Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talk to Trevor Kaufman, the CEO of Piano, a platform that provides paywalls, personalization, and analytics for hundreds of media companies and brands.
In 2012, Trevor became a seed investor and CEO of a small two person company building a micropayment solution for digital content creators.
But about 18 months in, he realized that the economics of their business model just didn't work unless they could get a massive customer base.
So they pivoted and moved to selling their product to large media companies.
But they struggled to find customers.
Either those companies weren't interested in selling subscriptions, or if they were, they often had built their own internal solution.
All this time, Trevor was funding the business out of his own pocket.
He had sold a previous business, which helped, but he still wound up selling his house to keep the business going.
At the time, it was a scary thing to do.
But Trevor believed he was solving the right problem.
It was just a matter of time.
And that bet eventually paid off for him.
Today, Piano generates $80 million in arrival.
The company has around 800 customers worldwide, over 600 employees, and they've raised $222 million.
I hope you enjoy it.
Trevor, welcome to the show.
Trevor Kaufman (01:36.950)
Thanks for having me.
Omer (01:37.790)
Omer, do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Trevor Kaufman (01:42.710)
It's funny you ask.
I have two favorite quotes, two favorite business quotes, both of which are from my dad.
My dad was like a.
A 60s and 70s Mad Men era creative director.
And he said two things about business that I was like, or three things, I guess.
He said, make sure you're not working for your own people.
He said, if your client knows more about their customer than you do, you're a commodity.
And he said the best way to win any pitch is to sell the client on a vision of what they can be that's bigger than they've dreamed of so far.
Omer (02:19.030)
Wow, those are really good quotes.
Trevor Kaufman (02:21.590)
Yeah, yeah, they stuck with me, as you can tell.
Omer (02:24.870)
Awesome.
All right, so tell us about Piano.
What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Trevor Kaufman (02:31.830)
So Piano's a very powerful, elegant, privacy compliant analytics solution that's married with a very intuitive rules engine that personalizes user experiences.
I think we're now the most widely adopted digital rules engine in the world.
We do, at least for business, we do well over a trillion page views a year.
It's effectively, you know, running on a data store, which is a DMP and CDP analytics tool.
And so we're all of that and marketing automation in one really elegant solution.
And we use that to solve particular business problems, like paywalls for media companies, or most recently, checkout personalization for airlines.
We've got about 800 clients around the world.
It's about an $80 million company, and we have now a little over 620 employees.
Omer (03:23.050)
And funding wise, you've raised about 222 million to date.
Trevor Kaufman (03:29.250)
I think that's about right.
Including debt.
Omer (03:31.330)
Yeah.
Okay, great.
So I know there's a journey that you went through to get to what Piano is today, and it started with a company that you were running called tinypass.
But before we get into that, why don't you just tell us about what's your background?
What were you doing before you became the CEO of TinyPass?
Trevor Kaufman (03:51.260)
Sure.
My background's in the agency business.
I started a couple of digital agencies in my life, the biggest one being a company called Schematic that I founded in Los Angeles and sold to WPP in 2007.
And then within WPP, we merged that together with some other businesses.
And I ran that conglomerate, which was called Possible Worldwide before wpp, eventually merged that into Wonderman Thompson.
And I left in 2012 to go join TinyPass.
Omer (04:24.720)
What was TinyPass?
How did you come across the business?
Trevor Kaufman (04:28.560)
So there was a guy named Dave Moore who ran a business called 247 Real Media within WPP.
And he called me up once and he said, we've invented this thing now called Programmatic Advertising, and It means that CPMs for premium media are never going to pay for the production of premium content ever again.
And he was the chairman of the IAB that year, the Internet Advertising Board.
And he gave a speech in which he said that.
And everybody said, well, what should we do?
And he said, you all ought to go behind a paywall at once.
And he said, let's design paywall experiences for these media partners of ours.
And I said, oh, I don't know whether it's as simple as a paywall.
Maybe it's a micropayment solution or something.
So we tried incubating something within wpp, but that was just kind of a distraction from our day jobs.
And we eventually hung it up.
But one day a friend came to me and said, I just read this article on Business Insider about this little company in Tribeca that it seems like they're doing exactly what we talked about.
And sure enough, there was an article about this company called TinyPass, which was two guys in a little room above Newbu on Franklin Street.
And I said, let's go get a beer with them.
And we did.
