#triggit

A few weeks ago I was honored by Fortune as one of the worlds 10 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs.   Before this selection I was asked to answer a few questions.  I penned my responses at MaiTai Cabarate (an entrepreneurs / tech folk kitesurfing camp) knowing a session at La Boca was waiting.   I won't say these blurbs are my best work, but I think the spirit they were written in captures the essence of how I think.   

I've decided to share a few of them with the world over the next few weeks, culminating with the Fortune Most Powerful Women Conference. I hope you enjoy! 

Question 1: Why did you start your business? 

I founded Triggit probably because I didn’t know any better.  I mean, who starts an ad:tech company without experience, and without a technical lead!   Somehow, eight years later, as an exploding company and a leader in our space, it’s pretty amazing to look back at the journey.

 My brother Zach and I have actually been partners in entrepreneurship our whole lives.  From publishing a WWII study guide when we were kids, to selling pins and scalping tickets at the Olympics (making us so much cash we had to hide bills in our vacuum cleaner), to Votes For Students (VFS), a Pew Trusts funded get-out-the-vote  nonprofit we started in college, and now Triggit, starting stuff is in our DNA. 

After college I had shuttered VFS and moved to Chile to be a ski bum, surf bum, and travelista!  Within weeks I had landed a sweet job as a ski instructor at Valley Nevado and was having the time of my life.   Within months I was bored out of my skull.   Zach called and asked if I wanted to start another company with him and I jumped on the first plane out of Rio and abandoned my ambitions of world surf dominance. 

In 2005 advertising was stupidly inefficient.   Big brands were paying $100+ CPMs for homepage space on portals like Yahoo.com, but pennies for an even more engaging ad slot on niche blogs and websites. And there is money in advertising, lots and lots of money.

In many ways I now think of starting companies like climbing a mountain.   Most have been conquered, and if you keep moving there is a good chance you can find a route, but you can also fall off a cliff.  It took us six pivots to find Real Time Bidding (RTB) and we came close to that cliff each time.    

By Diana Samuels @ The Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal

Facebook's ad retargeting service performing well, partners say

  Triggit, a San Francisco company partnering with Facebook on its "Exchange" ad service, has seen good results.

Facebook’s new ad service is much more effective than those from competitors like Google, new reports say.

The Menlo Park social networking company’s “Ad Exchange” real-time bidding service just left beta on Thursday, and its partners began releasing data about the results they're seeing. And they’re quite pleased.

Ad Exchange follows users as they browse the Web and then targets related ads to them when they’re on Facebook.

One partner, Triggit, is a San Francisco-based company that makes a platform for advertisers to manage their ads. They found that ads on Facebook Exchange saw four times the return on ad dollars invested, compared with other real-time bidding services like Google.

A post on Triggit’s website said the “inventory” of users on Facebook is massive, and “it’s there for a bargain.”

“Imagine going from casting a fishing line in a pond to dropping a gigantic net in the Atlantic Ocean,” the company’s post said. “That’s what it’s like to retarget your users on Facebook - infinite pageviews with nearly a billion fish available to hook.”

Another partner, AdRoll, also saw good results: According to Bloomberg, advertisers usually get about $10 for every $1 they spend on ads. On Facebook Exchange, they are making $16 for every dollar.

The news could be another boost for Facebook in what’s already been a good week. CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a well-received talk at TechCrunch Disrupt on Tuesday, and Apple executives at the Wednesday iPhone event touted the phone’s integration with Facebook.