Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast From the Ground Up where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their success, challenges, and lessons learned. We hope you be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. Zack Dugow is the CEO of Insticator, Bop and Oco, where he bridges revenue opportunities to online communities and ad technology, leading a global team overseeing 2,000 publishers and over 1,000 advertisers and 500 million users. He's earned accolades including a Top 40 Under 40 CEO from Crain's New York and won awards for Insticator from the Inc 5000 to Deloitte Fast 500. He's an active member of YPO, Forbes Tech Council, investor, and mentor to other entrepreneurs. Zack, welcome to the show.
Zack Dugow: Great to be here, Jake.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well before we dive in here, you and I, you and I have both lived in New York, which I love by the way. Now you're in Miami. What led you to Miami?
Zack Dugow: So I still spend some time in New York, but I am primarily in Miami. Um I think uh there was probably three or four things. The first being um, during COVID we had our whole team go remote and uh it really worked very well for the rest of our team and myself. And we started, started expanding where we looked for talent as opposed to just being like, "Hey, is, is somebody in or near one of our four or five offices, can they be anywhere?" And um I have family in Miami, but more than that there's also like a thriving business ecosystem. There's a, you know, a lot of new exciting like YPO chapters and tech companies. And um and then uh frankly a part of it was also just like where would I rather wake up in December if I'm going to be working from home? Would I rather be in 10 degree weather in the freezing cold snow or I rather be looking at the ocean? And look, you're, you're speaking to somebody who, who was born and raised in, in Manhattan, New York um, and so I still love New York City, but um you know I've really come to appreciate everything that Miami and Southern Florida has to offer. And uh I think it's um, it's a, it's been a nice, it's been a nice adjustment and change of pace. Plus also you know... and people don't talk... people talk about it plenty, but the tax benefit of not being a New York resident is also a very big plus.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: No doubt about that, we've heard a lot about that. Um that's great. You know, many entrepreneurs we've talked to on this show and just in general have started companies well before they got out of school. Um some in high school, some earlier. When did you start your first company?
Zack Dugow: I was in college, um so I was going into senior in college and so um I guess 21 in that range.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: And in college you know you're going to school, you're developing as a person, you're kind of coming into your own socially. What was it that drove you to create a company during college, and what specifically did you create?
Zack Dugow: Yep. So I was always curious about business and um how businesses made money and, and in different ways. And so you know, the first company that I started, um we did internet ticketing for food and liquor brands that had like a, like a whole promotional marketing element to it. So think of it like we had a ticketing platform that was like half tech, half services that would sponsor events, have liquor, food and beverage companies sponsor the ticketing platform and then have like fees associated to it, and the whole promotional team that was supported. Um and that really just came from like grassroots being in New York City and seeing an opportunity. And one thing led to another. There wasn't like this aha moment, there wasn't like "oh this is my broad vision for this." It sort of just uh created, got created out of necessity um and uh yeah just expanded. And so had that company for about, before selling it in, at the end of 2011, beginning of 2012. So um before starting Insticator, which we launched in uh July of 2012.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Amazing. Let's get into Insticator. I know that uh for those out there you're in a space that you know really well uh, online content. And I'll let you kind of get into your platform specifically, but walk us through what was the idea behind Insticator when you started it, and where it's at today, and what it... what problem it solves?
Zack Dugow: Yeah, completely different. And the way I like to talk about it is most people Jake don't realize or think about that a lot of successful tech companies start out as one thing, pivot entirely into what will drive value. So like YouTube started out as video dating. It was called YouTube and Hookup, and they pivoted into "Broadcast Yourself." I don't know, did you know that?
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I didn't know that. Now you know that!
Zack Dugow: Flickr, the image sharing uh platform, was a role-playing strategy game, but all people wanted to do was share the photos.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.
