Podcasts about Freewheel

In this episode of The Refresh News, host Kait unpacks a headline-heavy week across the advertising industry, setting the stage for big Cannes conversations. From Warner Bros. Discovery's strategic split to Mark Read's departure from WPP, and a flurry of pre-Cannes product rollouts, this episode highlights how the future of media, agency relevance, and AI-powered innovation are all colliding in real time.  - Warner Bros. Discovery will divide into two focused businesses—Streaming & Studios vs. Global Networks—with cable taking on the debt burden as the company bets fully on streaming.  -WPP CEO Mark Read is stepping down amid pressure and stock declines, with the holding company finally embracing an ad tech and AI-first future years later than needed.  -WPP's recent moves—acquiring InfoSum, consolidating under WPP Media, and investing in AI—mark a delayed but necessary transformation for agency survival.  -Multiple vendors including FreeWheel, Mediaocean, The Trade Desk, and Basis Technologies announced major product innovations focused on CTV, retail media, AI, and data integration ahead of Cannes.  -The episode emphasizes that agencies must evolve from service vendors to tech-powered solutions providers or risk becoming irrelevant in a self-serve media world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AdTech God speaks with Kathy Argyriou, Head of Publisher Sales at Freewheel. Kathy shares her journey in the advertising industry, emphasizing the importance of networking and mentorship. She discusses the unique challenges women face in the industry, particularly regarding work-life balance. The conversation shifts to the rise of Connected Television (CTV) and its impact on advertising, as well as the role of AI in transforming the advertising landscape. Kathy concludes by reflecting on changing consumer habits and the evolution of content consumption. Takeaways Networking is key to success in any industry. Women often face unique challenges in balancing work and family. The advertising landscape is rapidly evolving with CTV. AI is transforming how advertising campaigns are executed. Building relationships is a long-term investment. Mentorship can significantly impact career growth. Work-life balance is often a myth, especially for women. Consumer behavior is changing with new technology. Binge-watching has changed how we consume content. The future of advertising will be driven by programmatic transactions. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Kathy Argyriou and Her Journey 05:51 The Importance of Networking and Mentorship 11:19 Challenges Faced by Women in the Industry 17:41 The Rise of Connected Television (CTV) 22:54 The Future of Advertising and AI's Role 25:24 Changing Consumer Habits and Content Consumption Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

W/C 13th January 2025Because I am not sure what to write this week, I am going to back fill a few bits of extra information on some of the stuff that came up...Duke Special was born just a few weeks before me in Northern Ireland, and the song of his I am banging on about was released in 2005. There is a Marillion tie-in as he often works with Ben CastlePride and Prejudice (sort of) has just begun its run for this year, and is going to be on the road for quite a while so you have a good chance of catching it. The website has the cast details, and jolly fine they all were. Don't think about it, just book and go.According to onlineopticiansuk there is a chart to help you pick reading glasses, and apparently for my age I need a 1.50 to a 2.00. The strength of all reading glasses is measured in dioptre, with units increasing by 0.25 dioptre depending on the power of the lens. So there.Stay safe.Freewheel - Duke SpecialTherapy For Me (or TFM as I now refer to it) is a bit of an audio curiosity. It started out as a mechanism for me to clear my head, with the hope that by saying stuff out loud it would act as a little bit of self-help. It's remains loose in style, fluid in terms of content and raw - it's a one take, press record and see what happens, affair.If you want to keep in touch with TFM and the other stuff I do then please follow me on Facebook, Insta, Twitter or Patreon. Thanks for getting this far.

Our host, Ben Goodfriend, chats with Kathy Argyriou about her early childhood and her journey into the ad tech world. Together, they explore the complexity of live streaming infrastructure. Kathy shares what it's like explaining programmatic advertising to her grandparents, diversity in the industry, and advice to the next generation. 00:00 Introduction to Kathy Argyriou and Freewheel 02:11 Kathy's Journey from Greece to Ad Tech 06:10 Explaining Programmatic Advertising 09:25 The Data Currency Dilemma in Streaming 14:01 To Fill or Not to Fill? 19:25 The Future of FAST Channels 20:25 Challenges of Live Streaming Events 25:02 Interactive Innovation 26:05 Diversity in Ad Tech 29:33 Advice for the Next Generation in Ad Tech Find us at www.amagi.com. Send us questions and comments at ben@amagi.com Produced by Next Chapter Podcasts Amagi is an award-winning media technology company that provides cloud broadcast and targeted advertising solutions to broadcast TV and streaming TV platforms. Amagi supports 800+ content brands, 800+ playout chains, and 5,000+ channel deliveries on its platform in over 150 countries. Learn more about us at www.amagi.com.

In this engaging interview, Diane Yu, a repeated founder and highly successful entrepreneur, offers valuable insights into her extraordinary journey from a young graduate to a leading force in the technology and finance sectors. From her early days at DoubleClick to her role in building FreeWheel, which Comcast acquired for about $400M, and now her current venture, TidalWave, Diane has consistently focused on innovation, learning, and building strong relationships. TidalWave has attracted funding from top-tier investors like RevTech Labs Capital.

What do you get when you combine a Grammy winning billionaire rapper with the content marketer of a multi-billion dollar brand... A multicultural content amplifier expert with a free wheelin' media pro? You get insights from four incredible individuals who gave spontaneous Insider Interviews to me during Advertising Week New York 2024. Guests and Highlights 1. Kris Magel, VP, Head of Global Agency Partnerships - Freewheel: Kris discusses his new role and how Freewheel is making things easier for #CTV providers and advertisers.  He explains the company's efforts to “demurkify” the programmatic advertising space and make it more transparent and controllable for both publishers and agencies.      And to really clarify? Catch his analogy to his martini-loving 84-year-old Aunt Pat. Trust me. 2. Percy ‘Master P' and Hercy Miller: The legendary 5X Grammy Award Winning Rapper, Entrepreneur, Actor, Investor, Author, Filmmaker, Record Producer, Philanthropist and yes, Mogul (!), Master P, along with his NCAA star son Hercy Miller, talk about their latest ventures. Master P and Hercy Miller with Jeff Hamilton Jacket Master P shares insights from his new book, "Five Ps to Wealth," and emphasizes the importance of financial literacy. They also discuss their involvement with Jeff Hamilton's branded jackets and the significance of NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) deals for athletes like Hercy. Best quote you can take to the bank: "Product outweighs talent."  3. Jeannine Shao Collins, Chief Client Officer, Kargo: Jeannine highlights the importance of amplifying multicultural content. Jeannine Shao Collins with Jess King at SeeHer She shares key takeaways from her panel at the SeeHer event, emphasizing the need for accurate representation and authentic voices in media and why they've made a commitment to supporting diverse publishers. Jeannine also talks about Kargo's innovative ad tech solutions and how they put "the art in the science." 4. Annie Granatstein, VP Content Marketing, Marriott International/Marriott Bonvoy: After Annie told the Brand Innovators audience crowd about her content marketing approach, I had a 1:1 where she explained how she manages heading up global content for more than 36 brands... And about Marriott's brand purpose, which drives contributions to diverse and inclusive content. She shares insights on how they identify traveler passion points and approach sustainability. Annie also highlights a favorite trend: podcast-video convergence (yay!) using Marriott's "About the Journey" podcast as an example. See Resources.  Key Moments: [00:02:40] Demurkifying the advertising marketplace -- Kris Magel: Simplifying the complex world of programmatic advertising and helping Aunt Pat not get overserved. [00:10:13] Financial literacy and securing generational wealth -- Master P and Hercy Miller: The importance of financial literacy, aligning with brands, and leveraging NIL deals. [00:12:45] Diverse voices and the value for marketers -- Jeannine Shao Collins on the impact of multicultural media and Kargo's role in supporting them. [00:19:05] Traveler passion points -- Annie Granatstein: Marriott's innovative content strategies, brand purpose and what's trending. Resources: FreeWheel: https://www.freewheel.com/ Master P: IG: @MasterPMiller TikTok: MasterPOfficial The 5 Ps to Wealth Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D77SVH4D Master P Masterclass: https://masterpmasterclass.com Kargo: https://www.kargo.com/ Marriott YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarriottBonvoy/podcasts  Connect with Insider Interviews: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insiderinterviews Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InsiderInterviewsPodcast/ YouTube: https://bit.ly/InsiderInterviews-YouTubePlaylist LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mossappeal Threads: https://www.threads.net/@insiderinterviews  X: https://x.com/InsiderIntervws And, email podcasts@mossappeal.

