Episode 28: Mahi de Silva- Building consumer-focused businesses
About Mahi de Silva:
My next guest on The One Percent Project is Mahi de Silva. Mahi is a serial entrepreneur. His company AdMarvel was acquired by Opera, and within the first month of acquisition, AdMarvel 10xed Opera’s browser monetization. His latest entrepreneurial stint, Amplify.ai recently merged with Triller. Mahi is a University of Kansas and Stanford graduate. He kicked off his career at Apple and later was a part of the core startup team at VeriSign. He eventually became the company’s VP (Engineering) and, later, GM of its Wireless Services.
Listen on:
Spotify | Youtube | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | JioSaavn
In this conversation he talks about:
His journey from Apple to Amplify.ai.
How he thinks about building a business.
Customer Acquisition Vs Customer Retention, which is more important and why?
How valuable has it been for him to be a business leader with an engineering background?
Three ways to support the podcast:
#1 Share the episode with family and friends on social media with #OnePercentProj using the share button on the site.
#2 Take a few seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts. This helps new folks find us organically. Rate
#3 Leave a review if you feel inclined. We read every single message and love feedback. Review
Transcript:
*The transcripts are not 100% accurate.
Pritish: Welcome Mahi to The One Percent Project.
Mahi: Thank you. Happy to be here.
Pritish: Congratulations for Triller’s acquisition. You kicked off your career as a tennis instructor back in college. So do give us a background of your journey and how amplify happened?
Mahi: Yeah or maybe even start a little bit before that. I was born in Sri Lanka and as an 11 year old, my parents moved to the United States. I grew up in Colombo, which is a very cosmopolitan place and I moved to the middle of nowhere in the United States, in Wichita, Kansas and it was a much less cosmopolitan place than where I came from. But it definitely shaped my journey in life in understanding that my parents were always because they were professors are very academically oriented. They set a standard for us on what was the bar, we had to cross and my dad brought home an apple two computer when I was in middle school, and that was I fell in love with computers. As a result of that I learned basic, and then Pascal and a bunch of other languages and I was hooked. That was my journey into being a technologist and I would just say, I grew up in the golden age in the United States, where, if you're a reasonably smart and ambitious person, the world was your oyster.
You could go to a pretty decent University study, I studied electrical engineering, computer science in college, the opportunities were far and wide. I got a chance to come work at Apple in their advanced software division in the late 80s and that really shaped my career. It helped me understand what it meant to build products that were not just about your aspirations, but a collective wisdom, and setting a very high bar as to what was good and what was not and I spent eight years at Apple and then had the good fortune of being part of the founding team at VeriSign. I was a graphics geek in the mid-90s. I joke that I couldn't even spell security and I had to figure out how public keys and private keys and crypto technologies work. It worked out okay. I spent 10 years at VeriSign help, very proud that I helped shape the security sort of building blocks for the internet, things that I worked on or still survived today.
That's very rewarding. I shifted gears a VeriSign from being a VP of engineering, looking after the product development into a general management role, running a business helping get the company into new businesses. We did 43 acquisitions when I was at VeriSign, so all of those were just amazing learning opportunities and after 10 years, I decided I wanted to do something on my own, and built a couple of companies in that process and recently, one of those latest endeavors, we were able to merge with triller and we're now at a much broader journey.
Pritish: Brilliant and before amplify happened, you did bill at Marvel as well. That became a big part of Opera. So tell us how do you think about building a business? How do you find a niche? Where do you see the need of the consumer is? And go about it?
Mahi: That's an amazingly great question. Because I think that for entrepreneurs who are always motivated by whatever it is, like, we want a better opportunity to express our talents, or we see an opportunity in the marketplace. I think above all else, what I've always embraced is find a problem that nobody else is adequately addressing and like with that Marvel, we were I'll tell you a funny story, which is seems really funny now. But back in 2008, I had a pretty good Rolodex at the time and I went to New York, which is really the center of the universe of the advertising world and I met with really the captains of industry around advertising and I showed them what we were building. The iPhone had just come out. We showed them full scape screen ad experiences and these are people that were running multibillion-dollar ad businesses, and they said, Look, you're telling me that I'm going to take my banner ads I show on Yahoo and other websites, I'm going to shrink that down by 60% and people are going to click on those things and I tell them, no, you're thinking about this the wrong way.