And I sort of fell in love with them and the idea and started seed financing the business and then over the course of a year wound up helping them more and more and extracted myself from WPP and joined them as CEO in 2012.
Omer (06:01.260)
Let's talk about that journey because how long did you work on TinyPass before piano?
Trevor Kaufman (06:07.580)
We worked on TinyPass for about a year and a half and kept signing up little strategy blogs or research businesses or rodeos or all these funny long tail businesses who had very small audiences paying small amounts of money for access to content.
And we kept looking at this, I kept trying to do this analysis of exactly how much of that we would need.
And it was a massive number.
And so we pivoted, I guess about a year and a half in to being purely focused on enterprise software sales or decent sized publishers.
And so I think we met with the Piano media guys in 2014 and merged the companies together at the beginning of 2015.
Omer (07:01.590)
Can you just explain what you just said there about trying to understand the economics of the business and it had to be massive?
Can you just break that down for us?
Because I think that's an interesting lesson, I guess, in terms of you can go into a market and be very excited about a product and be signing up customers and things look kind of great, you know, you seem to be headed in the right direction.
But when you take a step back and you actually look at this and say, can we actually build a viable business out of this?
It's not always that clear cut.
And I think this was a realization that you came to, I guess, at some point while you were running TinyPass.
Trevor Kaufman (07:45.130)
I think there's a time when you start a business where you are so excited about initial customers, about anyone hearing about having heard about you, right.
That it's easy to ignore some fundamentals about the economics.
You think if I get some customers and get some traction and people start talking about this, everything else is going to work itself out, right.
And what I learned at that point was if your business model is a percentage of sales, sales need to be really, really high for that to be a viable market.
Right?
So if you're a credit card processor, right, that makes a lot of sense.
If you're showing billions of videos or something, that makes a lot of sense.
But in a world where it's subscriptions to content, that's an example of market that's just not massive enough in my view, for kind of a.
A percentage model to, to be logical.
And I am.
I'm very, I'm always very skeptical of some businesses where, you know, there's a.
Perhaps there's a.
Like, for example, email newsletters.
Charging for email newsletters.
You can have a million paying subscribers to email newsletters.
If they are all paying about $50 a year on average.
And your model is you take 10% of that, well, that's a $5 million business.
Right.
Even though you might be a household name, you might think it's really big, in some ways, you might be having the effect you want on the world.
It's still not a great business at the end of the day.
So we realized that our job should be to sell software for a subscription price rather than try to share in what were basically some small economics on a.
On a, you know, in terms of the little companies we were working with at that point.
And of course, large companies wouldn't want to share their subscription revenue with us, so it made a lot more sense to charge a SaaS fee to big customers than to try and take a percentage from small ones.
Omer (09:50.450)
Okay, great.
So you came to that realization and then what did you do?
Did you change the business model?
Trevor Kaufman (09:57.730)
Absolutely.
We stopped servicing small customers.
I think it actually took us several years to wind down the small customers that we worked with and move to just working with large customers.
It really took us a long time.
Of course, one of the funny things about subscription is once you have a subscriber base that has real value and you never want to get rid of it.
Well, for all of our small mom and pop content companies, again, these sort of rodeos and technology blogs and such that we were working with, stock advice, all kinds of funny things, accent training videos.
For all those clients, we had real trouble moving their subscribers from our kind of bank accounts onto theirs, effectively from our payments onto theirs.
So it was very difficult to shed the long tail business.
But we eventually did.
Omer (10:51.490)
So you move into a subscription business model, and then you came across the next challenge, which was realizing that most of the companies that you were talking to didn't want to sell subscriptions.
Was that when the business was still TinyPass or.
Trevor Kaufman (11:15.020)
It was, yeah.
We would run around to digital publishers of all kinds, and we would say, you insert client name here, Reader's Digest, Hearst Magazine, you ought to be charging for access to your content.
And they would say, yeah, we're not doing that.
We think digital advertising has a great future.
The web is meant to be.
Information is meant to be free was the thing that was running around then, which was a misquote from Clay Shirky.
And so people just.
It was not at all fashionable to have a subscription business at that point, which of course now it is quite in vogue, but it certainly wasn't then.
And we, we couldn't get, you know, we would have 100 meetings and literally, you know, out of that sort of two companies would be somewhat interested.
To make matters worse, some of the companies who were natural subscription businesses, like a Wall Street Journal, we were a little too late for them.
They had already built their own internal tools.
So we had quite a struggle in the beginning.