Hupsee. Daar zijn we weer. Misschien wel voor het eerst dat Martijn tussen twee podcasts door 0 (nul) kilometer heeft gefietst. De reden mag inmiddels bekend zijn. Herman daarentegen heeft een prachtig lang weekend in de Eiffel, Ardennen en Zuid-Limburg achter de rug. Samen met 25 fietsvrienden op avontuur. Ondertussen hebben we groot postcodegerelateerd fietsnieuws van PostNL, hebben onze Vlaamse luisteraars ons getipt omdat men in Belgie achter de identiteit van het E17 Snacks-meisje is gekomen, heeft Martijn nieuwe schoenen, is zijn gravelfiets terug uit Italië, komen er zeker weten nieuwe petjes en bespreken we de uitslag van het NK wielrennen voor militairen. Bumper!ShownotesHet soundboard van José de Cauwer De E17 Snacks-podcastDe Bende van Nijvel-podcast De Gijzeling van GladbeckDe Duitse YouTube-serie met Marcel Kittel in de Tour de FrituurNieuwe schoenen van Lake Cycling Schitterende groep van CampagnoloSegmenten van de ShowHerman kiest voor de Mur van Huy, ingewikkelder en zwaarder dan je denkt. Martijn mijmert weg bij de gedachten dat ie weer langs de Vecht kan fietsen.Zelfbevlekkende linkjes:Volg ons WhatsApp-kanaalVolg ons op InstagramVolg Martijn en Herman op StravaSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/tweewielers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Check out the video versions of the podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/@Cade_Media/videosHere's some time stamps (FYI, sometimes the adverts throw off the timings slightly!)00:00 Freewheel running + Mick Hucknell nightmares03:20 Shimano's latest groupset leaks online12:51 Former EF Education rider joins OnlyFans after drugs arrest18:56 WTF is going on at Ineos Grenadiers?24:24 Clarity on Classified/TRP (FUOTW)27:42 Overrated/Underrated: SPD sandals30:58 Overrated/Underrated: Titanium mech hangers32:23 Overrated/Underrated: bleeding brakes regularly33:50 Overrated/Underrated: mid/post ride soda37:03 ‘Am I an idiot for building my own bike from scratch?'47:31 SICK custom bike buildIf you'd like us to send in a question, story, some good news, things you'd like us to discuss or anything else, email us at wildonespodcast@cademedia.co.ukThanks and see you next time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Generous leadership is standing up for what is right.” Chapters: 00:00  Introduction of James Rooke 03:53  Background and Influences 08:19  Lessons from Father's Leadership Style 12:08  Simplifying Decision-Making Filters 26:21  Staying Close to the Front Lines 31:15  Creating a Culture of Generosity 36:25  Humility and Vulnerability in Leadership 41:06  The Power of Small Acts 45:06 Creating Experiences that Shape Beliefs 48:59 Being Present and Engaged with Employees 52:55 Walking the Talk: Authenticity and Integrity Episode Summary: James Rooke, President of Comcast Advertising, shares insights on leadership and decision-making. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing patterns and investing in talent. James learned valuable lessons from his father, who taught him the significance of generous leadership and standing up for what is right. He also gained insights from his early career experiences, which highlighted the common root causes of organizational challenges. James recommends leaders stay close to the front lines and have simple filters to guide decision-making. He also discusses the need to balance a high-level view with deep dives into specific areas. In this conversation, James shares his approach to leadership and the importance of generosity in the workplace. He emphasizes the value of being present and engaged with employees at all levels, and the power of small acts of recognition and appreciation. James also discusses the need for leaders to have humility and vulnerability, and the importance of making quick decisions and being adaptable. He highlights the impact of creating experiences that shape beliefs and change culture, and the role of authenticity and integrity in leadership. James provides valuable insights and practical advice for cultivating a generous leadership style. R.O.G. Takeaway Tips: Recognizing patterns and investing in talent are key to leadership success. Generous leadership involves standing up for what is right and acting with integrity. Common root causes exist across industries, and focusing on human beings is crucial. Leaders should stay close to the front lines and have simple filters for decision-making. Balancing a high-level view with deep dives into specific areas is essential for effective leadership.  Generous leadership is about the culmination of small acts that have a lasting impact. Recognition and appreciation, even in small gestures, can have a profound effect on employees. Leaders should prioritize humility and vulnerability, as well as authenticity and integrity. Quick decision-making and adaptability are crucial in a fast-paced and uncertain environment. Creating experiences that shape beliefs and change culture is a powerful way to lead. Being present and engaged with employees at all levels fosters a sense of connection and belonging. Guest Bio: James Rooke is president of Comcast Advertising, the advertising division of Comcast Cable that fosters powerful connections between brands and their audiences as well as among publishers, distributors, MVPDs, agencies and other industry players. In this role, James oversees the operation of the company, which includes Effectv, FreeWheel and AudienceXpress. Most recently, James was general manager of Effectv, where he led a nationwide team across sales, product, engineering, data and operations focused on enabling marketers to reach their target audiences across TV and video streaming platforms. Since adopting the role in January 2020, he successfully led Effectv's transformation to a multi-screen, audience delivery company including bringing the more widespread use of data to TV advertising strategies, as well as driving addressable advertising and programmatic Capabilities. Prior to leading Effectv, James oversaw FreeWheel's global publisher business unit responsible for providing TV programmers and distributors with advertising technology to manage the monetization of their video content. During his eight-year tenure at FreeWheel, he also helped design, launch and scale FreeWheel's first video marketplace; led the Advisory Services practice, a consulting business unit; and served as the company's chief revenue officer. Earlier in his career, James worked in the media business at Time Warner Cable (now Charter Communications) as vice president of strategy and execution. He was also a principal in the media and entertainment practice at Capgemini, a consulting and technology company. He began his career as an associate consultant at EY (then known as Ernst & Young) in London. James speaks at many major industry conferences including Cannes Lions, Advertising Week and IAB and is often featured in leading business and industry media, including Business Insider, Advertising Age, Adweek, AdExchanger, Broadcasting & Cable, The Drum and more. Additionally, James is focused on moving the industry forward, sitting on the board of the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB) and Ampersand and acting as a board advisor to TVision. James earned a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Birmingham in the U.K. He resides with his wife and two daughters in New York. Resources: Comcast Advertising  James Rooke Where to find R.O.G. Podcast: R.O.G on YouTube R.O.G on Apple Podcasts R.O.G on Spotify How diverse is your network?  N.D.I. Network Diversity Index What is your Generosity Style?  Generosity Quiz Credits: James Rooke, Sheep Jam Productions, Host Shannon Cassidy, Bridge Between, Inc. Coming Next: Please join us next week, Episode 195, with special guest Yvette Kanouff.

