English Major’s ‘Simple Idea’ Worth $850 Million
By Michael Zitz, The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Va.
Apr. 12–RICHMOND — He was supposed to be an English teacher.
Instead, in a roundabout way, he’s become a business teacher.
A very rich one.
Eleven years ago, Michael Walrath graduated from the University of Richmond with a B.A. in English.
“Business,” he muttered at a UR Robins School of Business honors convocation this week with a smirk. “I didn’t understand it. I didn’t like it. I knew the University of Richmond had a good business school. I might have been able to find it with a map.”
It turned out, at least in Walrath’s case, that imagination and a willingness to embrace change were more important than business classes.
Walrath, who will turn 33 next week, founded the New York-based Right Media online advertising firm in 2003. It was based on what Ad Age calls: “a simple idea, really: Non-premium ad inventory can be worth more by increasing the odds buyer and seller find each other in an open, real-time market.”
A simple $850 million idea, that is. That’s how much Ad Age says Right Media is worth to Yahoo.
He was CEO of the company before its acquisition by Yahoo in July 2007. He’s now Yahoo’s senior vice president of advertising marketplaces, and he played a key role in developing AMP!, a new Yahoo advertising management platform designed to significantly simplify the process of buying and selling ads online. Yahoo announced plans for the platform on Sunday. The Web portal, which is trying to keep up with Google, says AMP! will allow advertisers to select audiences from across multiple sites and networks and to “innovate on top of the transparent marketplace,” Yahoo said in a press release. Plans call for AMP! to launch in the third quarter, when it’s slated to be introduced to Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium.
Walrath spent three years at online ad pioneer Double-Click, where he came to the conclusion that the system for buying and selling online advertising was inefficient. There was no structure to connect supply and demand.
He created an exchange called RMX that Business 2.0 magazine describes as “a kind of eBay for display-ad inventory.”
It launched in April 2005, and by the fall of that year the number of impressions traded on the exchange had reached 20 billion a month.
Walrath was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of The Year 2007.
“Hundreds of people made Right Media what it is,” he said. “I tend to get more credit than I deserve.
“Eventually, hopefully, you’ll reach a place where you get more credit than you deserve,” Walrath said to laughter from UR business students.
Burning ambition is not ingrained in Walrath, who lives in Port Washington, N.Y., and has children ages 7, 5 and 3. Thinking outside the box is.
He took his first job out of college “because I could play lots of golf. It was a good job. I was a bartender.”
He left the bartender job when a New York stockbrokerage firm hired him for a bottom-rung job. He took the train from Connecticut and showed up at 7:30 a.m. six days a week, making 200 to 300 cold calls a day. He got, at best, five positive responses a day.
After eight months of that soulless grind, Walrath’s boss called him in to his office to say he was head-and-shoulders above the other young associates — and that someday he’d be wealthy, secure and work banker’s hours.
Instead of feeling elated, the idea of a lifetime in a career he hated horrified Walrath. He woke up in a cold sweat, trembling. He resigned the next day.
“The next morning I went back to bartending and golf,” he said. “When you’re chasing something and you realize what you’re chasing isn’t the right thing, you can’t get out fast enough. When you stop going after something that means something, to you, you stop learning. Your mind closes.”
Three years later, Double-Click began hiring large numbers of people, near the end of the dot-com boom.
“It was a company worth $12 billion losing $100 million a year,” he said about Double-Click and the bubble. “The world had gone completely crazy.”
But that insanity presented an opportunity to bring sanity.
“This is an important lesson [about] change,” Walrath said. “Every time you lay somebody off, there’s an opportunity, if you have the will to work hard and pick up the balls that have dropped. In the world of Internet advertising, there weren’t any experts yet.
“You can fear change, or you can embrace it. In business and life, you can play the disruptor or the disrupted,” he said. “Disrupting is more fun.”
It’s as simple as choosing between being an agent of change or a loser, he said bluntly.
“If you fear change, consider how terrible it feels to be on the wrong side of it and left behind.
“Most of all, try to have fun with what you’re doing,” Walrath said. “If your job isn’t fun, try to make it fun.”
And if you can’t make it fun, change.
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