Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Adam Singolda. Adam is the founder and CEO of Taboola, a content discovery platform that reaches over 600 million people daily. Taboola powers content and recommendations for major publishers like CNBC and Business Insider and serves as Yahoo's exclusive native advertising partner. Taboola went public in 2021 and trades

• 0:46Auren Hoffman?

  under NASDAQ under the ticker TBLA. Adam, welcome to World of DAS.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. It's crazy. We've never done this before.

• 0:54Auren Hoffman?

  It's super crazy and we've both known of each other for a long time. So I'm really glad to hang out. For those who are not watching on video, Adam's in his Lego room, which is super fun and I'm very jealous of as well.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  All of my issues are in this room. I have my Transformers, my Lego, all of my childhood dreams, you know, came into fruition later in life.

• 1:13Auren Hoffman?

  You're too young. You probably don't have like the G.I. Joe and He-Man and stuff like that, right?

• 1:17Speaker 01

  I have T-shirts of those, of course. I watched all of that stuff.

• 1:21Auren Hoffman?

  This is amazing. Okay, I'm extremely jealous. Now, Google built a gazillion dollar business showing ads to people who know what they want. Basically, the whole idea is you search for something, you know what you want, you get it. You almost went the opposite direction where you built a business showing people things that they're not actually searching for. Maybe you didn't really know, or maybe you do. So explain your thesis around discovery.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  I started Taboola in 2007. It's my first job. Before that, I was an engineer in the Israeli army. And when I graduated, I was trying to watch TV and I couldn't find anything to watch, which is an experience all of our listeners are familiar with. You're just going through things, hoping to stumble upon something that may be interesting to you. And it was very difficult. And the idea was, you know, we only have 24 hours a day and we will never have enough time to read all the books you want to read. Read or meet the people we're supposed to be meeting and the products we may love. So if only something could have given us this guidance so that we can actually have a better life because we can discover things that would make a positive impact on us. If you think about yourself listening to this podcast, we've all been through this experience.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  You go to the gym, you're working out and there's a song in the background. Like, that's a great song and you fall in love with that band or song. And you think it's new, but it was always there. You just never discovered it or a TV show. So I think serendipity is a beautiful thing and I think search is great when you know. But when you don't know, there's really an opportunity to expand your horizon into even Lego, which we talked about. I wanted Lego as a kid, but it was too expensive for my family to afford it. And then 20 years after Lego did this piece when they partnered with auto manufacturers to build this huge cars made by Lego. And I kind of discovered that piece of content. I fell in love again with Lego and I started buying it because now I can buy it.

• 3:10Auren Hoffman?

  This idea of serendipity is amazing, yet it does seem like it's hard to manufacture. It's hard to actually make it happen. It's something that when we experience our eyes light up and it's incredible. It seems more and more rare in today's world, or maybe you don't agree. How does one essentially create a company around serendipity?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  You have to start small. You have to pick a segment that you think you have a chance of truly creating value. For us, it was, we started off with just video and back then. You have to go back in 2007. Netflix was still sending DVDs to your house and they just thought about streaming back then. Your Kindle just launched. So suddenly you had a device in your hand with 90,000 titles. It was the beginning of abundance of content available to you in real time, which made the problem discovery real. When you start a company, when you're a founder or when you're on the team, just picking the right problem and focusing on that really passionately gives you a chance to do that. So for us, we spent the years trying to just crack the code on video discovery.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  And that was actually not an easy problem to solve, but it was a very defined problem. And about four years into it, we expanded into articles and videos. The year after, we've expanded into sponsored content. So by that, allowing people to promote things from even a broader universe. So for us, it was more about just trying to really focus on few things at the time until we build it such that it could create enough value to consumers in different situations.

• 4:43Auren Hoffman?

  It does seem that even with all the people working on it and all this great content, the content recommendation and shopping recommendation systems today are still absolutely terrible. You'd think they'd be amazing. You'd think I'd log into Netflix and they would show me this incredible thing that maybe I haven't heard of that is absolutely the right thing for me. And I would just start watching it and I would be so excited and it'd find something new. But I would say almost every cool thing I found on Netflix has been because someone else has told me about it. Or I heard about it somehow, or somebody tweeted about it. Every time I log in, they just show me whatever else is watching. They don't show me anything that interesting.

• 5:23Auren Hoffman?

  Whenever I log into Amazon, I never see, hey, I've seen you've bought a thousand products on Amazon in the last 20 years. I have your history, Orin, of all these things. I know you, Orin. There's this really cool vacuum thing that I think you would love. Why don't you check it out? Like, I'm pretty confident that you would like this, but I never see that. Why is it not working?