Omer (12:19.430)
You're running this business.
You are excited about the product and the opportunity.
You realize that the business model that you had wasn't working or wasn't going to be an interesting business.
So you switched to a SaaS model.
And there's the pains that come with making that transition.
And then you realize that this is a real, you know, you're pushing a rock uphill trying to persuade these media companies to start charging for content because they're still going down the ad revenue path.
And how were you funding this business during that time?
Trevor Kaufman (12:54.940)
I was paying payroll out of my own pocket.
So I had sold Schematic to WPP and so I had some money and wound up selling my house to fund the business.
And it was a tough time.
In retrospect, it was smart, but there was no proof.
It was difficult.
I believe that it's easy to.
You're very lucky if you find something that customers believe that they want, but yet no one else has stepped in to fill that need.
Right.
So the only alternative is something they don't yet know they want.
Right.
And that's where we were.
We really believed that companies were going to have to charge for content, that there was going to be a, a subscription business, that we would be accustomed to, paywalls in effect everywhere.
That there was a re plumbing of the media, of the digital publishing business that needed to take place.
We feel like we're still in that process, but years ago nobody agreed with us.
We were a little too early.
Omer (14:01.450)
Is that what kept driving you, that, that belief?
Because you're, you're going in and you know, what I see is, you know, it's a startup trying to find traction, trying to get to product market fit.
Generally the Sound.
The signs aren't that exciting when you're saying you're having 100 meetings and struggling to close one sale.
Was it that belief that kept you going and had you continuing to pour your own money into the business, or was there something else?
Trevor Kaufman (14:33.490)
I'm really not sure, Omar, exactly why I kept going in the face of some pretty clear market evidence that people didn't want what we had to sell at that time.
I think I'm maybe being too strident.
I mean, in Europe, clearly there was a more robust digital subscription content business than in the States.
And as we started to talk to companies in other countries, we got an inkling that what we did might be more valuable.
I guess I just, I had real faith in my colleagues.
I mean, I really thought that we could build a better product and thought that even if there were a lot of bumps in the road or twists in the road, I guess as we changed to different directions, that that team could build great stuff and that it was just a matter of us finding out enough in the markets, having people know about us enough and continuing to develop product that we'd eventually hit it.
And I think it was really that faith in the team that made me think we needed to keep going no matter what.
I should just also say, Omar, I had an experience in the agency business.
You'll remember the dot com crash right In I guess, 2002.
Yeah.
And really at that point, it's hard to imagine now, but the Internet seemed ridiculous to people.
Right.
It was after pets.com and a great way to get fired at a company was to spend money on building a website.
Right.
And I had a web development agency at that point and we had the tax authorities come in and try and figure out how much they could liquidate all our monitors for in the middle of a workday one time in Los Angeles and it was dire, Right.
But yet we made it out of that.
Eventually things turned around and I guess I just had faith that a similar thing would happen with Piano.
Omer (16:36.440)
I think that's one thing that I've seen in a lot of successful entrepreneurs is this ability to keep going.
Just taking that one more step.
I mean, obviously it doesn't always work out, but yeah.
Trevor Kaufman (16:51.990)
And there are some guys who do that and fail.
Right.
Terribly.
My friend Reggie who started Cvent, you know, he was that business.
They went, almost went out of business and he was sleeping on friends couches.
And now it's a phenomenally successful Vista Equity backed business.
And you know, Vista bought it for over a billion dollars and Reggie did great and good for him because, you know, he, he kept that business going when nobody believed in it.
Omer (17:17.440)
So tell me about, I guess the merger with Piano Media.
How did that come about?
Trevor Kaufman (17:24.560)
So we had gotten some outreach from an Austrian VC firm called 3TS Capital Partners, which is still a Piano investor and been really great.
And they had wound up with a company in their portfolio called Piano Media.
And they came to us, they were having some technology problems, some product problems.
They had lost a pitch to us to build all the paywalls for Time Inc. Magazines at the time.
And they reached out cold and we had a meeting and they said eventually it got to them saying, look, we might have them build a bit of a management issue.
They were, their CEO had resigned and we have a technology problem, but we have investment capital and we have some good customers.
Why don't we merge these businesses and you can be CEO?
The combined business will standardize on your software.
And the one caveat that they asked for to save face in the transaction was that even though TinyPass would be the surviving corporate entity because everybody wanted to be a US C Corp, not an Austrian GmbH, they, they said, even though TinyPass is going to be the company, we've got to call it Piano Media.