Prioritising talent and creativity should be top of the list for media leaders this year, according to attendees at The Media Leader Summit.The Media Leader reporters Jack Benjamin and Ella Sagar bring you highlights in a special episode from their conversations with senior figures around what the top focus should be for the industry this year.Sustainability, measurement, inclusion, consistency and trust were also discussed as key topics.Some of the winners of The Media Leader Awards' Leader of the Year category — Patrick Affleck, CEO of Havas Media Network UK and Ireland; Thomas Bremond, senior vice-president and chief revenue officer, international, at FreeWheel; Rob Edwards, head of media and digital at Arla Foods; and Dominic Williams, chief revenue officer at Mail Metro Media — share their thoughts.We also hear from Cath Waller, managing director of advertising at Immediate Media, and Chloë Davies, founder of It Takes A Village.Highlights00:53: Dominic Williams on testing new things02:56: Patrick Affleck speaks about people and optimism06:10: Rob Edwards discusses the importance of measurement and creativity for advertisers08:48: Thomas Bremond's views on sustainability and building the future of TV11:14: Chloë Davies highlights the need for the media and advertising industry to "hold the line"14:36: Cath Waller calls for more action on trust in media

AdTechGod sits down with Doug Knopper. Doug is the co-founder of Freewheel and serves on the board of several adtech companies, including Magnite, Extreme Reach, and Locality, and has previously been on the boards of TripleLift and WURL.Freewheel, which was acquired by Comcast for $360 million in 2014 remains a major player in the CTV space, offering a comprehensive platform for buyers and sellers working with CTV and video partners globally.Thank you RainBarrel for advertising on this episode.

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BAR ITALIA - The Only Conscious Being In The UniversePIXIES - You're So ImpatientBLUR - Living Room_Parklife (Live At Wembley)mariagrep & Galician Army - Una Balada MásJAMIE XX - Treat Each Other RightCONFIDENCE MAN - I Can't Lose YouLOS BITCHOS - Don't ChangeBRIGITTE CALLS ME BABY - We Were Never AliveCAMELLOS - LorosGO CACTUS - Lo De SiempreJOANA SERRAT - FreewheelTRASHI - ReventarmeCONJUNTO AMISTÁ - Tiger WoodsGORKA URBIZU - Kolore BatFOSTER THE PEOPLE - Lost In SpaceABBA - Does Your Mother KnowPABLO SENATOR - StalingradoEscuchar audio

AdTechGod sits down with Rick Holtman from HUMAN.Rick serves as the Vice President of Sales at HUMAN. Rick has a robust career spanning more than a decade, he has significantly influenced several high-profile companies before his tenure at HUMAN, including nearly seven years at Freewheel, Watchwith, and AMC. He is known for his deep industry knowledge and extensive experience and unique perspective.Thank you to Innovid for advertising on this episode. Mentioned in this episode:ADTECHGOD DISCLOSURE

In our third special episode from POSSIBLE, our hosts, Dan and Evan, sit down with Xander Kotsatos. Xander is the Head of Beeswax Sales for the Americas at Freewheel, a global technology platform that helps to power the connected television ecosystem. During their conversation, the trio discuss the exciting intersection of connected TV and retail media networks, the potential for co-branding and merchant planning tools to enhance the consumer experience and offer more than just products at a discounted price, and they envision a future where CTV and retail media work seamlessly together, providing optimized advertising experiences and maximizing ROI for retailers. 00:00:01 - Introductions00:08:27 - Explains What Freewheel Brings to the Table00:11:42 - The Challenge of Measuring ROI for CTV00:28:50 - How to Simplify the CTV Supply ChainFollow Albertsons Media Collective on LinkedIn to stay in the loop: www.linkedin.com/company/albertsons-media-collective The views, information and opinions expressed on The Garage podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of Albertsons or its employees. The content of this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute or contain any legal or financial advice, nor does it constitute information provided under any sort of fiduciary relationship. Albertsons is not responsible for the accuracy or completeness of any of the information, statements or opinions provided during this podcast and it makes no guarantee regarding the outcomes or results you will achieve by using information you received by listening to the podcast. Any product or company names, brands, logos or other trademarks featured or referred to in the podcast are the property of their respective trademark holders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Thomas Bremond, SVP & CRO, International at FreeWheel, joins Vincent Flood, Editor-in-Chief at VideoWeek. Bremond discusses how FreeWheel has changed in light of its acquisition by Comcast, the role of social networks in TV distribution, and what it means to be a broadcaster in 2024.

Rugby podcasters Brett McKay and Harry Jones are joined on The 8-9 Combo by new Wallabies assistant coach and one of the great rugby coaching brains in the game, ‘Lord' Laurie Fisher, to discuss the ever changing trends in professional rugby as well as gain an insight into the preliminary discussions within Joe Schmidt's growing Wallabies coaching staff. Where Laurie Fisher has forgotten more about rugby than many of us will ever know, this chat pulls back the layers on his coaching philosophies and his approach around the breakdown and defensive systems in exactly the kind of technical discussion fans of the game love, while Australian fans will really enjoy the level of planning and discussion already happening with Schmidt and his most recent addition to the Wallabies staff, renowned New Zealand scrum guru Mike Cron.   Social media: #89Combo Twitter: https://twitter.com/89combo Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/89combo/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@8-9Combo TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@89combopodcast   Brett: https://twitter.com/BMcSport Harry: https://twitter.com/HaribaldiJones   (Yes, Brett and Harry did used to host The Roar Rugby Podcast!)   Find Brett and Harry's written work on RugbyPass and The Roar: Brett: https://www.rugbypass.com/plus/contributor/brett-mckay/ Harry: https://www.theroar.com.au/author/haribaldi/   Music from Uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io/track/oakvale-of-albion/extreme Voiceovers by Chookman + Amelia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the episode our host Preethy Padmanabhan has a thought provoking discussion with Diane Yu,  Co-founder & CEO of TidalWave.ai on the book  “The Worlds I See" by Fei-Fei Li.  The book serves as a call to action for creating compassionate and inclusive technologies that address real-world challenges and foster a deeper connection among people.  Diane shares her journey as a serial entrepreneur and reflects on similarities of her experience to what Fei-Fei shares in her book. Diane's current company TidalWave is on a mission to build the first ever generative AI application for mortgages. Before TidalWave, Diane held past roles as the CTO for Better, a digital mortgage lender and CTO for Comcast Advertising. Diane came to Comcast via Comcast's acquisition of FreeWheel, a company she co-founded and built from the ground up. 

In the latest episode of our Identity Architects podcast, InfoSum's VP, Corporate Marketing, Ben Cicchetti, sat down with Moe Ismail, Executive Director, Product Management, at Freewheel, to discuss identity, market fragmentation, TV advertising, and more.---Listen to our Identity Architects' Soundtrack Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7hxg4NGr6qxDtpbLExAZI9?si=7e239b8cee34490b More information on InfoSum https://www.infosum.com/ InfoSum Case Studies: https://www.infosum.com/resources/library/case-studies ---Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.infosum.com/resources/insights Follow us on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/infosumhq Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/InfoSum

AdTechGod sits down with Daniel Church, Head of Advanced TV product at Beachfront. Daniel has carved a niche for himself through significant contributions and leadership roles in companies like StickyAds, Freewheel, and currently, Beachfront, where he is spearheading advanced TV product innovation. His journey through the evolving landscape of TV advertising, from linear to programmatic, highlights both the challenges and milestones of integrating traditional models with cutting-edge technology. Thank you to Publica for advertising on this podcast.

FreeWheel Chief Product Officer David Dworin offers a detailed overview of the Comcast-owned ad platform. While many people know FreeWheel as the ad server and SSP of choice for traditional broadcasters, it has other products too — including a DSP (Beeswax), an agency transaction management product (Strata) and a media business (Audience Express). In this conversation with Ari Paparo, Dworin walks through each of these products in turn and situates FreeWheel within the competitive landscape — including vis a vis Google. Visit Marketecture.tv to join our community and get access to full-length in-depth interviews. Marketecture is a new way to get smart about technology. Our team of real industry practitioners helps you understand the complex world of technology and make better vendor decisions through in-depth interviews with CEOs and product leaders at dozens of platforms. We are launching with extensive coverage of the marketing and advertising verticals with plans to expand into many other technology sectors.Copyright (C) 2023 Marketecture Media, Inc.