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Imagine you went to google.com as we do now to search for something and the page would be completely empty with no place for me to type what I'm looking for. And Google would just say, here's what we think you want to search. It's very alien-like thinking to believe this is possible. It's the perfect Google. The perfect Google would be an empty page. It's a very hard problem to solve trying to predict which market I'm in. What's my interest before I ever told you anything about me?

• 6:14Auren Hoffman?

  I've already seen so many things on Netflix. I probably bought over a thousand things on Amazon. They have a huge corpus for me, yet they still can't show me anything I really want to do.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  But Amazon, I think, is probably among the best ones. The way I know I'm right is because I have way too many boxes outside of my door that I know nobody needs in this house.

• 6:33Auren Hoffman?

  I don't even know if there's a page on Amazon where it says, here's the deals for you. Here's what I think you would want. It's showing me maybe everyone in my demographic. I don't think they're showing me really anything even personal.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  They call it other people also bought or something. I think that's how they, that's the strip of recommendations. And I agree Netflix is probably still early on their journey. Amazon was among the first one to say people who bought this also bought that. And they also have the best of signals, which is I ended up buying it.

• 7:00Auren Hoffman?

  Correct. You bought it and you did not return it.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  This is not impressions and clicks, the world of attribution of how do I know, know something really happened? And how do I know, know something really meant anything? This is a company that knows what I'm seeing, what I'm clicking on, what I'm buying, what I'm using, what I'm coming back to. They have probably among the best signals. But this is also the opportunity because you're looking at these world gardens, Facebook, Google, Amazon, very good companies. They have a lot of data. Obviously, data is something you know very well. They have a lot of great data, first party data. It's a great consumer business. And what do they do? They end up building great products to serve themselves.

• 7:41Auren Hoffman?

  I think they are showing me things, they're just showing me things where they make the most money on, or people are advertising, or Netflix really only shows me content that they created. They don't show me really anything that they've bought.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  There's a fundamental conflict in should Google put an ad on a publisher or should it put it on YouTube? That's a tough question. On one side, you make a hundred percent. On the other, you make less. There's a conflict for these world gardens to ever decide, are they Jedi or Darth Vader? They're both powerful, like which one are you going to be? This is the opportunity, the way I see it from our point of view, which is any one publisher will always be too small to build an Amazon-like recommendation engine or an Amazon-like advertising business. But what if the aggregation of everyone combined, Captain Planet, we spoke about cartoons, but it's like with your powers combined, I'm Captain Planet.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  From a dead show, what if the entirety of the open web, anyone outside of search and social and Amazon were on some sort of unified platform where clicks and traffic and conversions were somehow valuable to everyone collectively? And this is the vision to build that great consumer engagement technology and advertising product outside of search and social.

• 9:01Auren Hoffman?

  That's super cool. A lot of publishers today are terrified of AI search stealing their traffic. You're starting to see like the data, what's happening on the ground?

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Obviously, it's a hot topic. You can't have a conversation these days without saying AI at least once every sentence. And I'm not sure all of it, it's real, but when it's real, it's valuable. But let me address your question. So I think, first of all, there is a scare because publishers rely on search traffic, they rely on social traffic, so they do need that source of audience coming from the platforms. And at the same time, there's a surge in ChatGPT and LLM, different types of models implemented across different world gardens. So there is a scare. First of all, Gemini, which is the Google version of that is already live and available to, I don't know, three billion people a day. So in many ways, we're already

• 9:51Speaker 01

  in the future. It's already live, it's out there. This is not ChatGPT building a consumer business. This is Google having the largest consumer business already making it available to everyone. That's good news because it means whatever turbulence we might have expected, we're already after it in many ways because it's live. And Google is the best in the world in making that type of service available to consumers. So that gives me some comfort. And as a company, we're not seeing any big change in traffic as of now, at least we're tracking that, of course. On the other side, what I think is interesting is, and this is again fascinating piece of information, the average American opening

• 10:33Speaker 01

  TikTok or Instagram will give those platforms at least 50 minutes a day, five zero. The average American, when they go to read the news on the internet, the average articles per session. Is about one to one and a half.

• 10:52Auren Hoffman?

  Most articles are designed almost that you could read them in a couple of minutes.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  That's all they do.

• 10:57Auren Hoffman?