It's the screen, it's a full screen, you have the entire screen, you can really create brand narratives and they wouldn't have really any part of that conversation. I literally got laughed out of some of those offices. But we believe. We really believed in the potential, we stayed our course we proved that out and today, if you go back to those people, and you ask them, did you think that mobile advertising would account for 66% of digital ad dollars today? They'd be a little embarrassed. I go back to just finding a real problem and in the ad business, it was about customer engagement. It was about measurement. It was about audiences, attribution, and mobile, let us do that in ways that desktop and browsers really didn't. Let us do that before.
Pritish: How did the idea or the acquisition with Opera happen? How did you find that to be a complimentary stage to merge ad Marvel with them?
Mahi: Yeah, I love talking about this story, because Opera is, as you might know, is a very popular mobile browser had majority market share and parts of Europe and markets like India, Indonesia. But they couldn't monetize their traffic and the head of digital advertising at opera happened to find us and we integrated our solution with them and I think in the first month, we 10x their monetization on their browser and it's a great story, because he basically went to his management and said, Look, this is the answer. We need these guys and so it ensued that we were acquired by opera. But even a better story is that individual, his name is Hobart Algo, who was the head of marketing there and I worked with him very closely, and Opera for six years, he's now part of our company. We've been able to close the circle, and really doing something transformational in a different industry.
Pritish: Brilliant and going from ad Marvel, to amplify, how did that journey happen? What did you see the market needed? And both these businesses in very competitive space, right? There are a lot of ad agencies digital ad reads as well. At the same time, when I look at Amplify, there are other similar products across different segments. So how did you think about doing amplify? And how do you differentiate yourself?
Mahi: Yeah, it's a great question. For these, I would tell you the motivation for us were twofold. One was at Opera, we had built one of the few businesses outside of Google and Facebook, that was doing billions of ad impressions a day. At peak, it was about 50 billion ad impressions a day and we were drowning in data and one of our team members, who is always very focused on understanding the latest technology, he built a machine learning infrastructure that allowed us to look at all this data, we were getting everything from location signals context, what publishers where the user was, what there was a time of day, all of these things and using machine learning was able to distill that information, literally terabytes of information a day and turn that into actionable data in real-time and a lot of us in the company, we're all geeks and I remember studying quote, unquote, artificial intelligence in college and this was an eye opening experience for us like it transformed our business.
It actually between 2012 in 2013, it added $100 million of revenue to our business and so we knew that AI and ML technology was real. It wasn't just what we studied about academically and then when we left Opera after, it was funny because Opera was acquired by this big Chinese company, and I spent a lot of time myself and my co-founder. We spent a lot of time in Beijing and we were amazed that how WeChat was such a huge impact on consumers in China. So we saw the Aha moment was seeing the combination of social messaging and AI technologies to create a really different type of consumer interaction and that was the motivation to start Amplified.ai.
Pritish: I think that leads to my next question. You said that you were a guy's, let's say a bunch of nerds, right engineering background, mostly. But now you were at the management level running businesses. So how advantages was it to think like an engineer while you're running it as a CEO? What are the advantages are things that you needed to learn as you grew these two businesses?
Mahi: Yeah, again, another great question and I would tell you that I've always considered as a silent mentor people like Vinod Khosla in Silicon Valley, who made that jump, right, was it technologists in the beginning goddess MBA really helped build Sun Microsystems into what he was and I got a chance to work with him when he was at Kleiner Perkins at VeriSign, and then he helped fund my first company Frango and the thing that I learned from Vinod is to really understand that what we believe as geeks has to be brought to life in something that the rest of the world understands. So what does machine learning mean? It meant to us that you had to convey to brands and agencies, that you could tap into this technology without really needing to understand it, to create better marketing outcomes and I think that's the chasm that any engineer turned entrepreneur turned CEO has to make is that you have to be a little bit of that translation engine between the technology absorb the complexity, but express it in its simplest forms, that is meaningful to a marketplace.
Pritish: I think, also talking about consumers are your clients, you have the big names like Tony Robbins, to you also work with the Indian government through the COVID situation and then in one of the interviews, you mentioned, that a lot of your users use a lot of emojis, which all the other competitors may not be providing. So how did you get that customer insight, as well as these big clients to come and join the amplify platform?
Mahi: Yeah, some of it is just through trial and error and circumstance. Our early customers in India or customers like Zee News, that literally we had hundreds and millions of people interacting with our platform and we found that first and foremost, the vernacular voice for Zee whether was Zee English or Zee Hindi, was English. It wasn't one or the other and because we come from a cross cultural background, we could deal with that. But then the complexity was that there was very subtle meanings that came into a conversation that was expressed in emoji, because if you parse the text, it would mean one thing, but when you added the emoji, it meant something completely different. It was sarcasm, or it was this notion of adding to a certain trend that was happening. So when we added that to our natural language processing systems, it really started to produce very different results. It helped us understand who that consumer was? How we should consider did they like that content? Did they not how they would impact our recommendation engine. So it was really a bit of a transformational event and I credit, these millions of interactions we saw in India early in our company that really contributed to that innovation.