And I said, well, I don't like the media part because we're not a media company, but we can call it Piano.
And since then we've really leaned into the Piano identity and name and it feels like we started a company called Piano.
Omer (18:54.160)
So Piano Media, what type of business was this?
Was this an agency?
Trevor Kaufman (18:57.680)
No, it was exactly the same type of business.
Really.
So it was a paywall software company Very strictly.
The CEO and founder had the idea that in a lot of European countries there are several big newspapers that occupy different parts of the political spectrum.
And so it's great to be able to read all of them.
And he, with a kind of news consumers mindset, said, let's create a bundle that is one price for access to all of these different publications.
He built that business.
But then publishers didn't like to collaborate.
Big ones felt they were subsidizing the small ones, small ones felt that they were getting lost.
And so those alliances kind of fell apart and they started building software like ours to help individual media properties charge for subscription.
And we were just doing a little bit better in the market.
And so they, they, they and, and they had a little complexity on their side.
So we put the businesses together to help solve that.
Omer (20:00.660)
And then this combined business.
What was the size in terms of revenue number of employees.
Trevor Kaufman (20:05.300)
It was about 45 people, I guess, and about five or six million dollars in revenue.
Omer (20:15.460)
There was a point where you pivoted from focusing on the paywall micropayments as being the core offering into something broader.
And from what I understand, when you and I were talking about this, this was really something that evolved as you had customer conversations where people were saying, look, we don't want this.
We actually want something like this.
Can you tell us about that?
Like, how did that come about?
Trevor Kaufman (20:47.130)
Yeah, I mean, I think this is pretty core philosophically.
You know, what I have found are, first of all, from a, from an end user point of view, the entire experience is kind of one thing.
Right.
You don't really think when you're on a website, maybe if you go into a commenting platform or something, or maybe if you sign in with Google, but you don't think I'm right now the subject of an AB test and I'm having content recommendations customized to me and someone is doing various kinds of analytics of various types behind the scenes and when my identity is being tracked throughout as me being a consistent person and there's somebody else managing the billing to my credit card and the payment processing integration and gift subscriptions and promo codes and my email newsletter and all of these different things that are part of that commercial experience you have with a publication.
And in the absence of piano, they that's eight to 12 to 15 different vendors.
Right.
And first of all, we saw our problem not as providing a piece of software, but our problem was helping these companies make more money.
And to do that, to get readers and viewers engaged and returning and understand what they wanted and would pay for, to get to know them, ask them questions, all of these things became expansions to the platform and effectively more software.
Even though what we were really trying to solve was just this fundamental problem of how do we build the age old media problem of how do we build an engaged, loyal user base who's willing to pay for what we do.
The problem's just a big problem.
I always joke and Pinterest is a great thing, but I always joke about what I consider I think of in my head as the Pinterest problem, which is you build Pinterest.
To me, it kind of seems like what it is.
There's maybe not a lot more to build necessarily.
It's a brilliant way of creating these boards.
How much more do you do?
Well, I guess there's lots of other things, but with Piano, there has always been more that we've wanted to do and so as we've kind of tried to solve more of the problem and help our clients make more money in advertising, in, in E commerce, in subscription revenue, that stack has grown.
And the entire time, as I've been excited about that and the design of that, we've said media companies who rely on readers is a great business for us, but at some point we'll have sold to all of them, and we certainly haven't done that yet.
But the top five newspapers in Japan, as far as I'm aware, are all Piano customers.
There are a lot of clients in the world who are using some part of our stack.
And so now we have tried to make what we've done the entire time abstract enough so that we can sell to other types of businesses.
And that's what's been exciting over the past year or so, is the growth outside of digital publishing.
Omer (24:04.240)
So what I'm trying to understand is when you, you merge with Piano Media and the focus was still on, I guess, paywalls as the core offering, was there a point where you, you pivoted into becoming this broader platform, or was it more organic, where customers would ask you for this feature or that feature and you'd start building it and then this thing evolved and became much bigger?
Or was this always the vision from day one and the paywall was just the first piece of that?
Trevor Kaufman (24:42.320)
That's a great question.
We wound up building more features organically.
There are two ways to grow, right?
One is you can sell the same software to lots of people in lots of different industries, or you can sell more and more to the same limited number of customers.
Right.
And, and we found that our expertise in digital subscription for publishing was very, very valuable as that business was starting to grow.
