I made a small fortune in the wild world of dot-com era digital marketing

“Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.” Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize winning author.

I have been asked so many times on Podcasts and in person about the $925 million eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions transaction that included digital marketing pioneer PepperJam and the eCommerce giant Magento both later sold to PHG and Adobe respectively. The deal won four private equity industry awards in the $250M to $1B transaction category due to its complexity and innovative structuring. Well… Over a rough-and-tumble 17-year spell, I built AffiliateTraction up into an industry leader, almost losing everything twice: the dotBOMB and the 2008 crash. It turned out to be a wildly successful digital venture that disrupted and helped define the fledgling affiliate marketing space at a time when everyone was still trying to figure out how to reach customers online. The story goes, In the early days of the internet, I learned the basics of coding and built Startups selling police bicycle lights, travel insurance, Passports, Visas, Foreign currency, magazine subscriptions, online advertising, Advertising compliance, and websites. I started selling websites then after the gold rush of websites, our customers would ask “what now, I have a website, but that's like having a store in the middle of a desert”. I listened to them and after the gold rush was over online advertising was next and affiliate marketing was the obvious choice as you don't pay unless you make a sale, you choose how much you want to pay and you don't pay for canceled orders. During the wild world of dot-com era the dotBOMB and the 2008 crash I rolled up affiliate program directories, and eventually, built the first performance marketing agency in the world, the only one to go worldwide and the first to be acquired.?

I made a small fortune in the wild world of dot-com era digital marketing. After the transaction was complete, I was asked to develop a technical, operational, and product vision across the now much larger combined Startup as Chief Strategy Officer, then later Chief Technology Officer to execute the strategy . After the technology was built, the Go-To-Market (GTM) plan was implemented to great success and after 3 years I was able to step down to focus once again on what I love, building Startups.