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AdTechGod Pod
Ep. 110 From Spin off to Smart Auctions: Tal Shaked on Building Rise and the Future of Agentic Ad Tech
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- [00:00]
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Market Live Announcer
By now you've probably heard about Architecture Live. We put on two sold out events jam packed with the most insightful advertising content around. Speakers included Eric Sufer, James Borrow from Universal Ads, Mark Grether from PayPal, Olivia Corey from Houzz, and of course me and the Market Extra crew. Well, this spring we're coming back bigger and better with a two day that's shaping up to be a must attend event. March 10th and 11th in New York. We're putting on the new tent pole event in collaboration with Adweek and TV Red and you absolutely need to be there. Early bird tickets are 25% off and qualified brands and agencies can be comped. Go to marketlive.com right now. That's market live.com to get the early bird discount.
- [01:22]
Host of AdTech Godpod
Welcome to the AdTech Godpod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host at Tech God.
- [01:35]
Podcast Host
Welcome to the Ech God pod where we speak with the adtech startup founders. Today's guest is Tal Shakehed, the Chief Business officer and co founder of Rise. Tal previously spent nearly eight years at IronSource and prior to that was involved in various companies in the space. Tal has many mutual friends. I'm excited to have him with me today, all the way from Israel. So thank you for joining me. Tal. Welcome to the pod.
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Tal Shakehed
This is amazing. I feel like I've died and gone to heaven and met the attic.
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Podcast Host
It's amazing. I'm, I'm happy you're here.
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Tal Shakehed
You know, I have to say, I, I, I'm an avid listener and I listen to you. I mean, not all the, not all the podcasts of course, but a few dozen. And you are a great companion for my morning bike rides when I need to get that cardio before a full day of work.
- [02:24]
Podcast Host
Amazing. Thank you, thank you for being a listener and thank you, thank you again for staying up so late over there and being on the recording. I wanted to ask you, you come from fantastic background. We spoke briefly about Rise and I was under the assumption that Rise was a startup on its own. But you had explained a little bit about the background of Rise. So maybe if you could take me back to how Rise came to fruition, how you came up with the concept and then maybe how that rolls into the Iron Source play and the background that you have there.
- [02:53]
Tal Shakehed
So I can give you a whole lot of a background which I think is super relevant also for this conversation. I've had a bit of, a bit of an unconventional start into ad tech if that's fine with you. I'd love to give you everything that rolls.
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Podcast Host
Absolutely.
- [03:10]
Tal Shakehed
And so yeah, I, I was actually born in Israel, just so you know. And at the age of two my parents moved to the us. My dad basically got a full scholarship to do a PhD at Harvard Business. So they came to the US in 1976, uh, you can tell my age now, and they had 400 bucks in their pockets. I grew up completely bilingual and you know, went to public school all the way through end of high school and even stayed in Boston, which is where I grew up and went to bu and I studied international relations of Latin America and Spanish, which has nothing to do with advertising or business or tech. And you know, all I really wanted to do when I finished studying was go to South America and work for some, you know, like a US Aid or a Peace Corps or something like that. But I eventually landed a pretty cool first job out of college, which even to this day I think is the coolest job that I've had. And I ended up getting a DIY startup gig for a university in Peru that basically wanted to start its own study abroad program from scratch. And that led to me nearly living and relocating for two years in Peru right after school. And then I moved back to the States a couple years in and I was trying to figure things out, doing my gmat, maybe going, you know, filling out MBA applications. And I all of a sudden decided that I, with this kind of identity crisis of going up, growing up bilingual and you know, in an Israeli home. But in the US I moved to Tel Aviv right at the beginning of the first Internet boom. And the first couple months when I was here I lived in my grandparents house. I interviewed with like 12 different companies and many of them at the time were, you know, affiliate marketing, casino gaming types. And I got like seven offers and mostly most of it was just because I think I was a native English speaker. And I started out with, you know, at a, at a skills based gaming startup that was, you know, really good socially for me. But at the end of the day, just didn't succeed. I went through another startup of a web development company. Nothing really good came out of that except the fact that I actually met my wife there. So that was cool.
