When MediaMath filed for chapter on Friday, the corporate’s co-founder and former CEO, Joe Zawadzki, was on the skin wanting in.
Zawadzki had been changed early final yr by MediaMath board member and former Sizmek chief Neil Nguyen, who took the reins as CEO with a remit to get the corporate bought. When a deal didn’t materialize by July, an embattled and bancrupt MediaMath was pressured to file for Chapter 11 chapter safety.
MediaMath owes greater than $100 million to no less than 200 corporations, in line with the chapter submitting, together with Magnite, PubMatic, Sonobi and Xandr.
Zawadzki is now a normal associate at early-stage VC agency AperiamVentures and chairman of FxM, a fin tech startup for media financing.
AdExchanger spoke with Zawadzki only a few hours after the information broke in regards to the chapter.
AdExchanger: What would you say to MediaMath workers if you happen to may deal with them straight?
JOE ZAWADZKI: There aren’t many corporations wherein the alumni are as shut and on to doing superb issues. Should you did a LinkedIn spider graph of the place the folks are actually, it’s form of superior. So, I’d maintain on to that.
It [might] really feel atonal proper now as a result of lots of people sadly are going to really feel like they’re scrambling and it’d really feel unfair. [But] I’m going to do my absolute damnedest throughout the Aperiam portfolio, and I feel the group has already rallied. Associates of the corporate are LinkedIn posting and providing subsequent steps.
MediaMath was early on a number of issues, together with speaking about transparency. Was it too early typically?
Typically, pioneers, they’re those with the arrows of their backs.
Does MediaMath’s chapter imply the DSP market is just about simply The Commerce Desk and Google with a bit little bit of Viant sprinkled in? What occurs available in the market now?
We’re already heading towards a kind of pure oligopoly. Classes have a tendency to try this. MediaMath ended up being the largest of the smalls or the smallest of the bigs, and that’s kind of a distinct segment providing for the enterprise.
There are many locations one might need taken that, by way of continued verticalization of media: retail media, B2B, pharma, gaming and leisure, the SPO aspect of issues and easy methods to handle a extra fragmented, sophisticated provide chain.
[But] Google, The Commerce Desk and a challenger, Amazon – that’s to some extent what the DSP class appears like.
The second-order influence is that there can be a flight to security. I can’t imagine that my child goes to trigger one other view on a few of these dynamics, however [basically] each SSP has entry to the identical stock.
Are you going to have fewer gamers on each side of the equation? In all probability.
A number of the issues that have been bundled components of DSPs or SSPs will turn into unbundled, and other people will innovate. We’ll find yourself with consolidation within the previous classes in addition to new class creation. However these classes themselves will get a bit extra locked down.
What are you enthusiastic about proper now with an eye fixed on the longer term?
FxM is the outgrowth of a macro appreciation for a way foolish the financing and refinancing of the identical Fortune 500 media greenback is, the place it goes from advertiser to company, company to DSP, DSP to SSP and SSP … and SSP.
Proper now, the entire financing is related to these hops, which ends up in an enormous duplication of rates of interest and a bunch of systemic dangers within the spine. SVB [Silicon Valley Bank] was one good instance. Sadly, to some extent, MediaMath can be one other highlight on the fragility that creates.
I took classes about other ways to finance the working capital wants of an organization and mentioned, “OK, let’s flip this into an business utility versus one thing that’s simply inside of 1 platform; let’s make it obtainable to all platforms and attempt to repair the true drawback.”
To some extent, that’s form of my third act proper now. I realized rather a lot; let’s be sure that different folks don’t must study the identical classes.
Solutions have been edited and condensed.