Zack Dugow: You know, um Twitter was, was uh called Odeo and it was, they were podcasting. And then Apple entered the market and [they] adjusted into micro-blogging. The, the point being is, is that a lot of companies when they start, their hypothesis is not what actually ends up gaining traction in the marketplace. And the teams and the companies that succeed, in a lot of the time in my view, are the teams that adjust fast enough to the market and building something that will drive value. Um and oftentimes it's very different from what they set out to... not in all cases, right. Like Instagram set out to be a photo editing app and that's what, but there's in, in a lot of cases. Um and so what Insticator first was, was a B2C web application where people could predict outcomes of TV shows and sporting events that they could win points to redeem for rewards. So think of it like you'd go to the site, you'd predict what happens in The Vampire Diaries online or Game of Thrones, and if you were right you'd get a bunch of points. And you could take those points, be like "alright I'm going to redeem this for a, a Game of Thrones jersey" or "I'm gonna redeem this for a Vampire Diaries pendant." And the idea was to be ad supported and really incentivize these exciting behaviors. So that's what Insticator originally was.
We launched with that, had success with that, got to like 50,000 or so users. But in order to really get scale, we realized we had to kind of pivot the technology to be an embedded experience and say "Okay, instead of trying to get all of the excited fan communities into one place, let's go to where the fan communities are." And we tweaked our technology to be what is currently Insticator Content Engagement Unit, where users engage with trivia, polling, content recirculation, and then we use all this data to feed this back to the publisher for a better experience, or to the advertiser so they can monetize that user more effectively.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So who pays for your service?
Zack Dugow: So um... and that's, so that's just one of our products. So that product is an example, is ad supported. So essentially we put it on a publishing site and then we have a revenue share with them. So, so we then have advertisers that'll buy advertising connected to the experience. And we'll say, "Okay great, we're going to pay you 70% or 50% or whatever that specific deal is, or of that specific ad space." Um typically a 50/50, and then we'll pay them out a percentage of the ad revenue that's generated. So connected to our technology is ad units that advertisers buy space on, we collect that revenue, and pay out a percentage of that to the publishers we work with for our Content Engagement Units.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love that. You know, the world's gone to digital and it seems to continue to evolve. As a company today... and you started this 10 plus years now...
Zack Dugow: Back more than that, yeah. 11 years ago, yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Where are you as a company uh as an employee size and really just as an organization?
Zack Dugow: Um yeah, so we're about, we're around 90 or so people, full-time and contractors and stuff included. And we've acquired companies. Um so we do a lot of different things. So one of the products we have is what we initially pivoted into, which was Content Engagement Units. The other part of our Insticator business is our commenting product, which we acquired and grew, where users can log in and comment. You've seen it probably on a lot of, on thousands of sites, you just didn't realize it was our product unless you looked for the "Powered by Insticator". And we use all this data and use natural language processing to scan comments and bucket people to audiences.
And about three years ago we acquired a company called OKO Digital, where we are now one of the, the leaders in CTV monetization. So connected TV, like smart TVs like Roku and a whole host of other smart TVs. We drive monetization by bringing in advertisers where you'll see ads through these connected TVs or broadcast video on demand, as well as managing all of the ad units for publishers or for an in-app publisher. And so that's become a very big part of our business and what we do via acquisition.
And then we also have um uh two other parts to our business. One is a company called Balihoo, where for brands we localize all of the ad creatives through search, social, display, video, and the landing pages. So a company like Kohler, who's a customer of ours, we'll make sure that you get an ad unit, Jake, for the Kohler store you're closest to within a five-mile radius with an ad campaign and ad creative that's custom to you and that store. So that we drive a higher return on ad spend, typically like 5 to 1, which is really good for the industry.
And then just last week (and I could talk about it now), we acquired another company on Wednesday of last week. It's exciting, based out of Australia, where we have a very cool CTV reporting dashboard that we're offering to customers, and we do managed service media spend. So as you can hear, there's a lot of evolution from what we started out doing, which was you know, predictions on TV shows, into really kind of the four different core elements of our business today.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, there's a lot of companies that build organically and as they grow and they scale, they're always trying to figure out, like you talked about, adapting and figuring out how to do it quickly so they can survive or maintain or scale. Um but earlier stage companies don't often go into acquisition mode. I mean you look at bigger companies like Amazon or Oracle or Microsoft... maybe not so much Microsoft but other companies... well actually Microsoft too, um you know, their growth by acquisition is very much a strategy. You started doing this as well. But before doing it, did you have experience of how to assess a company, how to acquire it? Is it a bet you place and hope for the best? And then post-acquisition, what have you learned that's been really helpful in making sure that the integration goes well and what you think is going to happen happens?