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Podcast Host
Something good came out.
- [05:33]
Tal Shakehed
Really. Yeah, absolutely. And so my real entry into ad tech and I've been in ad tech for 22 years so I think it is relevant to kind of talk a little bit about the journey is I joined a company called Hot Bar. Don't know if you remember them or not, but I do. They were somewhat of a pioneer in online advertising but they created an ad supported add on and toolbar for Hotmail and Outlook just to give you a perspective of what the apps that were being used then. It was an IE browser with a toolbar that sat on top of it and it allowed people to add smileys and all kinds of, you know, cool backgrounds to their emails. But really what, you know, the business model, there was these dynamic contextual buttons that kind of scanned the page that you were on and had these keywords that when you clicked on them would take you to like a full screen search page full of paid search ads. And those were changed, you know, based on your browsing habits. So I was the strategic alliance manager, manager there for a few years. My goal or my mission was to get distribution for all these products. I did content licensing deals for smileys and emojis and different backgrounds, even with like Disney for example. But really what was interesting was the work I was doing with companies that were at the beginning of I think the advertising revolution which was Overture or Miva and Find Oneology and all these other companies. So it was, you know, it was a great experience in terms of online advertising school for me and it was really my first foray into the space. And I think what was cool there was I had some really great mentors. So two of the Arc Tart Shark Tank panelists in Israel were my direct reports there. One of them ended up being the co founder of Amobi, which you are familiar with I'm sure. And yeah, Hotbar then eventually sold to an American company called 180 Solutions and rebranded into Xango. That rebranded like three times and eventually became Rhythm One or a part of Rhythm One. Familiar with Rhythm One, you know, so yeah, I mean incredible. That was my first, first ad tech experience and I think for me it was cool because it was my first time also experiencing an exit. I was flying high. I took the money. It wasn't that much but was just enough to buy home theater And a Pioneer plasma tv, which cost a lot.
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Podcast Host
Of money at Priorities. Yes, totally.
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Tal Shakehed
So, you know, after that I, I joined another company which you may or may not have heard of, called Babylon, which was a software company that put out some really useful translation tools and software. And for me it was a bit strange because they were trying to sell the software, get it downloaded on like this trial version, like a 14 day trial version, and then hopefully getting consumers to purchase it. And so every week I was in this meeting and the discussion was what the conversion rate from trial to paid was. And it was always, you know, a little bit below 1% or a little bit more than 1%. And I just come from a company that, you know, was making money strictly from ads. So I said, hey, we have a lot of this, you know, consumer download volume. I mean, there was like tens of thousands of downloads a day of this product and eventually hundreds of thousands. It was, you know, in like 40 different languages, it was super useful, very international, but zero ad revenue. And so eventually what I did was not just me, but I mean, this was kind of my initiative was a rollout of what we called alternative revenues back then. And this included display ads in the software, but also like search powered monetization in exchange for a free version of the product.
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Podcast Host
So that's funny you're saying all this so in a previous life, can I say that very similar background, worked at a company, did downloads, millions of downloads a year, no monetization product with the exception of partnerships with search and eventually Display. And it was the same model. And we looked at subscription models every week and we took a look at where we were at and we noticed that suddenly the display revenue and the video revenue was completely outpacing anything related to subscriptions. Where we started to feel bad that we kept them out of specific features for the free users. And we started releasing those paid features to the free users thinking, okay, let's just give them something since they're using this product so much, only to realize that that just made stickier and they used it more. And it ended up being substantially larger revenue stream on the ad side than it was on the paid subscriber model. So it's interesting to see I was.
