Roughly fifteen years ago I was getting my degree in statistics and finance, while working at Citibank first and Salomon Brothers later, trying to figure out “free lunches” in the world fixed income markets: those sort of things are called “arbitrage” and “quasi arbitrage” strategies. The former is when the “free lunch” is sure, the latter when it is free “on average”. I did pretty well, and we did our fair amount of money. But that was last century.
After a few years, I was shocked by Goto.com business model, and thought they were geniuses. I had to do the same thing, in Europe. About the same time I met an amazing guy that, by pure chance, was developing something similar to Goto.com. We got together and Godado was born. That was AD 2000. We opened offices in Milan, London and Paris, and begged around for money. VCs seemed deaf, throwing comments like “you’re crazy man, nobody will ever pay for search, IT IS FREE!”. Sponsored search was just born.
Without much money, and without much support from my shareholders, I left Godado. Overture came by, and hired me to launch Overture Italy. Everything was running cool, when I was called in London to run Commercial Strategy for Europe, and later in Pasadena by Ted Meisel (CEO Overture), to start project Panama. Back to London, I have been runing Business Intelligence and Operational Strategy for Europe. This at least till October 2008, when I decided there was an extremely interesting and tough challenge waiting for me, guess where? In the Yellow Pages industry. I left Yahoo! to join Truvo, the Belgian-Portuguese-Irish-Romanian yellow pages group where I am VP of New Media. Interesting and hough challenge, and definitely worth all my energy.
Quite recently I joined PubMatic as VP International. If you are not familiar with PubMatic, we are the leading Sell Side Platform and help publishers monetizing their advertising inventory by using smart technology. PubMatic created this industry-sector 4 years ago out of a super brilliant intuition by his four founders, and has since grown into a 250 employees company. My responsibility is to set up and run international. Plain and simple.
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NOTE: Everything written here is a purely personal opinion and does not necessarily represents the view or position of the company I work for. Only publicly available information is used.
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