  So they go to one article, they read one, they leave.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  They give the publisher, call it a minute or two and they bounce. So I think this whole AI revolution has opened up a whole new world in which publishers say, wow, should we adopt, use, utilize AI in a big way on our homepages, on our article pages? Of course, not to create the content, that is editorial, that is important. But when someone comes to our site, should we be as personalized as TikTok, but with high editorial value? Wow, that would be a dream. So now you only change if you have to. It's a greed and fear type of thing, dynamics. So now there is fear and a lot of greed, there's value to be created. So I actually am very optimistic about kind of the open web and publishers adopting AI in a much bigger way than we've ever seen.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Thanks to those platforms already doing it. That's kind of like what I'm seeing in the marketplace. We do have a product called Homepage For You, which essentially is trying to render your homepage as if it's as good as TikTok or Instagram, but using your own content. And we're seeing thirty, forty percent improvement, which shows you that there's a lot of value here while still sustaining editorial value. So I think this is just the beginning. Not to mention advertisers there, I think there's even more value to advertisers adopting AI.

• 12:15Auren Hoffman?

  One thing I hate is if I go to a site and I'm looking at their headlines, I kind of scroll down and then I decide I'm going to either read it or not. If I go back to the site, like I don't want to see those headlines again. I want to see the ones I haven't seen. I don't want to have to like re-scroll. They don't take account into the user's time. Maybe they're still incented to like take up as much of my time rather than give me the most service for my time.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  The question you have to ask yourself, let's say Facebook is among the good companies with regards to AI. Instagram is very good. I would argue that the ads on Instagram are so good, I would pay Facebook a subscription to see more ads.

• 12:53Auren Hoffman?

  So would I. That is my serendipity. I don't use Instagram as much as I should, but every time I do, I see really cool ads.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  I buy things from them and it's great. I mean, these are things I like.

• 13:04Auren Hoffman?

  It's interesting because I paid more on X, so I don't see the ads. But the only reason I did that is because the ads were bad. They just weren't engaging. They weren't interesting. They weren't relevant to me. In fact, they were just so not relevant and I was willing to pay more. I said, I don't see them. I'd rather pay to see good ads because then it's actually showing me things I really want that I can take actions on, like and get serendipity for.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Back in the day, magazines had beautiful ads. You literally bought magazine in part to see some of the advertising. If Facebook rendered the internet as it is now, my guess, it would have tripled in size. If Facebook rendered a publisher entire experience, my guess, it would have tripled in engagement and size and revenue. That is the bar. Now, we're not as good as Facebook. They're better than us. But this is the spectrum of what we want to feel. We want to bring that value. And because we're not a consumer company, then we'll always be a publisher's friend. We'll never compete with them. And what's missing in the world, you want a Facebook-like technology company that is a win-win, that is everyone's friend, and will never compete with their friends, which is what we're trying to be and are.

• 14:11Auren Hoffman?

  How do you think AI is going to really impact people's shopping behavior? Perplexity has recently come out with these agents to help you do that. I've started using it. It still doesn't work perfectly, but super exciting. Do you see agents helping people and going out on their behalf, buying things on people's behalf? Where do you see that going?

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Two things will happen. One, which is the huge one. You have about 100 million businesses in the world. About 10 million of them advertise on Google, about 10 million of them advertise on Facebook. If you listen to this podcast and you have a business, or your partner has a business, or you know someone has a business, or you have a restaurant you love, call that friend of yours or walk into that restaurant and ask them, what is their CPM? Or their CPC? And I promise you're going to get a look. And that look is gonna be like, what are you talking about? I know how much a client is worth to me. I sell tables. I know how much a table is worth to me. I have no idea what CPM is. But then again, at the same time, this entire industry is driven by three-letter acronyms. Nobody knows what they mean.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  It's a very complicated, cumbersome industry that is geared to do good, drive growth to businesses.

• 15:20Auren Hoffman?

  It's CPM. M means mill in French, which means a thousand. But most people think it means million. It's like cost per thousand is very, very confusing, just even the acronym.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  So I think AI, the first big step is to make advertising accessible to millions of businesses.

• 15:38Auren Hoffman?

  It's very hard to advertise, even if you're a local plumber or something like that. Like, it's very, very hard to even understand how to do it. The only way people can do it effectively are people have like real teams to do it for them.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  No agency will take a small business. You're just stuck in this world in which there is a lot of value to be created, but most businesses are capped out. They can't enter. So the first thing is AI will solve that dramatically. There's a hundred and X here. This is not like an incremental opportunity. This is a whole new world in which businesses can talk to a machine and say what they want to do. And that machine will buy on their behalf, either within that platform or other platforms. That will change the world as we know it because it's gonna create a whole funnel of businesses.

• 16:21Auren Hoffman?