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Tal Shakehed
Here, I was there for four years. I was doing, you know, I did the search deals with, with Google, Bing was just kind of rolling out and smarting in the space. Yahoo, Infospace, they're all battling for search market share. And eventually, you know, by the time I, I left, the ad revenue accounted for 72% of Babylon's revenue. It actually ended up going public while I was there. So that was public information. And like you could see, you know, the company was basically, you know, reporting ad revenue that way surpassed, you know, the, the paid version or the subscription version. But I, I decided that it, you know, I wanted to do something on my own. This was around 2010 and I was at a stage where I already had some overall tech experience and six years of ad tech. So what I did was I leveraged my network both of customers and clients and partners. And really I think in Tel Aviv, the beautiful part of it is a lot of them were kind of, you know, next door. So I was able to, you know, access, you know, this whole network of people that were familiar with what I had done at Babylon. And they had all wanted to basically onboard me as a consultant. So I started my own consulting company called Refinize, a play of words on revenue. And you know, one of my clients, and this alludes basically into Ironsource, is one of my clients ended up being a company called After Download, which had just started. It was started by two founders. One of them was a good friend and I started consulting them and I was doing BD work. I was basically being paid on success. I started onboarding customers like crazy and within six months they were cutting me already some like pretty big checks. And I eventually bought in to the company as a partner with my first ever investment. So I took a hundred K, a hundred thousand dollars, which is huge sum of money for me at the time, and I bought in at a discount. And really the company, you know what, what it did was it had a thank you page display monetization platform. It was nothing sophisticated, but it offered complimentary products on thank you pages of PC software that was downloaded. So you downloaded one product, you'd get an offer for another product. I mean this model is something that we see even today around E commerce and things like that. But some of our biggest clients were actually the big download portals, the likes of Download.com or Softonic. And what we eventually did was we white labeled our technology as an in house CPC display platform for them. And you know, the company just grew and grew and by the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, we ended up being sold to Iron source for almost $30 million in cash and stock. And I think excellent. You know, it ended up being, you know, a bunch a group of, you know, friends that we were working with at the time. They were also a customer of ours. We were, you know, obviously, you know, Generating great revenue together. But I think there was a lot of synergy there between those two companies. So we got rolled up into, into Iron Source almost as an acqui hire because eventually myself, I became the CBO of IronSource. One of my partners became the CMO of IronSource, and then our design studio had ended up becoming the chief design officer of Iron Source. So that was like a real, you know, a huge milestone for me in my career. You know, obviously, you know, first, first time exit and you know, I think it, it, it, it changed my life. And I think as I, you know, my role, my role at Iron Source is something that evolved over the time. And also I got kind of of a bird's eye view of a company that was really starting out only in desktop, only in web. Eventually, you know, had to kind of diversify obviously into the mobile space because, you know, the iPhone had just come out, Android was coming out. I think, you know, we, we made a play into mobile SDKs that didn't really work out and eventually we had to do some M&As in order to be able to, you know, succeed and move forward. But my role then at the time basically was managing a bunch of global biz dev people across the globe that would drive new business and partnerships across all the different divisions of ironsource, which were eventually desktop, mobile, out of box experiences for the telcos and a whole bunch of products and kind of connecting the dots across all of these PNLs and divisions and creating new opportunities for the company while also obviously opening up new markets, but making sure that the existing P and LS that we're driving, you know, a lot of the revenue were still being fostered and maintained and growing.
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Podcast Host
So I wanted to ask you a few questions. You had mentioned that during the time that you were there, there was this big shift where, you know, mobile became the new player in the market. Today we're also seeing very similar shifts in the space. User behavior shift from search to LLMs like ChatGPT and other in the market. This has an impact all the way downstream. Right. Like how websites are generating traffic, how much traffic they're generating, where people are sourcing information. And I wanted to ask you, like, based on where things are going and where AI sits today and how agentic plays a role, I'd love to hear how Rise came to fruition from all of this and then how you guys are addressing this at Rise with your clients and with your partnerships.