Next in Media spoke with Freewheel's GM Mark McKee about the problem with repetitive, messy ad delivery on FAST channels, and why the TV industry has to clean up its supply chains asap. McKee also talked about whether we're seeing too much CTV ad inventory too soon, and whether this market will be fully programmatic next year. Guest: Mark McKeeHost: Mike ShieldsIn Partnership with: Comcast AdvertisingProduced by: Fresh Take

Here's what you need to know for today in the business of podcasting:Spotify's podcast and audiobook discovery will get a boost from Google Cloud's AI by Amrita KhalidYouTube intros new AI governance policies. AI helps enforce them by Brad HillThe case for and against brand safety by Seb Joseph and Krystal ScanlonDefining Premium Video - How VAB and Comcast's FreeWheel are Trying to Settle TV Industry Debate by Jack Neff…as for the rest of the news: PodPod covers how to hit the mark with GenZ podcast listeners, and Triton's newest batch of podcast rankers have arrived, including Australia's top 100 showing Hamish & Andy has held its #1 spot for six months running.

Here's what you need to know for today in the business of podcasting:Spotify's podcast and audiobook discovery will get a boost from Google Cloud's AI by Amrita KhalidYouTube intros new AI governance policies. AI helps enforce them by Brad HillThe case for and against brand safety by Seb Joseph and Krystal ScanlonDefining Premium Video - How VAB and Comcast's FreeWheel are Trying to Settle TV Industry Debate by Jack Neff…as for the rest of the news: PodPod covers how to hit the mark with GenZ podcast listeners, and Triton's newest batch of podcast rankers have arrived, including Australia's top 100 showing Hamish & Andy has held its #1 spot for six months running.

Gavin Dunaway of The Media Trust talks fraudulent ads, including scams targeting the elderly and the early days at AdMonsters. We have an update on the Freewheel duplicate auction issue, and its earnings week for tech giants.Marketecture is a new way to get smart about technology. Our team of real industry practitioners helps you understand the complex world of technology and make better vendor decisions through in-depth interviews with CEOs and product leaders at dozens of platforms. We are launching with extensive coverage of the marketing and advertising verticals with plans to expand into many other technology sectors.Copyright (C) 2023 Marketecture Media, Inc.

Chris Kane from Jounce joins us to try to define what an MFA site is and what we should do about them. An anonymous blog post accuses Freewheel of duplicating bid requests. And Fenestra tries to Justify Its Existence.In this episode:https://telegra.ph/Comcast-deliberately-inflates-bidding-requests-to-extract-extra-revenue-from-DSP-partners-10-15 https://jonathanmendezblog.com/2023/10/17/neuralift-ai-is-born-to-run/Visit Marketecture.tv to join our community and get access to full-length in-depth interviews. Marketecture is a new way to get smart about technology. Our team of real industry practitioners helps you understand the complex world of technology and make better vendor decisions through in-depth interviews with CEOs and product leaders at dozens of platforms. We are launching with extensive coverage of the marketing and advertising verticals with plans to expand into many other technology sectors.Copyright (C) 2023 Marketecture Media, Inc.

Rick Mandler shares stories from across his career, exploring the launch of digital at ABC, the 'enhanced TV' era of 'two-screen' TV (where viewers used their thin Internet services to interact from their laptops while watching TV), the ABC Media Player, Disney Lab studies, and his new initiatives at Comcast including Freewheel's new Viewer Experience Lab.

Join this riveting panel at Brave New Worlds 2023 that dives deep into internal and external organizational challenges – from people (and their incentives) to data and technology – that make cultivating customers over time and across channels so difficult. Learn how to better set your organization up for success from Crystal Wallace, Chief Growth Officer, Platforms at Kinesso; Lou Paskalis, Chief Strategy Officer at Ad Fontes Media and former SVP at Bank of America; and Matt Clark, VP of Strategic Partnerships at Freewheel. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/no-hype/message

Bob highlights the importance of building interdepartmental relationships and growing a talented team of problem solvers, as well as the key role of continuous education. He also offers some insight into the technical and not-so-technical skills of a “data science champion,” tips for building adaptable data infrastructures, and the best career advice he has ever received, plus so much more. For an insider's look at the data science operation at FreeWheel and valuable advice from an analytics leader with more than two decades of experience, be sure to tune in today!Key Points From This Episode:A high-level overview of FreeWheel, Bob's role there, and his career trajectory thus far.Important intersections between data science and the organization at large.Three indicators that FreeWheel is a data-driven company.Why continuous education is a key component for agile data science teams.The interplay between data science and the development of AI technology.Technical (and other) skills that Bob looks for when recruiting new talent to his team.Bob's perspective on the value of interdepartmental collaboration.Insight into what an adaptable data infrastructure looks like.The importance of asking yourself, “What more can we do?”Tweetables:“As a data science team, it's not enough to be able to solve quantitative problems. You have to establish connections to the company in a way that uncovers those problems to begin with.” — @Bob_Bress [0:06:42]“The more we can do to educate folks – on the type of work that the [data science] team does, the better the position we are in to tackle more interesting problems and innovate around new ideas and concepts.” — @Bob_Bress [0:09:49]“There are so many interactions and dependencies across any project of sufficient complexity that it's only through [collaboration] across teams that you're going to be able to hone in on the right answer.” — @Bob_Bress [0:17:34]“There is always more you can do to enhance the work you're doing, other questions you can ask, other ways you can go beyond just checking a box.” — @Bob_Bress [0:23:31]Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:Bob Bress on LinkedInBob Bress on TwitterFreeWheelHow AI HappensSama