If, if a digital publisher goes and hires a subscription expert, that person has worked on one or two subscription products in their lifetime.
You know, we actively manage more than a thousand at the moment, so we, we see a tremendous amount of data and we can really dig into the problem very deeply and be experts.
So we made a decision relatively early on to continue to try and solve this business problem for customers rather than try and solve a kind of product software problem across every single industry.
So it happened much as you're describing, Omar.
We first built software that would do recurring billing and revenue recognition reporting, because that was very new at the time.
Zora, you know, across the country, had just started, but didn't, you know, wasn't really on the radar of most of our clients at that point.
They needed that subscription software.
Then they said yes.
Well, how do we determine when we want to make that paywall pop up?
And by the way, we want it to be different if you've come from Facebook, and we want first click free from Google, and we want, when you, you know, you.
We want to ask you to register after three pages and then pay after 10.
And so we created a rules engine to do that.
And then people said, okay, well I've done all that.
Now why do I have to pay some other company a quarter of a million dollars to create, to enable people to log in?
Can't you guys have a login function?
And it just sort of went from there.
And then after the company had been growing pretty well, we realized we had the opportunity to borrow money and make acquisitions, and that would enrich the platform both from a data and from a functionality perspective.
And so we started doing that and that that grew the stack as well.
So it happened really quite organically, just based on, frankly what we thought we could could sell to the same customer base that would help them with this fundamental problem.
Omer (27:09.240)
When you merged these two companies, I think you said revenue was about 4 or 5 million.
Trevor Kaufman (27:14.280)
5 or 6?
Omer (27:14.920)
Yeah, 5 or 6.
How did you get to that first 10 million in ARR.
What were the growth channels?
Was this mostly outbound?
Were these kind of like bigger deals that you were trying to land?
How did you go about finding the right customers?
Trevor Kaufman (27:33.440)
Because we had picked this one specific vertical of digital publishing.
The growth for us really came from networking and primarily at conferences, and it was convenient for us.
There were businesses like Digiday who became a customer as well, who were holding really definitive conferences in the media business or associations like one IFRA or FIP or various organizations that would gathering together European customers.
And so it was really a very easy barrel for us to fish in.
I mean, of course, selling software is always difficult, but we defined the audience quite tightly, right.
We knew who our customer was.
It was a media business that was charging subscription somewhere in North America or Europe, and that's what really drove the significant growth in the company.
And then we built that into Latin America and Asia as well.
Omer (28:33.620)
What was the typical sales cycle?
How long did it take to close these types of deals?
And what did that sales process look like, or how easy or hard was it to sell to these customers?
Because we've worked in similar spaces and we talked about our backgrounds in sort of media.
To me, it sounds like these things could potentially just drag out forever where you've got to talk to so many people and it's touching so many parts of the business and trying to convince all the right people to take a bet on this new product or platform can take time.
So what was, what was that experience for you?
Trevor Kaufman (29:13.480)
It's such a great question about the sales cycle and the difficulty of selling.
For us, our sales cycles are usually about six months, right?
But so many customers in our business will launch a sales cycle.
Fire the people who began.
By the time we're done, right.
The people who began the sales process are no longer there and the company has changed strategy or been acquired.
Right.
So like Gatehouse Newspapers was a big customer of ours.
They bought Gannett and then changed the name of the company to Gannett.
Kind of tiny past Piano Media style.
And the, the, the, all the Gatehouse team is now gone.
And so, you know that things like that are very difficult.
We did all of NBC's sports pay per view content online in this thing called NBC Sports Gold.
And then they moved all the great stuff in that over to Peacock.
And so, you know, again, so we have all these structural problems, right, where deals are difficult to close.
And even when they do close, sometimes there's so much consolidation and change in the media business that, that we can wind up, through no fault of our own, losing the customer.
So that's just a facet of the way we wind up doing business.
But, but, but, you know, we, we take the good with the bad.
And in digital publishing, I think, you know, selling software has been challenging, but the one advantage that we've had is we're not just selling a tool that is abstract.
We're really selling the customer on a new revenue stream, right.
Or an enhanced one versus the subscription revenue stream that they have already and the power that we can provide them with to do site licenses or promotions or gift subscriptions or all of these frictionless purchases, the way we handle payment retries or, you know, all of these things that can increase their revenue.
That's a, there, there's really a very direct story there between using Piano and then having a relatively small team at the company drive a lot of additional revenue for the business.