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Tal Shakehed
Yeah, so, I mean, there's a lot that's a lot. Those are a lot of questions there. But I'll start with how Rise came into fruition and then I'll talk a little bit about AI as a whole. But Rise was actually mostly a P L within IronSource. It was, I would say, the legacy division within the company. And in order to take Iron Source public, which was a decision that was made throughout 2020 and the kind of the goal or the date that we were looking at was in Some sometime in 2021, all the financial advisors basically and underwriters basically advised, you know, the shareholders and the main stakeholders that ironsource that in order to be able to IPO and eventually IPO'd at $11 billion, which is crazy, they really need to focus on a really narrow story to the market. And in order to do that it meant, you know, spinning out anything that was not core mobile, core game tech, you know, off into a separate company and off the books by the end of 2020, beginning of 21 and then six months later that IPO happened and then a year and a half later, you know, IronSource got acquired by Unity. So that was the end of that. But really Rise was born out of a necessity for Iron Source to ipo. It wasn't something that, you know, we said, hey, let's start this thing that was, you know, that that is basically going to change the way, you know, publishers and advertisers interact with. It was something that was born out of a necessity for IronSource to succeed. And I will say that the first year of the spinoff was actually really tough because it was almost like manic depressive. Like on the one hand, you know, we were a group that was, you know, off to the side but, but at the same time the company we were just at was ipoing. People were ecstatic, everyone was super happy. And so there was a lot of HR work to be done in, in terms of giving people kind of a vision of where this thing is going, why they should stay on, I mean beyond the fact obviously that they were able to enjoy the fruits of the, you know, their, their old company going public, it was more of a really starting to give them some kind of a vision. So at first out of the gate, Rise actually could only touch web. We had a non compete for the first couple years where we couldn't touch in app basically in order to do and to keep on going as a company, like we were forced to focus on web. And I think when I look back at it, it's a was a blessing in disguise. We actually only did web video at the beginning and we quickly recognized an opportunity on display eventually where we just saw that like a lot of the technology was super antiquated server to server integrations, antiquated header bidding, really basic, no added value for anybody or anything in the ecosystem. But at the same time like around 70 to 80% of publishers revenue was still coming from display. And so diversifying into display when focusing on the technology, there's was really that first pivotal moment for Rise. And you know, obviously since then, you know, we've completely evolved, right? If I fast forward, you know, four or five years down, you know, down, down the timeline to where we are now. We're a very omnichannel company where you know, we do display, we do native, we do, we do video, we're across screen, you know, whatever device, you know, whether it's mobile or even CTV, we work and we're integrated directly with 70% of the Comscore top 200 publishers, whether it's you know, Yahoo or People Inc. Or buzzfeed. But really where we are now, we've developed a platform that has from day one, by the way, we were super gung ho on data science, which eventually kind of got rolled into machine learning algorithms that we laid onto what we call sam. It's acronym for Smart Auction Management Platform. But it's really at the core of everything that we do at Rise. And so the alos that we have now at, you know, with SAM are very AI fed, but really a lot of machine learning for many years is what shaped those things. And that engine that, that even now is really the core part of what we do. So if, you know, if you think.
- [20:23]
Podcast Host
About how long you've been doing this in terms of the machine learning and the insights you have, I mean as technology's changed over the last 24, really 24 months is where AI boomed or at least we started hearing more. Are you guys utilizing a lot of your learnings back then to utilize better AI today? How is that playing a role in your products and how you work with partners?
- [20:45]
Tal Shakehed
We have a ton of data that we process monthly. I think it's like 3 trillion or so monthly requests that we process and it's 21 petabytes or whatnot of data like that we end up paying to Google Cloud. We just kind of moved over by the way from AWS to gcp. And one of the reasons is because we believe that actually Google from an AI perspective really has the infrastructure that is necessary to take us to the next level of AI. And I think you spoke a lot or you kind of wanted to hear about a little bit about Agentic. But I think AI as a whole is something where we're really feeling the impact more than anything. Our systems right now are, are seeing supply shift. It's obviously, you know, with Google AI overview and the zero click and all that we're seeing traffic patterns that are shifting and changing, especially many of our long tail publisher, long tail web publishers. Not that we have so many but we, we work with some ad ops companies obviously that, that are powering some of that. We, we can see that there's a significant amount of traffic loss there and even on the premium publishers. So we're going to need to find a new way hopefully to generate some new initiatives around some of these new LLM models that are really kind of the, the forefront of an entry points of people into the, on the Internet these days. Right. So most people are either going through some chat Interface, whether it's ChatGPT or, or, or you know, these things are popping up even more. Even the browsers that are, it's like we're back to the browser wars now. It's like a come full cycle and that supply is changing. So the way it's gonna, it's gonna impact even the mid and the top tier publishers is something that publishers themselves are going to need to reinvent because the supply itself is changing.