Zack Dugow: Yeah, that's a really good question. So to speak to your first question: did we have experience in doing it? No. So we learned a lot through each acquisition, and each one got progressively better and better through the process because our team became so much more effective. There's still a lot of things to learn. Um I would say there's, there's four key things we look for now when we're looking at a business. Um and the first is actually very different than what most people think. Before really thinking about and evaluating like "here's the revenue" and "here's the, that market opportunity" and so on, it's great to actually understand the culture of that business. And when I say that, I mean like: how are decisions made? What is the work culture at that company? Do people respond to emails after five o'clock? In the US that may be very common. That may not be common at all if you're based in you know, somewhere, some different country in Europe or so on and so forth. Understanding like what is the culture of the business, their values is really great, and understanding what is the difference between your values and their values. And there's going to be differences. You just want to go into, into those open eyes. You can understand more about like how, like call it like the nucleus of that business thinks in terms of: are they customer first? Cool. Are they, are they, are they team member first? So if they're customer first, does that mean they expect team members to jump on an issue if it's one o'clock in the morning? Or if they're like... so there's a whole host of a bunch of different ways to run a business, but one of them that we spend a lot of time on and talk about internally is the culture of the organization as well as you know, the competitive market and landscape.
Um the team: when we go to, when we acquire a company, we never look to get rid of team members. Like we're not uh like call it you know, the way that private equity will look at a company where they want to buy a company and go "okay, we've got 30% of synergy, we're gonna fire all these people and we're going to get an extra 5 million in EBITDA." We're... if we think we need to go in to let go of a whole bunch of the team, we're probably, we're not going to be doing that acquisition. For us, we look to find where there's been success and traction and that we can expand off of a really good base. And maybe there's a great team and product that has even more potential with more resources and synergies.
And then we look at what else, how can 2 + 2 equal 10? Like how can what they do and what other parts of our business do come together and add a lot more value in the aggregate? Um do they have team members with expertise that we don't have that can help in multiple business functions? And so to answer your first part, you know we've made a ton of mistakes along the way, but learned a lot that I think have made us be... we're a lot more effective at acquisitions now than we...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: How much um... when you talk about the culture, is something that you, I don't know, make sure that your own culture also adapts to the other company? Is there any combination where you guys say "you know we need to be a little bit more flexible how we operate?" And maybe tell us a little about the culture of Insticator when you started it from the beginning [to] where it's at today. What are the, what are the things that are important to you as a company? If others are maybe hearing about, about you and say, "you know what, that's a company I want to work for," what are they, what are they getting into?
Zack Dugow: Yeah, so to your first part, I think the answer is yes. And you need to, you need to see where the difference is and where do you flex. I think a fast way to lose a lot of or all of the team members of a company you just acquired is to be like "here's the way that we do things, we don't change any of those things, you do it our way" and you're very rigid. I don't think that that's like a recipe for success. So it doesn't mean you give up your core value, but it means you want to understand how you're different and where the commonalities are and see if there's opportunities to flex. Um and that is like a, I think a much higher, you know, stronger recipe for success.
And that's really important not just on that front, but with team members as well. Like when you're thinking about promotions and responsibilities, you want to make sure it's like a, a meritocracy. It's not like "oh these people are part of Insticator, those people are part of OKO, those people part of Balihoo so we promote these people first." You want to make sure there's like, people can see that that's very visually uh clear that it's you know the best person for the role, and it's across multiple orgs. Um sorry, can you just repeat the second part of your question?
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, just in terms of the culture, what's your like core principles of your culture?