That, that has helped us a lot in, in the way we approached our
Omer (31:36.130)
customer base over the last few years.
You, you've acquired, I think, two or three companies.
Trevor Kaufman (31:41.970)
Four.
Omer (31:42.690)
Four companies.
What led you to acquisitions was this, was this kind of the next level of growth that you were looking at?
Were there some strategic acquisitions to acquire some technology or some people?
First of all, what were the companies that you acquired?
Trevor Kaufman (31:59.920)
Our primary investor is a private equity firm in Washington, D.C. called Updata Partners who've been absolutely fantastic and not too long after they invested part of their thesis and part of one of the things they encourage their portfolio companies to do is make acquisitions because when done correctly it can be accretive.
Right.
So part of it was definitely just financial motivation.
So after they had invested.
There's a company in our business that was called csense that had.
That I respected a lot.
They had several really great technologies at the core of the business.
One was DMP so real time segmentation engine that they used to say okay, Omer's looking at a lot of automotive articles.
We're going to put him in a.
In an automotive interest category and he'll sell for more than for to an advertiser than.
Than if he were just a.
Not completely unknown.
Yeah, he had a content recommendations capability as well where they were indexing the content of every single article that you read on a site like the Wall Street Journal and using that to inform an algorithm that drove content recommendations that raised the click through rate on those homepages quite dramatically.
And Wall Street Journal still uses that today.
So I noticed that they had.
They had run into some trouble, management team trouble kind of overall operational problems where they were trading on the Norwegian Stock exchange for less than the cash they had in the bank.
And that seemed like a great opportunity and began a very arduous and complex process to do a public to private transaction in Norway from the States.
But it was one of the best things we ever did.
Another one being an acquisition down the road.
But really what we got out of that in addition to some marquee customers was just some great tech.
Was a tremendous team.
I mean so I can't imagine our company today without some of the people that have come to us through acquisition.
So you know we did it for financial reasons.
Really great kind of financial engineering in terms of an accretive deal.
We did it for customer reasons.
That technology, that real time segmentation tool powers all the targeting that we do now in our platform.
So that was great.
Lots of our customers are using that content recommendation capability and content intelligence.
So that's fantastic too and got us it's things like a great office and great team in Japan we never would have had otherwise.
So really, really tremendous on almost every level I guess.
Omer (34:43.330)
So what's next?
Where is the next level of growth going to come from for you?
Are you still betting on publishers investing more and doing more with subscriptions?
Is it the platform now is.
Is generating revenue in other ways?
What's the Belief or the bet now going forward.
Trevor Kaufman (35:07.500)
Our company really started with two parallel ideas and that's still really true.
One is we wanted to help digital publishers and keep working on the business model for digital content.
And that has not changed at all.
And I think there's all kinds of, particularly with the death of the third party cookie, you know, coming closer and closer and privacy concerns, I think there's going to still going to be a lot of innovation in publishing.
This world we're in now where we stop everybody and say, is it okay to set cookies on you?
And there's such a huge barrier to subscribing.
In effect, it's quite expensive to subscribe to things, but a lot of people would sort of pay something.
The rise of a lot of digital wallets with crypto.
There are all these dynamics that, that I think will continue to change the digital publishing business and help us help digital publishers, you know, better than we do today.
We still have not.
I feel like we're still scratching the surface on the fundamental problem of helping media companies be successful in a world where platforms are taking so much of the money away.
Right.
So there's a lot we have up our sleeve in that arena, whether it's different analytics analysis that we're doing, whether it's, whether it's different ad models or different partnerships with advertisers, or still these kind of micropayment and credit ideas that we keep experimenting and innovating in.
So definitely we want to keep working in that sector.
But secondarily and also importantly, we have lots of clients in other industries who use our analytics platform.
We have 20 banks on the platform, Deutsche Telekom, just lots of really fantastic and interesting businesses who are using us for analytics.
And again, in a world where I'm not sure that everybody's completely satisfied with the analytics solution from Google, whether that be for privacy or data reasons, or sampling or quality of the tool set.
So we're really developing our analytics and data visualization and the power of those tools.
There's so much yet to do there across industries.
Some of the most interesting conversations I'm having right now and in two weeks I'll be off to the World Aviation Festival with airlines who are having tremendous shifts in their business because the old GDS system of booking flights is now starting to shift and change and the relationships airlines have with customers are starting to become more direct and they want to personalize more and they want better data on users.