  It's like, hey, AI agent, maybe it's my marketing agent or something like that. There are times where I have extra tables in my restaurant. I want to try to get people in. Help me do that. Help me create the campaigns. Help me do that effectively. Let's A B test a few things. Do you authorize me to spend 300 bucks a month on your behalf? Yeah, sure. I authorize you to spend it. Okay, we're gonna test this out. We're gonna test a few different things. We're gonna see what it's like. We're gonna do these things and then let's see. We're really gonna try to make your Thursday lunch pop. Let's see if we can make your Thursday lunch pop and then see what happens from there.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  And that's the difference perhaps between a business that stays alive and a business that's not, because suddenly we're a business. Advertising is a great thing when it works because it enables companies to provide their services in markets, provide it more affordably. I mean Netflix now reaches 7 million people with their advertising market. That's great for Netflix. It means they can get into new markets. They can create it more affordably in markets that people can't afford otherwise. Great, it's a good thing. So I think this is the first big step. From our point of view, I can tell you, we're spending a lot of time. AI, like I said, it's very easy to say, hard to do. You need a lot of data, a lot of machines, a lot of people that know what they're doing. We took this first step at this thing of conversational onboarding. First step, we call it Abbey.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  And I can tell you the roadmap where this could go is you just give me your product and I will create even the landing page for you. I will create 10 landing pages for you. I will create your thumbnails and your titles. You just show me what you're trying to do and I will do the entire thing for you. And I suspect in three or five years, you're gonna see Facebook, Google, Taboola, Amazon, offering things in that world in which it's just very easy. So that's the first thing that's gonna happen. The second thing that's gonna happen is consumers will have much more to choose from because advertising will grow in a whole new area. We talked about Amazon saying, people who bought this also bought. I'm sure there's a product, if only I knew I liked, I would buy it.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  But outside of my realm, maybe that's like a Star Wars 3PO type of thing or some sort of other agent. Or the platforms themselves will offer me things to buy, but it's definitely gonna happen.

• 18:35Auren Hoffman?

  Where do you think Shopify sits in this feature?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  I mean, it can be the plumbing for all of this. I think they can just say, we are the infrastructure for everything that's about to happen. That's a big play. You have a lot of good companies in that space. You have Shopify, you have Wix out of Israel. You have a lot of companies that sit in different parts of that journey. There's an ecosystem that's about to be born on top of enabling those services all the way from the platforms to the consumer. So I think companies like Shopify and others could help many smaller businesses, bigger businesses to get going. And that's a big play for them. If they can make any business on Shopify a successful business, they won.

• 19:14Auren Hoffman?

  What are like data or data signals that matter more in this world that are maybe less obvious to the listener?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  It depends. There's no one answer to that. In my world is an example, okay? Twelvemillion will generate almost $2 billion in revenue this year, but 90% of our revenue comes from businesses, advertisers who buy directly from us. And they put a pixel on their page that allows us to see if a user we sent to their site ended up doing what we thought that person was supposed to do. If we did not have that pixel, we would be blind. We would send people to subscribe to this service. We would have sent people to read this article, send these people to thank you for signing up to this newsletter, and we would have never known if we did a good job or a bad job. So that is to us a very important piece of data.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Another important piece of data is we know when you go to NBC News or CNBC today, if you go tomorrow, we know you're the same person. We don't know your name. We don't know your gender. We don't know your age, but we know you're the same person because we have a first party integration across all of our publishers. That is good because then we can try to do what you said, which is if you read a piece of article, I'm not going to give it to you again. That's a no. Or if you clicked on something, I might try to change my feed recommendations so I give you more of what you like. So that is a piece of information that matters, especially as cookies go away and all those things. So that's in my world.

• 20:40Auren Hoffman?

  These publishers collectively, in some ways, they're worse off than they were 10 years ago. They are fighting against the walled gardens. In some ways, they almost always think of themselves as competing against the other publishers rather than think of themselves as competing against the walled gardens. You could think of the superhero analogy where they all get together and they're way stronger and they're all working together there. What is preventing them, besides for ego, to actually work together in a way where they could help inform each other, share data, do other types of things to give the consumer a amazing experience across all of them?

• 21:18Speaker 01

  We have to be empathetic to publishers and put ourselves in their shoes. These are people that, first of all, are doing God's work because they create content. But our children can know things that actually have editorial value behind them versus, for the life of us, you know, make decisions based on TikTok, which is maybe the end of humanity. So let us all be lucky if journalists and publishers succeed and grow for the rest of time. That's one. Two, publishers, for better or worse, rely on Walgreens and companies that are just in significant conflict of interest. How can search engines decide if to send someone to an article that reviews coffee machines? Or to send that person to a retailer that's paid Google for that?