- [22:42]
Podcast Host
How do you like in this industry, right? Like there's a lot of companies that all sort of feel like they do similar, right? They're monetization partners, they're media buying partners, they're data partners and they all fall into these core four, five, six buckets of ad tech, if you want to call it that. How do you stand out to your clients when speaking to your partners? What really sets rise apart and sets you as your personality, as your Persona, the person that you are when you talk to people. What sets you apart and the company apart in order to make things happen.
- [23:16]
Tal Shakehed
So I think what sets us apart really is our technological edge. I don't want to put us in a bucket, but I think we've really been focused on the supply side since day one. I will say that the last year or so that's, that's very much changed. Meaning we're still focused on supply, but we've realized that we need to bring a lot of added value also to the demand and especially as we go higher up the chain. But really where we've, if you look at Us now, like we're really a tech layer that sits on top of the supply. And what we've focused on and what our AI and our algorithms really are focused on are two main things, right? So floor price optimization, whereas the dynamic pricing, the dynamic price optimization that goes on on the supply side, but even more so it's the supply path optimization. And right now and moving forward, it's all about traffic shaping for us. So we're really focusing now on our demand partners and demand KPIs. And when I say demand partners, I think what's been interesting is that we don't have any unique demand until now. We've actually taken and we get integrated on top of our layer with, you know, the top and the mid tier SSPs, quite a few DSPs. And basically the way it works is the traffic shaping that we do works with each partner differently, but it all revolves around their demand KPIs. So what I mentioned before, Sam, it's basically like a decisioning engine, okay. So it gets really precise around things like revenue per request, cost per opportunity, win rate predictions, bid rate predictions and all the way down to the domain level. And when you combine that with things like making sure that our bid stream is like extremely clean, that there's clear signaling the output that we have and the feedback that we're getting is it really rises. Synonymous with traffic shaping, you know, around traffic shaping and everything to do with traffic shaping.
- [25:20]
Podcast Host
Basically when you and I were talking prior to recording, we, we talked a lot about standing out in the market, if you can call it a spin off, a spin off from Iron Source. But the, the market has changed so much. Like you had said, you know, we focused on the supply side for a long period of time and now we're focusing more on the demand side. But where do you think the focus will be moving forward as, as we're going into 2026? This is being released in December 2025. What is the direction of the industry from where you sit and what do you think will be hot for 2026 as it relates to the mobile monetization technology space?
- [25:58]
Tal Shakehed
So first of all, I think mobile monetization specifically and mobile in app ecosystem specifically is something that I don't want to say is a safe haven for now from in terms of, you know, AI. I mean I think user patterns are changing but like web is definitely like we're seeing everything kind of evolved in front of our eyes. I'm assuming that at some point in time that web change is going to plateau and I feel like bringing a real added value to performance and E commerce. Buy side on mobile is something that is, you know, going to be super important moving forward and I think it's something I know that we're looking at as well to provide some of these traffic shaping products that I mentioned as standalone products to you know, performance DSPs and retail media networks and things like SSPs and DSPs that are doing brand buying into mobile. Because right right now and at least for the foreseeable future and again we don't know where it's all going. I think the behavior of in app users is, hasn't all that changed that much. Especially obviously in gaming. I mean people are still playing a whole lot of games. I think once you get out of gaming and maybe non gaming apps, maybe that is changing a little bit. But still compared to web it's there's still a lot of growth to be made there and I think the other area that is really cool is definitely agentic and agentic advertising. It's something that I'm personally super excited about and we're already seeing the beginning of beginning of it and I think Rise definitely wants to be there and I think you know, what you're seeing especially on the buy side platforms right now is you know, things like, you know, these chat like interfaces that have already popped up, the ability for you know, agents to be working on our behalf in the background and doing things that usually took days and weeks to do in the past. Whether it starts with you know, the creative agency and the campaigns that you know, they're creating. You know, for example, you know, if they're setting up a campaign, you know, for, for Garmin, which I'm a big fan of. And that starts with you know, that, that creative direct group director basically going and prompting, you know, whatever interface it is, their agent saying, you know, I'll create this, you know, this campaign for me. I want it to, you know, be addressed to this demographic and give me 10 different versions of it, right. Just with one kind of prop and then that going to, you know, maybe someone else who is actually the buyer in the agency, the actual person that's doing the buying. But they don't have to, you know, call up 10 different friends, you know, at DSPS and say hey, I'm launching a campaign. And you know, the back and forth communications and emails, it takes forever. It's basically going to be them starting a prompt again, setting that up by audience, by type of user demographics, by interests, you know, categories, etc. And this is the Cool part, right? So that agent goes out all over, you know, at least the way I see it, the open web and kind of interacts with a whole bunch of other agents. So it could be that data management platform, the DMP agent, it could be the curation platform agent, it could be publishers that already have created agents that are able to talk with some of these buy side agents, say hey, I'm here, you know, I have exactly what you need. And then they'll be able to transact and exchange details and whatnot. And that buying will take, you know, take place and when it does, I don't think we're there yet obviously and I think, you know, I don't know how long that's going to take to get to that level.