Pritish: So I would ask customer retention, or customer acquisition, which is more important and why?
Mahi: Yeah, and this is somewhat controversial. I would say it's customer acquisition and here's why. Because you know where we sit, which is really at the bleeding edge of technology. We have come to understand that customers that are looking for innovation will always kick the tires, they'll let you in. If you can prove yourself, they'll really let you impact their business in big ways. But companies often change tracks. Their priorities change, the economy changes. So the key to I think, for any entrepreneur is to look at growing your business. Because sometimes in a changing economy and in a COVID is a great example, your best customers might actually have to shut down and you just cannot, you can't run a growth. You can't drive a growth business on those ideals and it also the beauty of growth focus is a person I worked for the last 15 years have this really amazing phrase that he said that the scenery only changes for the lead dog. Because if you're a pack of dogs that are pulling a sled and you're behind, you're always looking at the dog in front of them. But if you're the lead dog, the scenery is always changing. It's always different,
Pritish: Very interesting.
Mahi: And I've really taken that to heart, that I'd never espouse that you should forsake those early adopters and you should drop them or treat them in differently, you have to acknowledge that they helped you get to where you are. But innovation is always driven by getting to more and more customers, understanding their needs, and adapting your platform to service almost as real time requirements in the marketplace.
Pritish: How has your mindset about business evolved during the COVID years or during the COVID period? So has it changed from what it was in 2019 and now in 2021, and going forward?
Mahi: Yeah and privilege, I have to start by saying more than half of my team is in India and we are, as a company, we are struggling with the reality of the crisis that is happening in India today, despite the fact that we're have a global way we do whatever we can to try to help them. But we are also an enterprise that has really benefited from having a 24 hour operational clock, sales clock, engineering clock, all of that and there are a lot of people I live in Silicon Valley, where there are a lot of people, if I talk to them, and I say my team is split across three time zones. They're like, I'd never do that. But I want to be control in control of my entire team. I think being a person of Southeast Asian descent, I feel like myself and my team really value the power of that multi-cultural, multi market approach because in many ways, those learnings that we got from like I said, Zee media, we never would have gotten there in the US. The scale, the scope, the diversity. So we're huge fans of moving to where the market will embrace you. I'm particularly an AI driven technologies, data sets scale, or having hundreds of millions of people billions of data points, it makes a huge difference.
Pritish: Yep. True. I think my last question before we get into the rapid fire is, how did you find again, the same thing, I think without Marvel and Opera? How did triller happened? And how did you find amplifier to be a great complement to triller?
Mahi: Yeah, that the partnership with trailers a little unusual because the two guys it's really started triller as we know it today. They brought me in 2019. They invited me to be part of their initial investor pool and I was on the board. So I've always had an insider view in the triller and as two separate companies, we've leveraged each other. We've looked at some of the problems they faced. That's influence some of the technologies we built and we triller used amplified at AI in their day to day operations and they got to a point that I was dividing my time between two companies and it just made much more sense to combine this. There's a ton of synergies between our technologies, our approach, our personnel. So it's a rare, you know, really a rare combination and I think everybody on both sides are thrilled to having made that that decision to merge.
Pritish: So I think now we come to the exciting part of this conversation, rapid fire one sentence of one word and I'm sure you will sail through this. So are you ready?
Mahi: Yes.
Pritish: Brilliant. The hardest thing about your job.
Mahi: I'm both a psychologist and a babysitter.
Pritish: Relate one book or a blog that has influenced you the most personally and professionally.
Mahi: Jim Collins, from good to great.
Pritish: Amazing book. Your most favorite superhero?
Mahi:I had to take a breath on that. But I think really maybe a reflection of who I am. Batman.
Pritish: Brilliant. Will AI ever take over human interactions?
Mahi: I don't believe so. I think that the potential of AI is huge and a lot of people today will say AI is not here yet. But I will tell you that I get in my car. Sometimes I have to get out of my garage and onto my road. But I don't have to do much else to get to my destination and that's AI work. It's real.
Pritish: Mahi, it was a pleasure speaking to you. Thank you for being on The One Percent show.
Mahi: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure.