Posts Tagged ‘Todd Vernon’
A few weeks ago a friend of mine and a friend of Lijit’s lost his battle with cancer. They say success has many fathers, but Jerome can certainly claim an important role in making Lijit a success. Jerome was the first institutional investor in Lijit when he was at High Country Ventures.
I got to know Jerome while I was still at Raindance and through the final years of my involvement at Raindance we would often meet for breakfast to discuss my many crazy ideas. When I started Lijit, Jerome helped me formulate some of the ideas and strategies and when our Angel round of financing needed a little more investment fuel he led High Country into a $200K investment.
Jerome was a tough business guy, and like a lot of tough business guys he had his fans and otherwise. I was always in the fan category. When he had something constructive to add around the board table he would add it. When he didn’t he wouldn’t. Jerome was a consummate professional.
A few years ago Jerome moved on to San Francisco and Crosslink Capital. I pitched Crosslink for a late stage investment round but my style didn’t mesh with the other partners at Crosslink. I believe humility is the best tool as a CEO, but as Jerome counseled me after the fact, that style can appear weak – especially to a Valley VC expecting “ego” to be plentiful. We found our investment somewhere else but nearly every time I was in San Francisco over the last two years I would meet Jerome for breakfast at the Meridian Hotel near his office. He always had helpful advice on business and we had great discussions about taking our favorite cars to the track to go fast.
I’m not a friend maker (or collector) by nature. But I counted Jerome as one of them.
Tags: industry, Todd Vernon | View Comments
Employees, investors, and friends of Lijit recently celebrated our acquisition by Federated Media with a party at one of Boulder’s newest restaurants, The Kitchen [Next Door]. The restaurant is one of downtown Boulder’s latest additions, serving as a more casual take on the farm-to-table concept that has made its sister restaurant, The Kitchen, a Boulder hot-spot for many years.
The Lijit team loves a good party and in true Lijit fashion we did it up right! On the day we announced the acquisition, our CEO Todd Vernon proclaimed it a “Major Martini Day” and we doctored up a poster in his honor. Check out some of the photos below to get a glimpse of our celebration…
Tags: events, Lijit employees, Todd Vernon | View Comments
On Tuesday, September 20 Lijit’s CEO and Founder Todd Vernon had the privilege of speaking at Federated Media’s Signal Chicago conference. His presentation, titled “Using Supply Side Platforms, Real-Time Bidding, and Private Exchanges to Reach the Independent Web at Scale,” provides a brief overview of the latest technologies in online advertising.
In this session, Todd discusses the following:
- How to use SSPs (supply side platforms) to source inventory
- How brand marketers can use audience analysis to reach desired themes and conversations
- How to expose audience and content segments to automated buyers
- How to use audience futures to reserve media through private exchanges
Check out his quick, 10-minute presentation below. Enjoy!
Tags: events, industry, Lijit Advertising Services, speaking, Todd Vernon | View Comments
Are you interested in learning more about how to create and manage online communities?
Then come join us at the Forum and Communities Conference in San Francisco next Wednesday, February 16. Todd Vernon, Lijit’s founder and CEO, will be speaking on a panel titled “Technology and Community” along with executives from eBay, VigLink (a Lijit partner), and CloudFlare. The panel will be moderated by Dan Gill, co-founder and CEO of Huddler.
During this one-day event, a team of experts will provide guidance on how to effectively engage with communities, give tips on how to maximize the value of communities, and offer insights into new services to try and trends to watch out for. Click here for additional details on the event. We hope to see you there!
Tags: events, industry, Lijit publishers, publishers, Todd Vernon | View Comments
I was going to entitle this post “When the Mouse Speaks…” but, by now, we all realize that Chris Brogan is no mouse.
Last week, a day before I left for BlogHer, I was at Techstars listening to the teams’ 45 day demos (quick analysis: 2-3 interesting ideas, no great presenters, a lot of work ahead in a short period of time). As I left to grab a quick dinner with the mentors and the teams, a direct message from Chris buzzed on my phone.
