Capturing Intent In Non-Search Performance Marketing: Zephrin Lasker, CEO Of Pontiflex (Part 2)

Sramana: What happened after your attempt to get Beautility up and running did not work?

Zephrin Lasker: I spent time thinking about what to do. I had spent a lot of time thinking about the go-to-market and marketing strategies that we were going to use. Some of the people I had hired to work at Beautility ended up working at various ad agencies in the city. They hired me at two or three different advertising agencies. I spent the most time at I33, which was eventually purchased by Commerce One.

Sramana: What role did you play there?

Zephrin Lasker: I had a few different roles. I was a technical project manager, which was a great experience. I was managing large advertising campaigns and large corporate redesigns for companies like Sprint. They were very large enterprise projects. I found the intersection of marketing technology with the Web product sales. That eventually turned into a lot of early performance marketing.

We looked at a lot of different ways to acquire customers for Sprint. We looked at CPA, CPL basis, and things like that. That has formed the basis for a lot of what I have done. I quit that job in 2002. I felt I had learned enough and I really wanted to get back to working for myself. I saw a lot of the performance marketing work we were doing and felt it could become something bigger.

I then left and started the North Roads Group. I was a small advertising agency, and I ran that company for four years. That company has grown and become part of Pontiflex. We did some of the first cost-for-lead deals with the New York Times, Monster.com, CareerBuilder, Lycos, United, and other companies. I was representing my customers to publishers, and I would ask them to help me generate leads for customers like eFax. We would generate custom deals for each customer.

The deals took months, but there was high demand for them and they were very successful. I realized that we could not build a technology platform that took three months per cycle. Fortunately, I had developed a great network of friends in New York who worked in marketing and technology. I explained that cost-per-lead would become a great market and that nobody had built a DoubleClick for cost-per-lead, and I pitched the idea of building that platform in 2006.

Eventually we created a new entity which was called Pontiflex. There are three co-founders of this company: Roshan Bangera, who has a Java development background and had come from IBM; Geoff Grauer, who had a security background and came from Amazon.com; and me.

Sramana: How did the three of you come together?

Zephrin Lasker: We were friends first. We have known each other since 2001. We worked together at a few different agencies. When I started North Roads, they helped me on a consulting business. That is a huge advantage because we know how we all work and we have trust in one another’s work.

Sramana: When you decided to come together and create this company, did you all agree to work for equity?

Zephrin Lasker: It was all based on sweat equity. I had some operations that was enough revenue for one person but not enough to support all three founders. We would have company meetings Tuesday nights around my dining room table. Nobody drew a paycheck for the first two years. We all had other jobs. I was funding the legal fees, which were some of the biggest expenses.

We wanted to have a working prototype that could move data and show ads before we went to try and raise capital. I saw people get funded on paper in 2000, and it ended badly. I wanted to have something solid to raise money against.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Capturing Intent In Non-Search Performance Marketing: Zephrin Lasker, CEO Of Pontiflex
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