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Who gets the click? One click is worth $10? One click is worth nothing. Massive conflict. So they have to navigate. These are very powerful sophisticated companies. You mentioned Walgreens, which is true. Their competition is consumer attention. And these are very powerful companies. So that's tough. And then thirdly, there is an evolution of an adoption of technology that takes a lot of cultural growth. Because to put on a homepage, an AI software that changes the homepage based on the person reading the homepage is a very new concept. Because the homepage is supposed to be the same. It's what matters today.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  But now, because as consumers, we're interacting with those social networks, image chief editors say, you know what? I get it. There's a cultural growth and evolution that takes place coming from a world that is very conservative for the right reason. Because do you want them to be conservative? And I think we have to be empathetic to that. And that's why I said earlier, the good news about Gen AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, you know, all those things, is that publishers seeing that and saying, you know what? We should at least play with that too and see what happens. And 10 years ago, or five years ago, or maybe two years ago, I think that conversation would have been shut down immediately. I show a lot of empathy for these people and I love them for the value they create.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  But I know sometimes, and some publishers will be more early adopters, and some will be less. There's a big upside here for those who try, adopt, and essentially improve those metrics for their consumers.

• 23:40Auren Hoffman?

  We've been in the world of the last 10 years where cookies are a smaller and smaller percentage of interactions, whether it's because now we're doing more things in apps, things on Safari, which don't have cookies. They're kind of slowly going away in Chrome as well. What does that new world look like? In some ways, it could be good for publishers. They have more context. There's other types of things, but also could go against them because there might be retargeting ads that they're not going to be able to get. How is that going to affect these guys going forward?

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Obviously, that's another hot topic. So in the case of Safari, again, this has been already the reality for, I think from 2020. So it's been a while now. So that is stable. Then you have other browsers, Chrome and others. I think in the case of Google, which is a big one, as it seems now, they're not really deprecating cookies, but rather allowing users to choose and then building an infrastructure for advertisers to still monetize in a way that seems good. So we'll see what happens. I think all of those trends are good trends because they force the industry to do the right thing for consumers and the advertiser. At the end of the day, no one wants a creepy ad to hunt them down wherever they go. We want ads. We said it on this podcast earlier. If you could see a good

• 24:56Speaker 01

  ad that's relevant for you, that's great. I would click on it, buy it, ask to see more of it. That's good. When you see ads that are low quality, not relevant, maybe confusing, those are the things that I believe those platforms are trying to prevent. So I'm not against that. I like it as a trend. What it basically creates is that companies now in advertising need huge scale. When I started Taboola, I remember, I thought, wow, if we can get this business to $100 million, it's going to be a massive success. This was, you know, over a decade ago. And I can tell you now, Taboola is almost $2 billion in revenue, and I think we're small. We talked about before we started recording, I plan from

• 25:39Speaker 01

  2 to 10 billion. That is what you need to have enough data, enough technology, enough click stream to be great at what you do. Not good, great, amazing. So I think it forces this interesting trend in the industry. And what publishers have, which is arguably unique,

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Is that they have this curiosity. When we see what you read, it's true that on Facebook they know my name, my gender. I tell Facebook things I wish people thought of me. I don't tell them the truth. I put movies on Facebook on my hobbies that I think if you looked at my profile, I'd be like, Adam is cool, you like those movies. Oh, you like Godfather. I don't want to watch Godfather now, but I want you to think I like it. It's a good movie for you to think that I like. That's in my profile. But I would never, ever post on Facebook reading about a medical situation I'm concerned about regarding my family. Never gonna happen. But I will read about it all day long. And this is what publishers have. They have this curiosity graph, perhaps even authenticity graph. Because I will always read about things I really cared to read about.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  And that could be hobbies of mine, commerce, little things, medical things, financial services. I want to take a mortgage. I'm gonna read a lot before I take a mortgage, I promise you. And where am I gonna go? I'm gonna go to publishers I trust. So this trust as a currency, this idea of curiosity and authenticity, I think plays a bigger role in this version of humanity. The world is in a weird place. So to know something is real, to know something is driven by a human, that someone cared to write about it and review it before you take action, I think will mean more over time. I'm a fairly optimistic person, but here, I'm optimistic because I think this contextual

• 27:25Speaker 01

  signal and curiosity signal will pay dividends in years to come.

• 27:31Auren Hoffman?