This week on the podcast we dive into the origin story of Wilde Bicycle Co with founder, Jeffrey Frane. As a child, Jeffrey found the bike and along the way found freedom, adventure, and ultimately, a calling. Jeffrey has spend over twenty years in the bike industry finding himself at QBP managing the All City Brand since its earliest days. His experience and passion has led to the founding of Wilde Bicycle Co. Wilde Bicycle Co. website  Episode Sponsor: Hammerhead Karoo 2 (use THEGRAVELRIDE for free HRM) Support the Podcast Join The Ridership  Automated Transcription, please excuse the typos: [00:00:00]Craig Dalton (Host): Hey Jeff, welcome to the show. [00:00:04]Jeff Frane: Uh, hey Craig. It's great to be here. [00:00:06]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah, this is gonna be a lot of fun. I'm excited to learn more about you and more about the Wild Bicycle brand. So let's, let's start off by where, where'd you grow up and how'd you discover the bike? [00:00:16]Jeff Frane: All right, so, uh, for the listeners joining us, uh, my name is Jeffrey Frame and I am from, I grew up in the North Woods of Wisconsin. In a small logging slash milltown called Rhinelander, Wisconsin. A shout out to the Hoda. Um, so I grew up small town Wisconsin and luckily there were a bunch of mountain bikers around and we had, you know, several mountain bike races like twice a year. And, um, all these woods to explore. And got hooked on bikes as a kid because it was the only way I could leave my neighborhood. I lived outside of town where most of my friends lived in town, so I had to get there somehow. And my parents had jobs, so it was ride the bike and I just never stopped. You know, when I was 16, when most people, you know, kind of put down the bike. I was really afraid of killing somebody. I was, I was immature. I'm, you know, I, I, up until like my 40th birthday, I was pretty immature. Um, but I was afraid of hurting somebody with, you know, the power of an automobile scared the crap out of me. So I just like never got my license and I just kept riding. I did eventually get my license, you know, when I was 20 years old, but, so I just never stopped. [00:01:34]Craig Dalton (Host): and was it just sort of pleasure riding back then, or you'd mentioned there was a couple [00:01:37]Jeff Frane: Yeah. [00:01:38]Craig Dalton (Host): Did you get drawn into the race scene at all? [00:01:40]Jeff Frane: did. Um, and it was, it was wonderful. My parents were always incredibly, uh, supportive of my sporting endeavors. And, um, in Wisconsin, we're really blessed to have the Wars series, uh, the Wisconsin Off-Road series, which is one of the largest and longest running, I think, state series in the country. And, uh, they would take me to the races. I started racing in junior high, uh, in the local stuff on my Little Trek eight 30. And, uh, that was wonderful and then kind of progressed. And then in high school we started racing full war circuits and my parents were awesome enough to take the time off of work and to kinda lug me around so that I could get, you know, fifth place in a sport class or whatever. [00:02:20]Craig Dalton (Host): I love it. And was there, was there a high school mountain bike scene back then, or was, were you a little bit of a, an outcast? [00:02:26]Jeff Frane: yeah, I was the only, I had some friends kind of coming up or growing up who raced with me, but once we got to high school, it was largely me. You know, we didn't have Nica or anything like that. In fact, I remember I played hockey as well, that um, I got a local sponsorship from Schwinn and like it was this big kerfuffle cuz like, they didn't know if I was still eligible for hockey and all these people were really upset about it and, you know, whatever. Um, I was, it turned out I was eligible for hockey, but, [00:02:55]Craig Dalton (Host): Some, someone just need to explain to the hockey world that bicycle sponsorship is not exactly making a living. [00:03:00]Jeff Frane: no, and you know, there was no money. But, uh, so, you know, I, I just, I just kept racing and mountain bikes were my first love and it was just a way of exploring, you know, the area around me. And we had a cool local shop, Mel's trading post, and they were super rad to me and put me on the little bike team. And then we got, that team got sponsored by Schwinn and, um, you know, it all, all just kind of held together until I went to the university and. As a poor college student, I really couldn't afford to race, but I was able to still ride my bike all the time. [00:03:32]Craig Dalton (Host): Were you still in Wisconsin at that point? [00:03:34]Jeff Frane: Yeah. I went to the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, [00:03:37]Craig Dalton (Host): Okay. [00:03:37]Jeff Frane: um, which is like a, a rivertown and, you know, a couple trail systems, but found, started finding like the bigger community, you know, there were a bunch of really fast racers and I learned so much by chasing these people around, you know, eventually got to. I still raced a little bit in college and was able to race expert where I got my butt absolutely handed to me. Um, and then after, after college, I spent a couple years living in my van, uh, 1992 Dodge Caravan. [00:04:05]Craig Dalton (Host): out Dodge Caravan. [00:04:07]Jeff Frane: I was gonna, I was like, I can't shout out too many things, but yeah, the Dodge Caravan was a, was a workhorse. Really good car. Went through transmissions like he wouldn't believe though. Uh, so lived in that for a while. And then, um, I got tired of, of living on people's couches and just being broke and there was a, a person I wanted to date. So I came back here and now I live in Minneapolis. I've been here since 2005. And like that's really kind of when I think things really took off for me in terms of bicycles as a lifestyle. You know, that was the height of the fixed gear. Boom. And, you know, so I, I moved to the, I moved to city, the city with like a single speed Magna Mountain bike that I had cut the bars down. I had like my little Dickies Messenger bag and I was like, oh, you know, like in the big, I'm gonna cut traffic. And cuz I had grown up like seeing bike messengers and like MTV sports and stuff [00:04:57]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah. [00:04:58]Jeff Frane: and uh, you know, got a job at a bike shop, started wrenching. And, um, started my little company Bike Jerks. So if you find me on Instagram, my handle is bike jerks, uh, which was a dumb inside joke at the shop. And it seemed like a real funny thing to call my, my little company, uh, when I was 25. Now I'm 43. Not as funny, but I'm stuck with it. Um, and the reason that started is like I needed a, I always needed a creative outlet and I really wanted to participate in the community. I wanted to organize, I wanted to throw races. So I needed a platform to do that. So I invented this thing, bike Jerks, which was the little, um, you know, platform for me to throw Alley Cats and Bandit Cross and, and other events. [00:05:41]Craig Dalton (Host): gotcha. Yeah, it seems like that Minneapolis bike scene is, has always been so creative and spanned so many different disciplines of the B of the sport, including disciplines that no one knows even exists, like tall bikes and random cobbled together bikes. [00:05:58]Jeff Frane: Yeah, it's, it's weird being here cuz we're a straight flyover country. You know, anything that gets media attention or national renowned is pretty much coastal. Um, so we, it's awesome to hear people say that. And, you know, people know that we're a bike city, but like, nobody comes visits Minneapolis, you know, um, we're kind of forgotten about. But we have this really, really special and unique culture. And, you know, there was Gene Ober, pillar and Hur ever stone. And Paul Ziegel and you know, the surly bikes and there's all these pretty amazing contributions that have been made. You know, single speed mountain biking. It wasn't invented here by any means, but I think it took on like its bigger cultural relevance. There was a huge push for that here, especially with, you know, surly bikes coming on outta the scene. Um, so we're standing on the shoulders of giants. There is an amazing, amazing culture that goes back generations, uh, here in the Twin Cities. [00:06:53]Craig Dalton (Host): And then I'm not sure exactly when quality bike parts came to be, but qbp is this cornerstone sort of backbone of the bicycle industry. Maybe you can describe who they are and what they do. [00:07:05]Jeff Frane: Yeah, so q uh, so the first shop I worked at here in Minneapolis was FreeWheel Bike. It was originally a co-op. By the time I got there, it was no longer a co-op. Uh, but, uh, what Steve Flagg, the owner of qbp, was one of the owners of the co-op, and they were, Essentially frustrated not being able to get small repair parts from Europe. And so he started bringing in repair parts and boom, that's how Quality Bicycles products got started. Him and his wife Mary, and you know, now it's the largest bicycle distributor distribution business in North America. They own Surly, they own Salsa, they own All City. They own whiskey. They own 45 North. Um, you know, it's a, it's a massive, massive operation. [00:07:48]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. I never, I never knew that backstory, but I've, I've certainly known Q BP my entire cycling life, it seems like. And you've ultimately, you've found your way [00:07:58]Jeff Frane: to Q. Yeah. So you know, there Qbp was always like the, you know, like the beacon on the hill kind of thing. It was like all the shop rats were like trying to get to Q and uh, I was lucky enough to get hired there, so I worked like part-time seasonal at FreeWheel bike my first year in Minneapolis. Got laid off for the winter, uh, took a bunch of weird random jobs and eventually, um, QVP was hiring for warehouse people. And so I started there. I think in, it would've been 2006, uh, as part-time seasonal picking, packing, labeling, like literally the bottom rung on the totem pole. You know, it doesn't get much lower. Um, you know, in terms of. I