Thinking he was talking about the ads that appear in our search results, and that he had a valid question, I responded with:
To which Chris responded:
Confused, and thinking that the normal ads on our results pages were wonky on his site, I responded with:
(side note: not sure why all the DMs are marked as Chris. I hope you can follow the thread…)
And then a couple of hours later (closer to 1am MST), I got home to a message from Aaron Brazell that Chris had written a post on Lijit and ads, and I should check it out.
Exhausted after a long day, I clicked on the link, and as soon as I saw the picture on the left, smacked myself in the head.
“He was talking about Re-Search!” <SMACK>
Re-search is an interesting feature of Lijit, which about 3/4 of our users have turned on.
To digress a bit, there are four major features of Lijit that we feel help the publisher (and ultimately the reader). They are:
- The search itself. The ability to get a more focused and related search on a blog is of high value to both readers and publishers. For example, a search on my blog, Learn To Duck for “billie” (my dog’s name) will turn up posts, pictures and videos done by me AND people I trust. Which is a different tact than Google, where they attempt to index everything (we index only the things that are important to you), and we assume everything is trusted (Google assumes everything is spam).
- The popular search cloud. The inclusion of the search cloud seems to drive searches. How many searches? It seems to drive 3x-10x of the searches depending on placement and use. The more the readers use the search cloud, then the more publisher content they discover.
- Search statistics. While many publishers have Google Analytics, they have little insight into the search behavior of their readers. Lijit provides an easy way to to see a snapshot of the previous 30 days of search activity.
- Re-Search. Re-search is a box that opens up with your widget or across the top of your site (if you know what you are doing, I believe you can put it in different places) that takes the query just done on a search engine (the box only appears on the approximately 30% of visitors that come from search engines to our publishers) and does a “re-search” on your publication.
Sounds good right?
Except that Re-search only appears when a search is done from a search engine. How many publishers do a search on Google for their own publication and then click through to their site? Probably none.
So, when a publisher does that, they are (sometimes) surprised to see the Re-Search box. As Chris was.
So, rightfully so, Chris wrote a post. And the comments were quite interesting. some positive, some negative. Mack Collier, a social media expert, decided to uninstall and write a blog post about why he was (unfortunately) not going to reinstall.
Todd Vernon, who normally I try to keep away from commenting on posts, jumped into the fray as I left for BlogHer. He listened to what the commenters, and Chris were discussing, and about half way through the day, pulled together a group of folks at Lijit, and decided that 1) we need to do a better job of calling Re-Search out in our signup flow (making it a requirement in the new redesign), and 2) to turn off ads within the Re-Search box, given that according to our users, they are intrusive, and 3) make the ads part of a opt-in ad strategy.
At Lijit, we are in a constant state of learning.
We are trying things, and testing things, and breaking things and failing at things. What makes the process truly rewarding, is that our publishers join us in the process, and they let us know what they think about the things we are doing.
Sometimes our lessons come from the whisper of a mouse, and sometimes they come from the roar of a lion.
So, thank you Chris and Mack, your feedback is invaluable. After all, we will never be what we want to be if we dont stay in a constant state of learning.
Tags: ads in search, chris brogan, learning, lijit, mack collier, micah baldwin, publishers, Todd Vernon | View Comments
I’ve already mentioned the awesome tech community that we are a part of here in the Front Range. At a Blogger Meetup last year in Denver, I met Rob McNealy, the man behind Startup Story Radio.
Last week, Rob stopped by the Lijit office to interview Todd Vernon, our CEO and master storyteller. The podcast interview makes for an interesting listen. I love hearing Todd tell the Lijit story, especially when he does so with a head cold. Check it out to hear Todd’s side of things and his predictions for the future of our company.
(Hint: Things are looking good….)
Tags: interview, press, Todd Vernon | View Comments