  I saw you recently signed a 30-year partnership with Yahoo. 30 years is freaking forever. 30 years ago, Google wasn't even around. 30 years ago, Yahoo wasn't even around. It just didn't even exist. How did you guys even decide to do something so long term?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  I wanted fifty, by the way. But when I started to pull up, Yahoo was not in my market. I never thought we would work with Yahoo. And with this new management, with Jim Lenzon and Matt Sanchez and Rob and Reid from Apollo. I mean, these guys are winners through and through. Some of them I knew from before, some of them I got to know. And funny enough, when you do things for a long time, you realize that eventually it is really down to the people who get to do what they do. And that's what differs between winners and losers. I feel fortunate that I was able to be in a conversation when we dream about the future, about how do we work together to help grow both of our companies? And that was incredible.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Thirty years, again, I wanted fifty, but thirty years was mainly meant to say, let's do this forever. Let's work as if all we care about is each other. I mean, you should be so lucky if you're in a position where partnership and friendship feels like forever. I will renew this in my seventies, which is a great feeling for me. But that's kind of the company I always wanted to build. I never wanted to be renewing anything every year. I don't want to go for like expensive wine every quarter to win your business. I want to be with you, aligned with you, win-win with you. You go up, I go up, you go down, I go down. That's all I want. With Yahoo and with that team in place, it feels like there's so much we can do together, even beyond what we actually went out to do at first.

• 29:12Auren Hoffman?

  When I read that, it still seems crazy. Most marriages don't last thirty years. It seems like an insane amount of time, especially since Yahoo hasn't even been around for thirty years. You guys obviously haven't been around that long either. That's like almost double the length of your company. I love the ambition. It's so cool that you guys did that.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  The way I think about it is, I'm going to sign one day the forever partnership. I'm going to sign a deal that will say term forever. And until then, I hope I get to sign things that feel like forever. And I've been in this situation many times before. Because some publishers, some people ask me, why do you even want that? And I'll tell you, the more you can be in a partnership state of mind, you end up growing faster because there is no moment of tension about to come where I'm optimizing for something and you're optimizing for something and we're looking for leverage. We're just in it to win it together. So I always thought that partnerships and good friendships are better than constant optimization that some industries tend to do. So I feel fortunate.

• 30:13Auren Hoffman?

  If you make the marriage analogy, you're making this commitment for forever as well, or at least till death. You're making a commitment. There's no reason to do any type of short term optimization in a marriage partnership because you're making this very long commitment to somebody.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  When you marry, you have good days and bad days, but it's not positive. It's better than anything you can do. That's kind of like a good analogy. And I hope Tabor will be here forever. That's just in line with the term I'm having in mind.

• 30:40Auren Hoffman?

  You also signed a deal with Apple News this year. Apple is really one of the hardest companies historically to work with, to get into, to build deals with. There's so many companies I know that want to do deals with Apple. Sometimes they can't even get on the phone. I'm like your number three app in this category. They still can't get anyone on the phone from Apple. Walk us through, if you're giving me advice to an up and coming company, how they should interact with Apple because it's this weird beast. You can't even like get into the building. If you want to go to like one infinite loop, they'll meet you at like the Starbucks across the street. Sorry, you're not even cool enough to get into the building with me.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  I can tell you a few things. One, as an industry, it is so great to see this opportunity for technology companies and founders listening to this podcast that you're seeing iconic, great companies that say there's an opportunity to partner and build something special together. I don't think 10 years ago, when you and I started our companies more than a decade ago, those were the days. And now we're entering this new generation of great iconic companies that say we can build an ecosystem around us and grow faster and do good things together. Netflix partnered with Magnite. Great, good stuff. I love that partnership. And you're seeing these relationships that I think in the past we didn't see it coming.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  But my expectation, as I look into the next five, 10 years, we're going to see many great consumer companies, utility apps, OEMs, various digital canvases, saying how do we engage consumers? How do we create a new revenue stream? Look, Amazon's first line of EBITDA is ads. Uber was worth more than a billion dollars in advertising this year. Uber's supposed to be sending it from one place to the other and Amazon's supposed to be selling new products. This is great.

• 32:30Auren Hoffman?

  There's this joke in the tech industry that everyone becomes an ad tech company. We're seeing that obviously with Amazon, with Instacart, with Uber, you just go down the list. They're all now having massive revenue streams and very high profit, like a very high percentage of their profit, Netflix, et cetera, coming from advertising. And people keep saying that trend is going to end, but it doesn't seem like it's going to end. Like, how do you think companies are going to start thinking about that?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  I think it's the beginning. First of all, if you're a Fortune 1000 company CEO, your board is having a conversation with you about what is your advertising strategy? I promise you, that meeting will happen. No one sits in that chair, looks around and say, yeah, we're just going to get billions of dollars that is trying to come to us, stay out. This is not happening.