mean, it's a fine job. I don't mean to say that the job was low, but you know, as far as the ranking goes, you're a part-time seasonal employee. [00:08:52]Craig Dalton (Host): it's the entry point. The very [00:08:53]Jeff Frane: Yeah, it's the entry entry point for sure. Um, so I got a job there and you know, by that time I was already kind of getting a reputation as like the fixed gear guy and I was already active in the community here in Minneapolis, organizing events. And they recognized that love and that passion that I had. And so, um, a few years in, I was able to start suggesting some product to Lisa Snyder, um, who was the brand manager of Dimension at the time. So there was the Dimension brand and they had like some track things and you know, kind of the whole thing was I was like, Yo, I'm really into track bikes and you have nothing I wanna buy. Like I'm buying all my stuff from Mary Sales and from these other distributors, Euro, Asia, imports, et cetera. Like, what's going on? Like, you're freaking qbp. Like, y'all need to do better. And so I started suggesting some product to her and she brought them in under the dimension label, and they did well. And then I was able to suggest more products. And then those did well. And eventually, um, I kind of got the, I was talking to Lisa about doing some other stuff. It just didn't go anywhere. And eventually I kind of got the guts up to say, oh, screw it. I'm going right to the top. And I drafted this, like, you know, at the time I thought it was really like rock solid, but it's ridiculously amateurish, like little business proposal for a brand that I was calling All City. Um, and the reason I needed a name change was I was like, I wanna do nicer stuff and people don't wanna buy nice stuff from dimension like that is repair level parts. So, I wanted a track crank, um, because there was a shortage at that time of 1 44 bolt, circle, diameter, you know, track cranks. And um, so I was like, let's call it All City. So All City Championships was the name of my alley cat that I was throwing every year. So the name comes from, uh, graffiti, uh, in New York City. Um, There's a term called being All City. And what that meant was that you had a piece on, on a train in all five boroughs. You were all city. So my race went to every part of the city, so that's why it was the All City Championships. And I just thought that would be a slick name for, you know, an urban track bike brand. And so, [00:11:14]Craig Dalton (Host): such a cool origin story of the name All City. I'd never heard that before. [00:11:20]Jeff Frane: Yeah, well, there's not many people, many. There's no one left to tell the story, like, I'm it, I'm the dinosaur. Um, [00:11:27]Craig Dalton (Host): So you started out All City and and didn't know this also All City started out with a basic concept of more premium track. Track componentry. [00:11:37]Jeff Frane: to make nicer stuff and I didn't think anybody would buy nicer stuff with the dimension label. Um, you know, it was kind of a weird deal cuz I like nice stuff. I've always been in a vintage bicycles and so like we had to kind of Trojan horse some of the ideas in, so like, I was like, okay, cool, now we have these parts. I wanna do a track bike and I wanna do a Minneapolis track bike. And we have winners in Minneapolis, which means, and fixed gears are like, are the best thing for winter commuters because, Maintaining a geared bike is just, that's way too much work. You know, I want the simplest bike I possibly can for these salty, crappy, slushy wind, you know, weather we have. Um, so I want our track bike that's a real track bike with real track geometry, but I wanna be able to fit a bigger tire. And, you know, at that time, like $500 complete fixed gears we're like dominating the market. And so I'm like, yeah, we're gonna do a $500, you know, uh, track bike just to like get the project rolling. Knowing damn well I don't wanna ride a $500 track bike. Like, no way. I wanna, I like nice stuff. Um, so then it was, you know, we kick off the project and I'm like, you know, I've done some market research and I really think that that price point is saturated. Like what we really need to do is do a thousand dollars track bike. Uh, no one's there, like no one's in that market space and we can put all our own parts on it and we don't have to use this cheap stuff. And that's how the big block was born. That's why it's a nice bike. Uh, because I convinced them that the $500 price point, price point, there was too much competition and we could never win that game. So we need to go upmarket. [00:13:10]Craig Dalton (Host): And at that point had QBP acquired or started any other, uh, full bike brand [00:13:15]Jeff Frane: Yeah. So Surly started, um, in like 1999. They changed their name to Surly in 98. So 1998 was when the Surly, or was when the one by one. Which was the precursor name to Surly Rat Ride came out and they had done some parts before that. Uh, sh I'm gonna do another shout out to Wakeman Massey, uh, founder of Surly Bikes. He, um, freaking visionary surly bikes, in my opinion, is the most influential bike brand of the last, you know, 30 years. Um, the steel Renaissance fat tire clearance. Every modern gravel bike is a crosscheck. Like I know they're, they didn't invent that stuff. Um, you know, big tire clearances, blah, blah, blah. But they popularized it and democratized it, and I think brought it to the forefront of the culture. [00:14:03]Craig Dalton (Host): Certainly democratized it. I would, I would double click on that one. And yes, double shout out to Wakeman. He may, he definitely doesn't remember this, but I met him back when I was at Dean Bicycles. I think he rolled in his first, Ever framed that he welded himself at university, a 24 inch dirt jumper that was ratty as hell, but he was super enthusiastic and passionate, and I think we even tried to hire him, but he wanted to go move somewhere else other than Boulder. [00:14:30]Jeff Frane: Yeah. Um, you know, and the fat bikes and 29 ERs and blah, blah, blah. Like surly, you know, they've done some really special things for sure. Um, and you know, QBP had already bought salsa, um, prior to that. So they had salsa and qbp, or I'm sorry, salsa and surly they had Sylvia at that time. Um, [00:14:51]Craig Dalton (Host): had, you started to kind of understand what a supply chain for a full bicycle looked like at that point when you brought the idea of the track bike to them. [00:14:59]Jeff Frane: I mean, kind of, you know, so like I, again, like with it was all baby steps, right? Um, You know, I was at first when All City started in 2008. It was 15 hours a week, and I was the sales and marketing coordinator, and then I made it to 20 hours a week, and then I made it to 30 hours a week. Well, you know, I was still doing warehouse stuff and all this, you know, and eventually it got to be a full-time position for me. Um, with Lisa still, like with Lisa still in charge. Like Lisa was awesome. She was the operations person and she had a really strong product background. [00:15:37]Craig Dalton (Host): yeah. [00:15:38]Jeff Frane: Um, and I was able to contribute, you know, my ideas and passion for the urban, you know, what we used then called urban cycling, um, for that. And, you know, we were a really, really great team. [00:15:50]Craig Dalton (Host): So that was probably the urban cycling angle for all cities, probably where my knowledge intersected with the existence of all cities. I started seeing these steel bikes underneath who were clearly passionate commuters in San Francisco. So how, how quickly did it kind of go from track bike? It's a commuter bike. And when did you start to see, hey, people are using these to ride on dirt? [00:16:14]Jeff Frane: Um, I mean, so right away the big block cleared a 32 seat tire, which in 2009 was like a pretty good sized tire. And you know, we were, before track lacrosse was track lacrosse, we were riding our fixes, you know, in the dirt, uh, doing that kind of stuff. Um, I had gotten interested in cycl lacrosse. We put out the Nature Boy, which is a single speed cross bike. You know, all city's evolution was always, there were always constraints for all city. We had surly on one side of us, we had salsa on the other. And it was like, how are we going to be different and offer something actually unique and not just, um, you know, compete with our sister brand. So, you know, the Nature Boy was a dedicated single speed, which didn't exist in the QBP for portfolio, you know, and when people came up, they're like, oh, that's just a stop and crosscheck like, what are you idiot kids doing? It's like, well, you know, ride the thing like, Um, you know, the nature boy, all the canal cities, I think have, have aged really well and become kind of culty classic bikes. Um, so, you know, I think, I think that came out well. We, we put out a bunch of fixie freestyle bikes if people remember fixed gear freestyle, which were also super fun to ride on dirt cuz they had big tire clearance. Uh, then we did the Nature Boy. Um, I think the bike after that was we went geared with the, with the macho man. And the Mr. Pink and the Space Horse and the Space horse was like the bike that really unlocked all cities potential. And you know, we've always been, I've always been interested in all facets of cycling and, you know, we saw what was happening with the crosscheck and it was like, well let's, if we make a bike like that, we're gonna sell a bunch. And that was the Space Horse, and it was our own spin on things. It was as sporty of a light touring bike as we could possibly make. Um, You know, that was Anna Schwinn's design and she absolutely crushed it with that. And that's the one that like started really opening doors and opening a lot of outside eyes to the brand because it was just a really good looking, functional and practical bike. [00:18:17]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah, yeah. And and clearly quite versatile. I think if you talk to anybody who's been around gravel for a while, as people were getting those first generation gravel bikes, you were seeing people on that