Zack Dugow: So we have three core values. Um the first is "Sleeves Up". And that, for us, we broke out core behaviors that exemplify the core values. And that means we really look for people who want to get their hands dirty and they don't like to lead from afar. So there's nothing wrong with it, but use Microsoft as an example, right? There may be people who are used to being managers of managers and they kind of give a little bit of high-level direction and the rest of the team kind of executes. And maybe that works really well for those businesses. For us, we really like when uh the people who are managing teams know how to do the actual thing for that team. You know, if you're a design leader, you know how to actually write you know, make the designs in um you know, Illustrator or Figma. If you're an engineer leader, you know how to write the code, you know how to comment it, you know how to check it. We just think that for our culture that works a lot more effectively, that you can lead by doing. And you can, doesn't mean you're always doing all of the work, but it means you understand it at least. Um that you know, you don't have a sales leader who's never actually sold and there were you know, some strategic MBA who came in and read books about it but doesn't know how to like get their hands dirty.
Uh our two other core values are "Be Defiantly Great" and... "Be Defiantly Great", we look for people who are curious and want to learn and want to grow. And there's a lot of people who are like "Look, I go to work, I do my thing and then I leave." And there's nothing wrong with that, but that's probably not for us. Like for our culture and vibe, the people who are the most curious um have the biggest impact and the most positive impact.
And lastly um you know, what we call "100% Viewability". It's a play on the ad word, but what we really look for as people is for us to be transparent and direct, even in, or especially during, direct and hard conversations. Um that, that can lead to... and a lot of times that makes people very uncomfortable. And I think though ultimately it's a better way for running a business and it's much more effective at aligning people to be direct, even if that's surprising. And what you'd asked about before with cultures actually, kind of Netflix did a great job breaking this out where they broke out geo-cultures um around power distance. Like if you are in the most direct culture is people who are Dutch. Like even much more direct than Americans. And then you've got like kind of like the US and then like all the way to the right you have cultures that are super hierarchical. Like if you are more junior, you do not speak up. Like meaning if you're in Japan and you're doing business and let's say you have something that counteracts somebody who's your manager, you don't speak up even if that might cost the company a lot of money or problems or resources. Or in India as well, you would never have a very senior person sitting at the lunch table with what's called a "fresher", somebody who's brand new. And so you want to be mindful of those differences so that you can at least address them and be aware of those geo-cultural differences to then be more effective at like being direct, if you will. And still that'll be surprising for people, but I think it's very helpful long term at least for our business.
So we have team members around the globe, and so leaning into that direct part can be quite challenging and surprising and nuanced for people when it's new for them. Because they haven't, maybe in their career they haven't had an experience where it's okay for junior people to be direct with senior people and say "Hey, I think we got that wrong, let's fix this," because at their prior company somebody would get fired for doing that. So you... I think being, for, for us, that directness actually helps move the needle in a positive way.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. I want to go back a little bit to the people on your team. You talked about you have 90 people uh, you're distributed, highly distributed, multiple countries. You know, during COVID a lot of companies had to pivot in terms of where, where their workers were located, whether it was in San Francisco, New York, the Midwest, and then it went to Canada and then South America and then Asia. And you know, cost of labor makes things different and easier in some capacity when you're scaling a company. Also making sure that you get the culture aspect right with who you bring on and really how to manage that. What's worked for you in terms of finding people internationally in different countries, and then also managing them effectively?
Zack Dugow: So there's two parts, and it's interesting we've had internal discussions about this. The first is, we really try to centralize that most working hours overlap with EST time so that people can have overlap with their team members, with their colleagues. Except in one case where like the customers are based in a totally different time zone or like certain exceptions that make sense. Um but so that you need that overlap. And I think it's important to set that expectation going in. "So hey, um you know, our expectation is that you're going to be available from these hours roughly EST." And I think what's been fortunate for a lot of American companies is a lot of actually international cultures have adjusted to that. Like you have offices in India that are open to you know 3:00 am their time because they're used to providing support for the US. You have... so we have some team members in the Philippines. You have I think it's something like 20 to 30% of uh Manila, the capital of the Philippines, works on EST time. They have bars that start their happy hour at 8:00 a.m. because that's when people finish their work shift. Okay? And I, I didn't believe it and then I saw it and I was like "oh my god!" because I went to Manila to see some team there years ago. And so I think aligning that is really important so you, even though people are broken out across the world there can still be that central connection in terms of overlap and seeing each other and, and Zoom meetings. I think that's one part that's really important. And then in terms of... you would ask, sorry, you'd ask that and then... maybe we can edit out the parts where I'm clarifying your question?