- [29:34]
Podcast Host
There's definitely a lot. There's so much opportunity all the way from the creative phase to you know, delivery and reporting, operational capabilities optimization. But we're, it might be, I don't think we're anywhere near that at this point. Like there's some great companies that are now building out the optimization features, the repetitive tasks that adopts people do. The creative side I think is good, but not great. You still notice a huge difference with AI generated creative, but still good and much better than it was five years ago, but still not there for the consumer. But definitely I'm seeing, I'm hearing a lot of people really leaning into every aspect of it that you had mentioned.
- [30:16]
Tal Shakehed
And I don't, I don't think it's going to really replace people per se by the way. I think it's going to replace like a lot of a low, you know, grunt, like the, the grunt work, let's call it like you mentioned on the op side I don't think it's going to, you know, do it's going to do all that and actually you end up freeing people up, especially whether it's adopts or customer success or sales, the account management teams to actually really focus on a lot of the more important things and you know, more creative things, the more out of the box thinking that, you know, me as, you know, an executive in my company. Like I know that I would love for our customer success team to be much more focused on things like that and less on, you know, these day to day, you know, things that take months now to get set up. You know, I'm with you.
- [31:09]
Podcast Host
I, I agree with you on that. I feel like there's, there's some, you know, on the ad ops side, fine. Like there's probably going to be an impact in terms of how many people you need to operate, like maybe there will be an impact there. You don't need as many. They can do more because the menial tasks which are done and it's just part of the job may be optimized through some sort of AI solution or agentic solution. But when it comes to the account management side, I actually think that it slows down business when they are stuck pulling and creating reports, when this can be created in a very fast method. But the human element, the conversations that need to take place, and especially the relationship building, which I think is often really undervalued and pushed to the side whenever there's AI mentioned, still is such an important aspect. And what I'm hoping for is I don't get automated emails from a machine. When I'm upset, I want someone to pick up the phone or someone personally to email me. It's okay if there's a typo. I don't care if it's not perfectly spelled like most people. That stuff doesn't bother me. But I want to know that there's someone on the other side that genuinely is like, hey, I'm sorry this is happening. Let me address this for you. Let me fix this for you. I got you. And I'm here to support very different.
- [32:22]
Tal Shakehed
Preaching to the converted here. I mean, I can tell you from personal experience. So, you know, my role at Rise is, you know, again, I'm the Chief Business Officer. But I'll let you in on a little secret. Like, I actually don't manage anyone. I don't have anyone that reports directly to me. And I'll get to that in a sec. But what I'm really focused on is really that external outbound, or what I like to say is kind of like the Secretary of State of Rise. And so I end up mentoring as part of my role. Like, half of what I do is really mentoring the teams here that are interfacing with clients and customers. And 99% of them are abroad, specifically in the U.S. and it's really about how you communicate with them. And so many times I'll get these, hey, what do you think? Maybe I should. We should do this or say this or how. What do you. Maybe I should write that. And I'm like, was. Is this created by some robot or something? Like, what it has, it's completely soulless. There's no, there's no personalization. There is no soul. There's no, you know, no flavor, no personal touch, like, which is super important. And, you know, I don't need to tell you, but, you know, this, this business is super relationship driven, right?
