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CENTRO Seeks To Be World's Most Widely-Used Media-Buying Platform

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A series of interviews with innovators operating at the intersection of consumer behavior and business transformation: Shawn Riegsecker, Founder and CEO, CENTRO.

Bruce Rogers: Tell us how the idea for Centro came about?

Shawn Riegsecker: I was in the newspaper business for a couple of years and then in '96 got into digital and helped publish the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio on the web. It was the third newspaper in the country that started publishing content on the internet. Then, I went up to Cleveland and helped with the Plain Dealer's newspaper on the web. I joined a three-person streaming media company, which was like Pandora/Spotify in '99. And we just didn't make it through the recession. I then went to work for Real Media, which was one of the first ad-serving companies started by Dave Morgan.

I saw how difficult digital was to plan, execute and operationalize. Even so, I would not have even predicted the level of complexity that we've created in the digital advertising and media industry.

In 2001, I decided to start a company whose mission was to build the most comprehensive and automated digital media buying and operations platform between buyers and sellers on the market. So, that was the idea. I was in my 20s and it's the month after 9/11, you know, we're in full-on recession.

The first four years were just about survival and trying to stay alive. I raised a couple million dollars in '05 and '06, and that's when we started coding the first version of our platform.

And that's the seed of it. Now, the difference in what I was doing, versus what the prevailing wind on the industry was at the time, was that my company was automating direct relationships between a buyer and a seller of media rather than using the ad network model, which was the prevailing model at the time.

Ad agencies were outsourcing their local digital media across newspapers, TV, radio, magazines, and anything else local. It's what we did, because I looked at local as a test bed. If you could automate local, which is very hard to do, national would be easy.

As a result, we had to build automated software, because buying thousands among thousands of local sites directly was difficult and time-consuming. So, we did that. The goal was to build the platform and then license it to ad agencies.

By 2012, there's no question we had the most comprehensive automated platform, and we were looking at rolling it out. But then, I thought it was not the right platform for 2025 and where we thought the industry was headed. So, we started over from scratch with programmatic buying at its core.

In 2013, we bought a DSP (Demand Side Platform) called SiteScout in Toronto, the leading Canadian DSP. Amazing group of people, amazing team. They're still with us.

We spent four years and more than $100 million rebuilding everything from scratch without a dollar of revenue coming in for it. I was not very popular with a lot of my team members and investors. It was a rough and challenging few years getting through that.

Rogers: You had taken outside investment by this time?

Riegsecker: We did our series A in 2010 with FTV for $22.5 million. Then, we raised our series B in 2015 with Neuberger Berman for $30 million.

Rogers: Were your investors willing to hang tough with you?

Riegsecker: Yes, but it was a very trying four years. In today’s startup world everyone wants to build little things that solve little problems for the most part. I think on many levels we've lost the patience to build really big things that solve chronic problems. Because building big things takes a lot of time and a lot of capital to do.

Most investors would say, "We would never invest in a company that's spending $100 million when we don't even know if anyone wants this platform."

Even people at Centro said, “Shawn, we think that you might've been the only person, even inside the company, who actually believed this was going to work."

Rogers: It obviously paid off. Tell us where you are today?

Riegsecker: We launched it in Q4 of 2017 and it's been on fire as one of the fastest growing platforms in the ad industry. The important thing about it is that we architected it better. And it remains competitive advantage today when most other MarTech, AdTech companies have grown through M&A trying to cobble together independent technologies, different code bases, different languages, different architectures, and they're trying to get them to talk to each other.

Rogers: So, is that your moat? You did what no one else was willing to do and it's too hard to do?

Riegsecker: Delayed gratification is hard. For someone to say I'm going to take four years and spend over $100 million to rebuild everything, that's a hard pill to swallow. It gives us confidence that we've got a more comprehensive and broader platform that goes a lot deeper than anything else on the market. Everything is connected and we've got a foundation that we can build on top of a lot faster than most competition, if not all of the competition, in the advertising space today.

Rogers: What can you say about where the business is now?

Riegsecker: Today, we have about 700 employees with 200 in R&D, 100 in G&A, and about 400 in sales and services. Last year, we had over $600 million go through the platform and now we're north of $150 million in revenue.

Rogers: Where does Centro go from here?

Riegsecker: Our mission is to build the most comprehensive, automated, and intelligent media-buying platform in the world. We have set out to be the most widely-used and adopted platform in the world, measured by the amount of dollars transacted through it. So that's our goal, and we are intently focused on it. We've got a long way to go.

Rogers: Tell us about your personal journey. Where did you grow up?

Riegsecker: I grew up on a farm in Ohio in a Mennonite family in a Mennonite community. I was adopted by a wonderful mom and dad and great family. It was very conservative; we went to church three times a week. But I went to public school as half the town was Mennonite.

Rogers: How did you get the idea that there's a bigger world out there and you wanted to be a part of it?

Riegsecker: When I was a kid, I wanted to be a minister. I always developed this sense of wanting to change the world, help the world, improve peoples' lives. I was bullied a lot as a kid; I think that created a high-level of emotional intelligence which helps me understand people at a deeper level.

As I got older, I gravitated towards politics. I loved politics and thought I could change the world through politics. However, I was a kid in a farm town in Ohio. I didn’t know anyone successful. We weren’t a financially successful family by any stretch of the imagination. And so I thought that I needed to create wealth before I could get into politics. So, my goal in high school was to start a business by the time I was 30. I was always preparing to succeed. I lived in the self-help and business section of bookstores.

 In 2001, I took that step towards my goal of starting a business. Left a job with a paycheck. I didn't have a lot of money. I didn’t have a backup plan. So, I just bootstrapped the business and tried to get through the first few years.

I use the analogy of the story of Cortez who told his crew to burn this ship. I’m sure his crew said, "What do you mean, burn the ships? What if we are losing the war and have to leave?" He responded with, "We either win or we die. There's no going back."

Sometimes in business, and in life, you've got to be willing to burn the ship. Because if you have a fallback option you will gravitate towards it when times get tough.

Rogers: Thank you.

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