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Paul Cimino and Christopher Keith took their experience from Madison Avenue and Wall Street, respectively, to form their brainchild Brilig, an advertising/data marketplace. 

This 1-year-old brainchild has a growing portfolio of over 60 clients. The company allows four parties: data providers, advertisers, analysts, and consumers to make exchanges and obtain more relevant material. When they say “marketplace,” they literally mean a place where new audiences can be created, sold, and purchased. The company’s mission is to build a community (of data providers, advertisers, analysts and consumers) that will use Brilig’s platform to surpass Google’s advertising ROI performance.

They call the latter’s advertising model of buying key words against a page rank algorithm ”monopolistic.” Instead, Brilig wants to make it easier for businesses and people to find each other and are working on a people rank system.

For consumers, Brilig’s recent deal with Bynamite helps folks fine tune information being collected about them. Paul explains,

The next evolutionary step of the internet is to become personalized for consumers. A consumer with full permission into what is being tracked about them, and even option out/opting out entirely. The web then works for us, instead of us just being some data point in a yield algorithm, which is the way the web works now. Consumer transparency into advertising is gonna change things quite a bit.

Paul is a long time veteran of startup world and compares the experience to an addiction. He finds it hard imagining having to go back to the corporate sector. After nearly two decades of startup life, I asked Paul the same thing I asked another recently interviewed entrepreneur:

What advice would you give to those who one day want to be in your shoes?

Make sure you want to do it. Entrepreneurs typically bootstrap a company for pretty extensive periods of time. I had a company that I started in the 90s, and we didn’t pay ourselves for over a year while we got the company going…

Things get tough for entrepreneurs when we miss time and revenue projections. Our best guesses at timeframes as to when we will hit goals are sometimes wrong. 

When we are a wrong about these timeframes and we need to become very flexible and think about the choices: Change your model? This is very hard for some entrepreneurs because they tend to fall in love with their ideas and visions. Scale back, cut back? This is hard because you have to cut salaries and lay off friends (very tough). Extreme dilution? This is what happens in most cases – that is, your financing sources will fund more but will want more for it. This is the way entrepreneurs lose control of their ventures. 

Sell your way out of trouble? That’s what I do—when faced with failure you need to rock and roll on the sales front, because failure is not an option.

Finally, you’ve gotta have what I call the ‘brass ring,’ which is the vision that the company could be worth something. Otherwise, you should just go work for Verizon…

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