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, no problems. We'll get, we'll get you. Second part, yeah, uh in terms of what tools or what's worked for you to make sure that you're managing your people effectively remotely.
Zack Dugow: Yeah. So um we use a few different tools. Slack is a big thing for us. So we have Slack with customers, internal like, so many different Slack channels. Like the vast majority of our org operates on Slack. We use Zoom, um even though I think we're moving to Google Hangouts in March because you know their whole data storing PR policies changed. We use ClickUp for project management, where it kind of keeps track of... we use Confluence for documentation so people can still you, do their work even when there isn't overlap. And there's a lot of um... and then a bunch of our different teams have specific kind of sub-specific tools, like our engineering team works on GitHub and there's a whole host of kind of sub-specific tools um that have sort of worked well for us in that.
The other thing that we look for also, and have gotten a lot better with this, but when you're hiring internationally to really make sure that um people speak fluent English and they speak it well. If, if that's the language of your business, that's really important. Uh what, what we found is, and it's not because... if that, if somebody is less confident in their English abilities, they're actually much more nervous to share what they think. And they have far less impact on the business as a result. So somebody who's less confident in their ability to speak English if you're hiring internationally. So we really actually look to vet that very early on, that people speak very good English. They can communicate what they're thinking, feeling without being shy. And the more communication there, the better.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: What country have you found the most success in hiring really good English speakers?
Zack Dugow: Well I mean Canada's obvious, but that doesn't count probably towards your question because you know, English is native to Canada. Um and we also have a team in the UK, so they speak English before the US does! But um, I think um India, the Philippines, and the Ukraine have actually worked out I think very well for us in terms of that. But even within that you, you just I think need to set a very high bar early on on the proficiency of English and they have grading levels for this. You could look at the grading levels and say, "hey, this is the grading level." Uh I think it's important to set a high standard early on for that. So those three countries I think have worked really well for us in making sure that level of English and confidence in that is um essential, both verbal and written.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. You know, as an entrepreneur you encounter a lot of things that you have to learn on the fly. A lot of areas it might be fearful to dive into that you don't know what the outcome is going to be. Ultimately you need courage to make big decisions often. And I always look at it as in life, you, you have to step up at some point to get the things that are really valuable to you. It might be asking that girl out that there's a little bit of fear, but you know what, when you look back in your life the things that you really valued, you had to step up and make it happen, whether you got, got it or not. Um aside from that, in business acquiring a company, you got to step up and ask the questions, put the price out you're willing to pay, whatever the you know issues are, whatever the fears could be. What's one experience that you look at your current company that you had some fears around, you had to make a big decision, you had to use a lot of courage and you did it, and it paid off?
Zack Dugow: So I'll take one even from this year. So when we were buying Balihoo, uh we were in a bidding process. And we had set a like maximum bid internally um for what that was going to be, and we were bidding against another company to buy them. And you know, it got to the part in the bidding where it hit our, it hit our number. Meaning we had said, "okay we're not going to go above this number." Now I, I had room with our, our board to go higher than that, but like internally in our discussions. And I was like, "Man," I, I like was thinking really quickly and I was like "Man, are we gonna let this go away?" And it was so funny, so it came back, and it came back. And so then I decided, after looking, like I had an extra 30 seconds. And that 30 seconds I was like, "Fuck it, we're going for it." And so we bid an extra $50,000 more, right. And they could have bid a hundred more, 200 more, like whatever it would have been, right? And it might have just like superseded us or whatever. But I went 50,000 more than our initial kind of internal limit if you will. And we won! And it was like shocking to me! Like it was that little difference. Now of course we had no idea what was their max price to pay and they had no idea what our max was, but if we had stopped, we would have lost! And that 50 grand difference, that like extra little push the envelope (not that I'm saying $50,000 not a lot of money, but you get it in, in the scheme of acquiring a company that's going to be you know a huge asset for your business). And so I look back on that, I remember I was like, "Wow!" Because I just as easily could have been like, "You know what, we, we had our number, we didn't hit the thing" or "we weren't gonna exceed this." And I'm really happy that we did um and uh you know we took that, that courageous step there. And it is a very... it, for all the diligence you do in the world, you never really know all the things until you've met the team you've acquired, that you've integrated them, you've spent time with them. And you can't know those things when you're bidding or just from like some diligence over 30 to 60 days. So you do your best to learn as much as you can. Uh but um yeah, that was uh I remember that was an important moment even in these last 12 months.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: It's important. It also is important because it's not just you making a decision. It's also, you know, the team behind you and your investors wanted to know what's going to happen. And uh yeah, that's great. It's, it's little moments that make up you know our lives that you look back on, and, and it sounds like that was one of them. That's great.