bike, on the trails. [00:18:29]Jeff Frane: For sure. [00:18:30]Craig Dalton (Host): I already have the first generation. It's been underneath my legs for a few years. [00:18:34]Jeff Frane: Well, and you know, the Mr. Pink cleared 30 twos, so that was my, uh, I, I raced gravel on that for a number of seasons. You know, um, the, the, the Minnesota gravel at that time was strictly like gravel roads. Like we weren't doing like, necessarily a much of like minimum maintenance stuff or double track. It was gravel, gravel. The El Manzo 100 and you could ride a 28 C in that race. Uh, Mr. Pink Fit 32. So that was my gravel race bike at that time. I eventually moved over to the space horse because it had longer chain stays in a lower bottom bracket, which as you know, our awesome for descending fast on gravel. Um, you just, it's just significantly more stable and more planted in, I think, confidence inspiring. And so then, then the space horse. And my big regret with the space horse is that so many people got them and just put racks and fenders and they became these beasts of burden. But if you build built a light space horse canny, it was a ripper of a gravel racer. Um, it was fast and it was fun, and it really came alive under power. [00:19:41]Craig Dalton (Host): And you know, looking at the other Q BP brands was all city, and I know, I believe Surly is the same way. All City was always focused on steel as the frame material. [00:19:51]Jeff Frane: Yeah, I mean steel was definitely our focus. Uh, we did have an aluminum track bike because aluminum in, in track, velodrome racing is an incredibly relevant material. But yeah, it was always steel. And you know, as I was saying, we were always trying to find that niche and there were all these guardrails. Well, you know, how am I gonna make a steel bike that's different than surly. Well, I love ornateness in bikes. You know, I love those classic details. And so it was, let's design our own fancy pants dropouts. Uh, let's do the reinforcement stars on the bottle bosses. Let's design our own braised on seat collar. And you know, my whole, the whole concept there was if you stripped the frame of all of its paint, could you still tell it wasn't all city and nothing else? And that was what we were going for, was, you know, unique detailers and details and bringing. Back kind of beauty into a production bicycle. Cause like a surly is a pretty utilitarian, stripped down thing. And so we wanted, uh, and, and you know, the salsas were kind of, of that ilk too. And so we wanted a little more embellishments, a little more, um, call out to the, you know, the, the, the frame building, uh, heritage of the sixties and seventies and eighties, you know, internal top tube cable routing. You know, those kind of details became an important signifier of the brand. [00:21:03]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah. Gotcha. I wanted to spend a few minutes on your QBP experience, cuz I just think it goes to underscore how much time you've thought about bikes, bicycle frames. [00:21:14]Jeff Frane: adult life, like this is it. Um, you know, and, um, so I, I became the brand manager and the leader of All City, officially, uh, Lisa was needed elsewhere in the company. And they were like, okay, dude, like, you're ready. I, I wasn't ready, turns out. But they were like, all right, so in 2013, I became the brand manager and kind of started assembling a bigger team because the brand was growing and you know, we put out a lot of bikes that I'm really proud of. Uh, you know, the cosmic stallion I think was a pretty, a pretty special and cool, uh, steel gravel racer, you know, and that was really the first gravel race bike that we, that we put out. You know, prior to that it was, we were using our cross bikes. Um, for these things, and now it was, okay, this is like, this is what a dedicated gravel bike should be. [00:22:07]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah. Yeah. So obviously working within an organization like Q bp, you've gotta advocate, you've gotta create the business case, but they've got the capital to bring an idea to market, and they've got the infrastructure to get it out. You've subsequently left qbp and you decided to go on your own journey and create your own brand in wild. What was, what was that journey like and. Why? Why are you doing wild? [00:22:36]Jeff Frane: Um, so in 2019, I left qbp, um, after being with them for, what, 13, 14 years. And, you know, I, I had a really, really wonderful experience. I, I learned so much at QBP that it was really time for me to move on. I'm kind of a weird dude. And, you know, in a corporate environment, any kind of nonconformity will only be tolerated for a finite period of time. And we were starting to reach that point. And so I left in 2019 and, uh, you know, I never intended to start a bike company again. Um, you know, this is the thing I know how to do. I know how I have, I'm really good at having a vision and driving towards it. Obviously I know how to run a bike company cuz I had been doing it at Q P P for, you know, quite some time. Um, but kind of a random encounter with Paul Crick, uh, who owns Donkey Label here in Minneapolis. Donkey label's a clothing company. He was starting up a fab shop, uh, for the brand Stomper here. And, um, we ran into each other kind of on the massage table. Um, cuz he has like a fit studio and a sports masseuse and stuff, um, in his building here in Minneapolis. And he was like, oh, you can write work on bikes. Like, I need a mechanic. And so I was like, all right, cool. Um, started with Paul part-time and then he found out about my background and what I could do. And so I started taking over some of the operations, um, here in Minneapolis for Stomper. Um, and it was a pretty casual arrangement. Um, and so this is 2019, right? And so 2020 comes around and I have the opportunity. So my background is in marketing. Um, that was my, um, comparative studies in religion and marketing with a re I got at Eau Claire, which is why I ended up in a bike shop in Minneapolis. Like those things, uh, wasn't super employable at the time, so, Um, marketing came knocking and I had the opportunity to move to Portland to work with, uh, Billy Siford and his team at Echoes Communication. And I was really excited about that. Um, you know, I, I enjoy marketing. I was really excited to work with their portfolio of brands And I [00:24:59]Craig Dalton (Host): is a, echos a marketing PR agency that works with a bunch of different brands in the bike [00:25:05]Jeff Frane: Yeah. And they're the ones doing the maid show, so the maid, hand-built bike show that's happening in Portland this fall. Um, it's an echoes thing, so I had the opportunity to do that and I was like, all right, yeah, of course. Like I'm, I'm there, you know, Billy's been a friend of mine for a long time. He calls, I answer like, no problem. And so I was, uh, I quit my thing at Stomper and I was gonna go be, you know, a marketing dude in Portland, Oregon. Um, pandemic hits. I'm one week away from moving to Oregon and everything just freaking shuts down. So, you know, he is like, you know, don't come dude. Like, I don't know what's gonna happen. And I was like, that sounds really reasonable. I'm not gonna come. No worries my friend. You know? And so I'm here in Minneapolis and while I was working with Paul, working on his operations, um, was one I learned how to paint, which was amazing. Painting bicycles, super fun. Uh, but I had developed an American supply chain and there was nobody really using that supply chain. And some people hit me up when they were like, Sorry, I'm ahead of myself. So while I was working at Stomper, I built what is a, what was the first Earthship? I built this personal bike for me and Paul was in the process of potentially changing the name of the company. There wasn't a solid name and I was like, you should call it wild. Like that's a good name for a bike company. Naming bike companies is hard and I think this is solid. So I painted wild on the side of, of my titanium bike. Um, and then shortly after left, and so I had this bike wild that people were seeing on my Instagram and people started reaching out to me and they're like, yo, I see you got this bike. Like, what's up with that? Can I get one? And I was like, yes, actually, yeah, yes, you can get one. Like, let's, let's, let's freaking go. And so started kind of doing onesie twosies there. Um, building, you know, in Oregon, uh, was simple. And then at Waterford, um, so using a couple different fabricators and started making a few, few bikes on my own. Um, it was going really great. But, [00:27:12]Craig Dalton (Host): And were you just following where the customer was taking you at that point? Like if they wanted a, a gravel bike, you were building a gravel bike. Road bike. A road [00:27:20]Jeff Frane: a absolutely, you know, one of my biggest pleasures is working with a customer to co-create the bike of their dreams. So I don't ever try, I have a vision for these things and I've been riding bikes and testing bikes and evaluating bikes my entire professional career now. Um, so I have a pretty good idea when they describe how they want a bike to handle what we have to do to get it there. And, you know, I have a strong vision, but it's really about facilitating their, what they want. Um, you know, and some people are like, I want this hedge two bangle and this C two bangle. And I'm like, bet. Like that's cool. And then some people are just like, describe a feeling they want or the best bike ride they've ever been on, or tell me about the bikes they've rid the past that they've really liked. Um, so at qbp, I was leading the team, uh, that created these bikes, but I wasn't, I wasn't the engineer. [00:28:12]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah. [00:28:12]Jeff Frane: Um, and I wasn't the product manager. Like I was authoring the briefs and then leading the team of the engineers and the product manager to the, you know, to the finished product. But now, I got to learn all the things. Uh, I got to learn how to do everything. And it, it is been amazing. Um, I consider