Meeting with Russell Fradin, CEO of Adify

We visited the offices of Adify and we met with Russell Fradin, CEO and co-founder. He is young, probably my age, but with a lot of experience in Internet startups in the Silicon Valley.

Adify provides an online ad network. He mentioned that in 2005 he identified an opportunity because the situation for advertisers was very inefficient as there are millions of places to advertise. There is a massive fragmentation: users on average visit 23 sites per day. Adify was founded in 2005 and has raised ~$25M from Venrock, US Venture Partners, ABC and Time Warner. It currently employs ~80 people.

We talked about entrepreneurship related to his previous and current experiences:

• He decided to take money at a lower valuation just to work with the right folks (Venrock)
• Look for VCs that are going to be VCs in 15 years
• Adify grew from 30 to 80 employees in 1 year. Not everybody can be good
• Bringing senior people might be difficult. They have their own voice and the existing employees joined because of you, and not because of the new external senior guy
• You cannot fire people because it is difficult to find new people
• It is difficult to predict revenues in new markets. It is like selling a phone. If you are a telecom company and you only sell 10 phones (with free minutes, etc.) you do not know how much people are going to use it. Later on you have demographics, etc.
• In B2B do not charge anything upfront because it would take forever to close deals. Instead charge a percentage of revenues.
• "Pick business/ideas that solve real problems even if the idea is not that sexy"
• "If you want to get to one point, go there now and do not go to another place that will eventually take you there"