Zack Dugow: Yeah, really cool.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Um as a company now, um as you continue to build and, and grow, um you know it's important to make the right decisions. But I think maybe one of the, the most important decisions is, is making sure the people on your team are the right fit. But more importantly the founders and the co-founders. And I usually ask this in the beginning, but did you, how did you find your co-founders if you did, and do you have co-founders?
Zack Dugow: So do not have co-founders. But we have you know, so we have a team and some of our team's been together a long time. Like our CTO has been with us for, with me for 10 years. So you know, in a lot of ways he's like a co-founder in a lot of ways. But before him even, we had an engineer who we had hired to be our first engineer, or I had hired to be our first engineer. We were three people in the Juan Valdez Cafe on 57th and 2nd Ave in Manhatt- so no one was like all this, it's like we were sitting there before we went to an office that we were paying, we were paying $1,200 a month for our first office on 20th and Broadway.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool.
Zack Dugow: If you've ever been to that area... Design Within Reach. We were on the seventh floor and you had to walk up six flights. There was a manually operated elevator. So if the elevator wasn't working or it was like after 5:00 you had to walk up or down six or seven flights. But we needed to save money. So that was our first office. But so our first engineer joined us, and um you know I think he was with us about six months or seven months. And uh, this goes back a ways, but you know naturally we didn't have a lot of money for salaries or pay if, if anything. And of course I didn't take a uh salary I think for the first four years of the business and so on and so forth because he was, I was just investing money in to keep us afloat. Um and I think it was like six or seven or eight months in, and he had been married and, and he was going to have a baby. And he was like "Look, I, you know my, my wife wants me to get a real you know, quote unquote like a paying, like a real paying..." You know he was getting paid, but he was getting paid like a tiny amount of money. Um and so you know ultimately it obviously you know didn't work out to, to keep him on board because um you know he needed to, and I, I totally respect that. And I get it, like a lot of things in life is timing, and you know that wasn't going to be the right time for him. Um so yeah. But so you know, was... but to your question, I... no, no formal co-founders in that sense. But um you know a lot of our early team has been super helpful to help us get to where, to get to where we are. But you know, I've certainly had to wear a lot of burden myself as a solo founder from the early days.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah that's great. You're um in a rare space where a lot of companies are you know have co-founders and they scale. Or maybe they've had companies before with co-founders and found out they really don't like that process where you want to be the one making you know the decisions or be in a process where you don't have to hear push back if you want to go a certain direction, you got the freedom to do that, which I think by the way is great. And I've had both, I had co-founders that we scaled up and got acquired, it was great. And then went solo and I, I felt there was benefits to both sides of it. So, so which one do you, which one do you favor or does it depend on the business? Or how do you think about it?
Zack Dugow: Yeah, I personally like um the solo founder but with a strong leadership team that feels like you know a founding team really, and, and for a lot of aspects it really is with equity and whatnot. Um exactly. That's, that's kind of how I feel about it.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Um where does, where, where does your company go from here? You've, you, you've acquired three or four companies, you're kind of scaling up. We're heading into 2024 already, um the markets are a little bit wonky but see, seem like they're kind of getting more clarity. Where, what, what, what's on the agenda for you post acquisition and as you get into the new year?