So there's just a ton of opportunity out there at the scale we are to compete more aggressively with companies like Google or Adobe in the analytics and the more tech space.
Omer (37:47.850)
I mean, you're closing in on, you know, hitting 100 million at some point.
Trevor Kaufman (37:53.770)
Please.
Knock on wood.
Oh, my.
Omer (37:55.690)
Yeah, it's a good thing you didn't, all those years back decide, I'm not going to throw any more money at TinyPass.
I'm going to go and do something else.
So one question before we go into the lightning round.
As you look back at this journey for the last, I guess, 10 years, what's been the hardest part of building this business?
Trevor Kaufman (38:15.760)
The hardest part of being an entrepreneur is what you put everybody else around you through.
You have these wonderful people who are kind enough to throw in their lot with you and have confidence in you, and you can't always please them.
Some don't make it along the way because they lose interest, or you do.
Some work very, very hard and make tremendous personal sacrifice.
Sometimes you tell somebody something and two weeks later you have to come back and tell them something else, and they have to adjust.
The hard part about being an entrepreneur for me is I would like to be only stable, patient, generous, and it's a really difficult business, and you don't always have the luxury of being all of those things, and that's hard.
I wish that entrepreneurship had been easier on my colleagues and my family.
That's the tough part for me.
Omer (39:15.660)
All right, let's wrap up and get onto the lightning round.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you, so just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Trevor Kaufman (39:24.380)
Yeah.
Omer (39:24.820)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Trevor Kaufman (39:27.980)
It's not the size of the deals you do, it's the velocity.
Omer (39:31.550)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Trevor Kaufman (39:34.510)
For me, in entrepreneurship, the best thing that I feel like I can do is get lots of input.
And when I have downtime, I read art books and coffee table books because that inspiration fuels me and fills me up.
Omer (39:50.270)
Yeah.
I think there's something about just getting away and thinking about something completely different that connects the neurons in interesting ways when you get back to work.
Trevor Kaufman (40:00.280)
Yeah.
You have to not lose your sense of wonder.
Right.
I was telling my sales team today, there's no sales without excitement.
Right.
And if you lose your excitement, it's all over.
So you have to keep that energy and excitement, enthusiasm.
And for me, consuming other people's creativity is such a great.
Is so affirming.
Omer (40:23.240)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Trevor Kaufman (40:27.000)
Determination.
Omer (40:28.680)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit.
Trevor Kaufman (40:31.480)
I keep a giant sketchpad on my desk so I can write things down as quickly as they occur to me so I don't have to open up an application and type.
That's been the best thing for me.
Omer (40:42.520)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
Trevor Kaufman (40:46.120)
I have new business ideas all the time for social networks, for other things.
The one everybody always likes the best is a video conferencing restaurant where there's booths pressed up against pane of glass in Los Angeles and other booths pressed up against a pane of glass in New York City.
And so you could take somebody to lunch in the other city and speak to them really fluidly in a telepresence way and buy them lunch and order from a waitress across the country.
I think that'd be really fun.
Omer (41:13.950)
Cool idea.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Trevor Kaufman (41:18.130)
I'm a really, really serious and avid cook.
I used to cook professionally and I think a lot of people know that.
Though I talk about it all, I make kitchen analogies all too much.
Omer (41:29.570)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Trevor Kaufman (41:32.450)
Oh, that's the same question.
I really love traveling.
I like to believe that being in motion slows time down and it's absolutely one of my favorite things to do.
And I'm always stealing a little extra time on work trips to go to museums or go sightseeing and it makes it all okay.
Omer (41:52.620)
Congratulations.
You got through the lightning round.
Trevor Kaufman (41:55.100)
Thank you.
Omer (41:57.740)
So if people want to find out more about piano, they can go to Piano I.O.
and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Where'd you hang out?
Trevor Kaufman (42:07.500)
They can go ahead and contact me on LinkedIn or email me at trevoriano
Omer (42:13.100)
IO Trevor, thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Thanks for sharing this story and condensing the last 10 years into useful nuggets in the last 45 minutes or so.
So I appreciate you doing that.
Congratulations on the success you've had with the business so far and I wish you and the team the best of success in the future.
Trevor Kaufman (42:33.620)
Thanks Omar.
I was honored to be on your show and I had a lot of fun.
Omer (42:37.060)
Cheers.
Trevor Kaufman (42:37.700)
Take care.