• 33:14Auren Hoffman?

  Walmart has like billions in profit from advertising. I mean, it's crazy.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  And that means they can invest in the business. They can open more markets. They can make it more affordable. It's good for consumers. The way I think about it is it's the beginning. Maybe it's a new wave of publishers. Maybe the next decade of new publishers will become utility apps and OEMs and these commerce, retail media companies and great companies that offers us also promoted services. And it allows them to do more and it allows us to discover more. It's a win-win. And again, so long that as an industry, we commit to try to create value to the advertiser and to the user, then we're going to end up winning. That's the essence of long-term thinking. It's like so long that we optimize for the long-term and we create something that users

• 34:00Speaker 01

  would want to use again and again and again, then this industry will flourish way more, even more than it does now.

• 34:06Auren Hoffman?

  Companies that I admire like Costco, they've always had the consumer in mind. They're always trying to do what's best for the consumer and they're always essentially substituting the short-term for the long-term. They're always long-term focused. Those are the best companies, the companies that try to like more optimize for the short-term and do some things around the edges, around the consumer. Those are the ones that have trouble lasting.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Easier said than done, but it's always the right thing to do because if you can create something that users love, if people give you their time, then you will find a way to build a great business on top of it. And this is why it's worth investing in engagement and value. And you're seeing great companies offering content to consumers. We have a business called Taboola News, which again, I really like because we work with Samsung and Xiaomi. And you're going to see great partnerships coming up whereby these OEMs and apps say, we have a relationship with you already. You trust us already. We should give you content you like and engage you more. And then you come back to us and you're going to appreciate what we do for you. And that is just an example. It's a proxy for that trend of companies saying, we don't want to be just a utility

• 35:15Speaker 01

  service. We want to be a full stack company that offers you multiple things so that you engage with you in a variety of ways. Look, Uber Eats is a big portion of Uber. Again, that's a good example of taking advantage of that relationship.

• 35:28Auren Hoffman?

  To speak of long-term, you've been now running this company for 17 years. That's a long time to run a company. What broke in year 15 that was doing just fine in year five?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  The things that come to mind that are just obvious are when you're smaller. And remember, Taboola for the first 40 years was not successful at all. We were around a dozen people, perhaps. We're almost 2,000 people now. But back then, you know, everyone could be in a room together. That has changed. Now we do all hands every two weeks. So I'm trying to sustain this transparency feel, but back then it was much easier.

• 36:02Auren Hoffman?

  Why do you need 2,000 people to do what you do? That just seems like an extreme number. Why do you need so many folks?

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Just sorry, technology investment is massive. If you think about Taboola, first of all, offering something for publishers. We have a publisher full suite of technology. Then we offer almost 15,000 to 20,000 advertisers that are used to Taboola to optimize. So, you know, it's a robust platform for both publishers and advertisers. In many ways, if you compare Taboola's investment in technology to other companies, we're probably under invested. Almost $2 billion and 2,000 people is almost a million dollar place. That's not that bad. For me, it's mainly about how do you scale a startup? How do I go from $2 billion to $4 billion and keep it lean and mean so that it feels like it carries the values and things that make it fun and make it something that people want to do for a long time? I look at my management, many of us have been together for more than a decade.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  The things that are probably funny enough, harder to do. When you're bigger and more successful, and this is a bit of a counterintuitive thing in my mind is that when you're smaller, everyone is ahead of you. So it's like a Formula One, you know, you're driving really fast, but you know what you need to do because you've seen it. It's ahead of you. And that's with us for years. We just had many great companies. We tried to just beat on that segment of what they competed with us. And now I'm very proud of the team execution. We became the biggest in many of the things we do. And that changes the culture. How do you make people feel like today is the day that today's client email is the most important thing you can do?

• 37:33Speaker 01

  You walk into Taboola's offices, we have a piano and the sofa is huge, looking like the logo. And there's food and all those things. And we're still fighting the fight. So I think the hardest thing to do as you scale is keeping the culture strong and evolve it into something that can scale to 2,000 people, but still feel like a startup in many, many ways. So you can still break things and make mistakes.

• 37:56Auren Hoffman?

