Often times when an entrepreneur thinks up a brand new business idea, the concept derives from a field of which he has a deep understanding. It's less likely, however, that the entrepreneur tries to make it work within his current corporation's conditions.
In 2007 when Ed Montes, co-founder and CEO of Boston-based Digilant, first came up with the idea for his programmatic ad tech company, he was serving as the Manager Director of Havas Digital North America. With years of rich experience in the world of advertising, he began to pick up on a signs of subtle, yet inevitable, shift towards a more media driven model of promotion.
Around the same time, Yahoo! had acquired Right Media Exchange, a young company that moved into the programmatic space early on in the game. Other ad tech startups seemed to be cropping out as well.
Yet Montes’s first idea wasn’t to embark on his own startup journey; it was to propose the idea to Havas:
“My initial thinking was that the Havas Group should really invest in this area. I went about trying to figure out where we would go with it, and planned to present to the Group as an internal business,” explained the entrepreneur.
Though he set the bait for a programmatic media company, Havas didn’t bite. Montes quickly became aware of two things: “The business shouldn’t be a part of an advertising group, and that because Havas didn’t want to fund the idea, it needed to be an independent endeavor."
While he didn’t quite get the reaction he wanted from Havas, having to branch out on his own ultimately worked to the his advantage. Montes’s pitch happened to perk the attention of the Rodes family, a fund based in Barcelona, which provided the company’s financing.
In January 2009, Montes brought together a handful of people from engineering to finance to form Digilant. Since then, the company has hired nearly every year; the successful startup currently employees 120 people out of a dozen offices worldwide. Now in a place to pay it forward, Montes has a few tips to offer the prospective founder:
When it comes to building your beginning team, trust is of the utmost importance.
“For your founding team, there has to be a huge level of trust. I purposefully started with people I knew for several years,” explained Montes. “You need to trust them because there are no processes in place yet. These are the people who will be able to help you develop the company and develop those processes.”
“As changes start to get bigger, you can start hiring for chemistry, you don’t have to be as cognizant of needing to trust them,” explained Montes. “There are professional processes in place, and you have to worry less.”
At some point, you’ll be flying the plane while you’re building it.
In late 2011, Digilant went on a major hiring binge to scale its product and support a sudden increase in demand. In a matter of two months, the number of engineers went from nine to over twenty.
“When you get market acceptance and the confidence to build on, you have to build a big scalable product or build sales demand and hope the product can catch up,” said Montes. “We tried to do both.”
Don’t overlook culture.
“I wrongly believed if you had really good talent and worked really hard as the leader...that the culture of the company would take care of itself,” admitted the co-founder. “But not everyone has that same passion for it. You really need to develop that culture and that common purpose or esprit de coeur.”
Historically, the company’s office space had a fairly spartan look due to its “Lean Startup” mentality; now, however, Digilant has spread out into an open floor plan and enhanced employees’ sense of individual accountability.
“The culture is a huge part of how [the company] is going to live and breathe when you’re not around,” Montes said.