- [33:36]
Podcast Host
It's personal.
- [33:37]
Possible Event Announcer
And I think there's a great time to use it.
- [33:39]
Podcast Host
I think, like I use it, right? Everybody use it. I think there's a great time to do it. And I think other times it's like, just be yourself. It's okay. If it's a run on sentence, it's okay. Like, it doesn't have to be perfect. And I think that's the big difference is when something is perfect, it often doesn't feel authentic. It feels very formal. And the more formal you are, the less personal it is. And I feel like being just yourself matters.
- [34:03]
Tal Shakehed
There's a few really important things in business when you do business, and by the way, especially when it's from afar and remotely and, you know, Covid aside or whatnot, we're, we're all based in Israel, but. And we don't have a presence in the US but really what I focus, you know, the things that I believe in are trust. In order to create trust, you need to, you know, you need to gain that trust, right? And in order to gain that trust, you need to get really, really personal. You need to know who you're doing business with. You need to really understand that these are people and they're, you know, these people have problems. They have families, they have pets, they have hobbies. You know, and if you don't know who these people are behind, you know, the email or the name or, you know, even getting on the monthly call or the QBRs with them, yeah, there's some level of business you'll be able to do. But I think once you really get deep and go deep from a relationship perspective, you know, the sky's the limit. And in ad tech especially, I've really, really, really seen that help.
- [35:04]
Podcast Host
I've learned this myself just, you know, from experience, from this pod and this Persona I've created. Yeah, friendship, relationship is super important.
- [35:14]
Tal Shakehed
Yep.
- [35:15]
Podcast Host
Tell as we kind of wrap up the podcast. You know, final question. You, you mentioned a lot about being based in, in Israel, working remotely, not being able to just walk to your client's office in, in New York City or San Francisco or any other location in the U.S. how do you deal with that? How do you keep in constant contact with your clients and how often are you here?
- [35:36]
Tal Shakehed
So you're basically looking at Rise's US Presence as we speak. I am here. You know, obviously I've always been a, you know, throughout my whole career, I've always here, you know, and my career has been here. I've always been the facilitator, right, the guy that facilitates between, you know, the Israeli technology company and the culture, and, you know, the one that can speak American, not just English, but speak of Moran on the other side. So I actually just came back from nearly two months in New York on the ground. I was there for adweek, I was there for program, I was there for architecture, which was amazing. And I think, you know, I, you know, obviously I had plenty of meetings, I went to a lot of curated events, and networking was key. And I think, you know, the amount of things I was able to get done, whether it's those meetings or coffees and lunches and dinners and drinks and whatnot, like, it just opened up a lot of eyes here, you know, with my peers, as to the benefits of, you know, having some people closer to the heart of it all. And everything just moves faster. I mean, Manhattan is crazy, by the way. The pace there is absolutely nuts. You know, I grew up in Boston. It's a little bit slower, but when you're on the ground there, you know, and until now, we haven't, you know, we haven't had that. So we're doing. We've done or doing a pretty good job over the last five years without having that presence in getting to where we are and building that brand equity. But really moving forward, I think, you know, that's going to change over time.
- [37:06]
Podcast Host
Absolutely, yeah. Awesome. I wanted to thank you for being my guest on the podcast and thank you to rise as well. Really wishing you a great end of 2025 and great 2026 since this is December, but thank you. Thank you for your trust and thank you for being on the pod.
- [37:20]
Tal Shakehed
Yeah, thank you so much. This was a dream come true. Amazing.
- [37:23]
Podcast Host
Thank you so much.
- [37:25]
Host of AdTech Godpod
Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the AdTech Godpod, a podcast for the people about the people. Stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of ad tech. Don't miss out on the latest updates. So follow me on X Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget ATG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of adtech innovation.