Zack Dugow: So we're on a... so we're seeing a lot of organic growth. So we've been really fortunate on that, that we are firing on all cylinders and hiring great engineers and ad ops people and account managers and salespeople. Um for us, we're also on a buying, you know we're looking at other companies we can acquire. So we have very specific targets we want to get to over the next two to three years and then evaluate you know. But I, I think there's a lot of exciting products and technology that we want to bring to our customers that we could gain benefit from in acquiring. So over the next year to two years we'd look to you know acquire maybe an extra two to four different companies depending on certain sets of circumstances. We're talking to some right now. Um so you know, our game plan is really to grow a lot organically and through acquisition over the next 24 months.
And so you know something I think to keep in mind is like when there's always a good time for growth... so what I mean by like "there's always a good time for growth," I mean like you have times like in 2021 when like valuations are super high and money is super cheap relative to like interest rates, and you can raise capital very easily. And you could use that capital to grow your business. When times are very difficult like they are now, meaning interest rates are super high and the economy is super shaky, that level of inorganic growth and the ability to buy other companies at a price that's maybe much more reasonable or feasible than it would have been in 2021. And so I you know, I highly encourage other CEOs and entrepreneurs to look at where the inorganic growth levers [are] in your business um you know that you can tap because there could be opportunities while the markets aren't strong, but there could be great products out there and teams that are available. And if we hadn't looked for those opportunities and levers, we would be in a much different position than we are today, today than we would, than we were four years ago as an example when we started acquiring.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: And when you go into acquisition mode um do you bring in a firm to help in the process of diligence and assessing you know the operation, financials, or do you kind of learn as you go, do it on your own and, and then have like a legal team come in? What, what's been your recipe for success?
Zack Dugow: So we do all of this internally. Um and I don't think there's a right or wrong to that. I think you can be successful with you know, paying a big firm like a McKinsey to come in, and they'll probably point out things that maybe you don't know or so on and so forth. I think for us and our industry, and the different industries we play in are very nuanced, and that like our team are really experts at what we do. I think it would be very difficult to find like a consultant who would know more than our internal teams and would be able to be like, "Oh, look at this area of net dollar retention" or "this or that" that would like really change the way we think about it. All of that being said, um you know I think we're open to trying that at some point, uh but I think that's worked for us.
Because a part of it is also like uh an education. So we've evaluated companies and chosen not to move forward with the acquisition because of what we discovered in the diligence or in the evaluation process. But your team learns a lot through that process. Like you get to understand how the new team members think, how they feel, how the business has trended, how they've marketed themselves. Like the diligence process is actually like a very good education process for your internal teams on what's happening in the marketplace, in the landscape. Plus um you know, these new team members are going to be working with [them], so it's actually in a lot of ways really great. Like I would not favor... like if we could bring in some external consultants to just do all the diligence... they're like, "Great, now we've acquired them," I think it would be very difficult for us because it'd be like, "Wait, where, like how are all the customers situated? How have they broken out this? How have they broken out that?" At least for us. I'm sure it's different if you're acquiring, you know Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn and you're acquiring you know 2,000 people and it's a public company. It's probably very... there's a lot of other variables at play um than for us at this stage. But um you know, so far doing this internally has worked very well. But we're also bolstering our internal capabilities on that, so adding internal team members that have you know experience on those fronts and different kind of capabilities on visa v M&A.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Well Zack, you're on an amazing journey. I love the growth, I love the process of how you've grown. Um if people or companies wanted to find you or find your company, how would they find Insticator?
Zack Dugow: insticator.com. Or find me on LinkedIn, Zack Dugow. Or shoot me an email, zack.dugow@insticator.com. And um you know always happy to help if I can. So if I can be helpful in any way, happy to help. Um you know we are where we are today in part because we've had some a lot of, lot of very helpful people who've been wonderful to us. And so happy to be helpful and pay it forward in any way I can.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well thanks Zack for jumping on here today. Huge shout out to you for taking the time, and to our, all of our listeners for listening. It means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today, on Halloween by the way. This is Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all in the next episode. Until then, take care.
Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, we can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.
This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market. And they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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