  And how do you personally get better? Because if you want to get better at tennis, you could hire a tennis coach. There's probably thousands of people in this world who are better than you at tennis. You could hire them, they would do a great job, they could coach you. You go from level you are now to the next level. But if you want to get better as CEO of a tech company, there's not really coaches out there to tell you what to do, to help you. You're kind of already at the top of your game. So how do you work on your own improvement? And it's not even sure what the playbook is.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  There's always value in people that have done something successfully before to learn from and surround yourself with a community of people that have strong opinions about what they think you should do, but you don't have to listen to it and make your own decisions, obviously. However, Taboola is my first job. I don't know any other company outside of Google, Facebook and Amazon that has built an advertising business at our size in 22 markets around the world that generates a million dollars every four hours with over 20 million dollars of EBITDA, with hundreds of applications a day for people to join the company with a culture like Taboola, the level of transparency we have and how it feels to be here. And the reason I say that is because we built it together. My CTO, when he joined Taboola, came from cyber, did not know what CPM was.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  It can be the CTO of Google if you wanted to, in my humble opinion. Our COO was a rocket scientist, did not know what CPC was. Could be the CEO of Facebook, in my opinion. These people are the Avengers. They're so good at what they do. They learn fast. And this is a humbling thing for those who think they're great. We tend to like ourselves over time as we become successful. So this is a humbling exercise I'm about to tell you. Remember that classical music is an example. 200 years after Chopin, Bach, and Mozart were born, we still play the same music. If you go to Carnegie Hall and you go to a great concert, you're likely going to hear Mozart, Bach, or Chopin, or maybe some others. But those three will play a big part of what you listen to, and you're going to really appreciate that.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Those kids, when they were six years old, wrote symphonies for 30 people that 200 years after, it's still hard for us to even play what they wrote when they were six years old. That's prodigy. And it is likely that 100% of the people listening to this are not prodigies. We are all fairly average. We try hard. We lean in. We're humble to listen and make mistakes. But if you think you're anything close to Chopin back then, keep smoking what you're smoking. But it's a very down-to-earth, humbling exercise to be reminded that what separates winners from losers is not necessarily who has the best LinkedIn profile. It's not necessarily who has done it, who has made it. It's not necessarily that.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  It's a lot of times a combination of passion and empathy and intelligence. And that is because none of us is Chopin. And most of us are average. And still, some of us are winners. Some of us are really winners, and some of us are not.

• 40:48Auren Hoffman?

  Couple of personal questions we ask all of our guests. What is a conspiracy theory you believe?

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Well, we did Star Wars on this podcast, so maybe I'll go with George Orwell's Sith Lord. There's some episodes, you know, that he shows some power, so maybe, who knows? Nobody knows.

• 41:02Auren Hoffman?

  I like it. All right, last question I ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Breakfast is the most important thing? No, I skip breakfast.

• 41:12Auren Hoffman?

  So do I, by the way.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  I think a lot of times we have a tendency as operators to do what's right for the business for the next 10 years. We hire senior people. We go heavy-handed into infrastructure investment because we're trying to build like a huge company. And I think a lot of times we're not ready for it. My advice is try to think shorter terms, three years, not 10 years. Try to do something that would be great for them and then be open minded to change. This is something that a lot of times your intuition is to build a huge scale of an infrastructure for when you can serve bazillion people on your company, but you're just at 1 million. So maybe invest less, save some money, put it in other areas, maybe don't hire a chief.

• 41:55Auren Hoffman?

  Duct tape is okay because by the time you're out there, the whole tech stack's going to change anyway.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Maybe don't hire a CLO when you're 20 people, maybe wait for that. No presidents just yet, just wait a little bit.

• 42:05Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, I generally found going even more extreme that maybe you never have to hire a lot of those amazing people that have great experience you could rent. Maybe Taboola, you're big enough and most powerful enough that you could actually hire these incredible people, but most companies that are probably listening to this today, they can't get the number one person, the number one CFO, the number one marketer, the number one salesperson. They actually could rent that person. They can get that person for a few hours a month and get their advice and actually that person would be happy to help. And maybe that's all they need. They just need a little bit of wisdom from this amazing person and then they have an up and comer that actually can implement everything.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  I will add to that as we're wrapping up, that maybe they hire a person full time for that position that has a lot to win with them. And it's an incredible feeling when someone is joining you on their way up, not afraid to change their LinkedIn profile because they lost something with you. Maybe your chances for success improve.

• 43:05Auren Hoffman?

  All right, I love this. I really enjoyed this conversation on World of DAS. I follow you at Adam Singolda on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. This is great.

• 43:21Auren Hoffman?

  Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of DAS wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review and check out worldofdas.com. That's worldofdas.com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren, that's A U R E N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.