myself to be pretty darn good at bike geometry now. Um, you know, I'm the one drafting all the bikes. I'm the one doing the mo doing, doing geo. Um, I was doing a lot of the tubing choosing, but I'm finding out that there's significantly more knowledge than I have in that regard. And so I'm always all about turning over those things to the best people, you know, who, who, who will get me the best outcome. And so, you know, we're working with our fabrication partners on that part of it now, but I get to be significantly more involved with product than I ever was at Q, which has been really, really super fun for me. [00:29:08]Craig Dalton (Host): I bet. So it sounds like, you know, people were coming to you, they were interested in the bike that you were riding and, and showing on your Instagram feed, et cetera. Was there, was there a moment that you sort of decided, Hey, I've made six or 10 for people I know I need to really kind of build some infrastructure around this brand, put up a website, get a little bit more structure so I can build a little bit more scale to this business? [00:29:31]Jeff Frane: well, you know, um, building bikes in the US is really challenging. Um, there's capacity issues in terms of how many frames we can get made. You can't really scale up a ton, um, or at least at the level I was at. And more importantly, one of the driving factors for me is working with my friends at the bike shops. So many of my best friends, uh, own shops and. The US stuff is, is awesome, but it's hard for them to make margin on it. And so I knew that I wanted to be in business with my friends and I knew that the best way to secure financial stability for my company was going to be to use my connections in Taiwan to have frames made. And luckily I was able to partner up with, um, Leche International Amazing Trading agent. Um, I could name off a bunch of brands that they work with, but I don't know if that would be polite, cuz I don't know if people want that information out there. Um, and we partnered up with them, right? I knew I wanted to do these Taiwanese frames, but I didn't have the resources to do it and nobody was gonna give me a loan for the money I needed. But luckily, Because I like to work with my friends, I was able to reach out to my buddy Josh at the Angry Catfish, Josh, uh, and Andy Co-Own Angry Catfish, which is a pretty well known bike shop here in Minneapolis. And they were into it, you know, they were having was pandemic time, so they were having all these issues with their supply chain and they wanted to, they, they, they didn't really feel like they could depend on anyone in the bike industry. To supply them. So they were like, hell yeah. What we wanna do is to take more of our future into our own hands as well. And so by owning a bike company, we can make sure that our bike shop has frames to sell, has bikes to sell. And so they were all about it. And that gave me the financial, uh, horsepower to be able to afford to do our first batches of frames in Taiwan. And we partnered up with the Max Way factory. Max Way is one of the best. One of the, one of the best places to make a bike. Um, their knowledge and depth in the industry is, is just incredible. The quality of their bikes are superb. Um, they're not the cheapest by any means, but they are really, really great bicycles. And so now we have this Taiwanese product that we're able to sell to our dealers at a decent margin where they can make a living and partner, partner with us. And I don't know, it's just really cool that our small business. Supports their small business. And it's the same thing when we work with our fabrication partners here in the US and we work with, um, you know, our designers and we work with our bag makers. We try to make as much stuff locally as we possibly can. It's our small business supporting the community, supporting their small business, keeping the money in the wealth in the community, among the culture creators. And that's become really kind of a rai and detra for us is, um, building, building strong community, and. Trying to keep as much of the wealth as we possibly can inside this kind of network of friends. [00:32:36]Craig Dalton (Host): Amazing. So if I'm understanding you correctly, if a customer comes to your website and they're interested in the bike, they've got two paths they can go down. One is kind of working with you on a custom US made frame. Second is either buying from you or from one of your bike shop partners, a production frame that you've designed. [00:32:55]Jeff Frane: Yeah, so we do custom uh, and production here in the us you know, and there's all shapes to that. Like somebody might say, Hey, I like the custom geo, but I want this and this, this paint job. You know? Um, I'm in the business of saying yes. Like, if you wanna do some stuff, you wanna try something And we haven't done it. Like I'm game. Like this is how we ex expand and grow our capability. And so, yeah, pretty much everything's on the table. Yeah, we have the Taiwan stuff. Um, it's cool because I feel like we can serve a customer at all levels of their kind of journey through bikes. Um, where they, where they don't, I mean, they can leave us if they want. Like you can buy whatever you want, but they weren't gonna outgrow us. Cause it's like, okay, you're gonna get in with a $2,300 complete Taiwanese bike. Awesome. And then maybe a few years down the line you're like, you know, I really want, have this idea that I wanna see come to life. And then you order a custom, uh, you know, steel bike from us, uh, that we make here in the USA to your specifications. And maybe a little later you're like, oh, you know, I also need, um, you know, a titanium mountain bike. Like, let's go wild. Like, can you make that? And then the answer is, hell yeah, we can, like nothing would give us the greatest pleasure. So it's cool cause I'm hoping that customers kind of get in. They, they love their bikes and then they continue growing with us. [00:34:14]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah. Gotcha. I love that vision. So on that $2,300 price point, which I think is so amazing, I mean, it's so often that. We get people on the podcast and the, the bicycles they're talking about are just unattainable by the majority of the population and you need to start somewhere. So the reason I was asking the question about kind of custom versus production line, the Taiwan Taiwanese lineup, you had to make some decisions there because it wasn't a customer coming to you saying, I want 50 millimeter tire clearance, or I want this head two bangle. Tell me about the design of that bike. What's, who's the rider that you designed for, and what are some of the attributes of that, of that model? [00:34:56]Jeff Frane: Yeah, so if we're talking about the Rambler, which is our Taiwanese made gravel platform, we sell it in two versions with a carbon fork. We call that the SL super light. And then we have the steel fork version that we just call Rambler. Um, that is kind of based on the earth ship as, um, it kind, it borrows heavily from the earth ship. So in my lineage, as I progressed through the industry, we had the Space Horse, then we had the Cosmic Stallion, and then I created the Earth ship, which was an iter iteration of those works, an evolution of those works. And now we have the Rambler. And so when I, things I like in gravel bikes. I believe that an endurance bike comfortable is fast. Um, I love a tall, I have a bad back, uh, as we talked about before the podcast. Um, so I like Tall Stack and I'm super stoked that the industry trend is going more and more towards tall stacks because, you know, high-end bikes serving elite athletes, professional racers is freaking ridiculous. Um, you know, most of us who ride even. Those of us who ride, you know, 10,000 miles a year, we still don't hold like that riding position for a long period of time. Um, the way a professional can, um, so you know, comfortable is fast. So taller stacks. I like to design our gravel bikes with a relatively quick handling front end. I try to keep the trail number in the low sixties because I want it to be really agile. Um, I like bottom bracket heights. That are just slightly, they're slightly lower than a road bike. Um, you know, traditionally, like a touring bike was an 80 mil bottom bracket drop. Uh, with a space horse, we have that cuz we want it to be sportier at 75. Uh, I think the cosmic stallion is 73 and the Rambler hits at 72 with the carbon fork on it. And I really think that's a good, uh, position for it to be in. Um, for, you know, keeping it stable on those gravel descents, having it be very confident, inspiring. Uh, we spec a big tire and with big tires come longer, chains stays. Our chains stays are 4 38, uh, which I kind of think is a magic number in terms of still being agile, but giving you a little bit of cush from that rear end. Um, kind of interesting with the rambler is that the steel fork and the carbon fork have a little bit different geometry. The steel fork needed to be a little longer to clear that big tire. And I'm actually really excited about the change because it makes the, that version of the bike really slick for gnarlier double tracks. Um, some, you know, single track more, more aggressive off-road terrain as well as it makes it really good for six 50 B conversions. When that conversion, it's, it's designed for it. So a six 50 B set up, [00:37:43]Craig Dalton (Host): And what is, what is for 700 C? What kind of tire clearance were you able to achieve? [00:37:48]Jeff Frane: uh, a 50 in the rear, and then the fork clears a two, one. [00:37:51]Craig Dalton (Host): Okay. [00:37:52]Jeff Frane: You know, I, I mean, to me that's gravel standard now. Like if you're not clearing a 50, like you're off the back. [00:37:57]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah, totally agree. It's been interesting, like the journey over the last, at least for me, the last five years to come to that point and see the industry come along and you know, when I first got into it, it was like you had to have two sets of wheels because. If you wanted to get big tires, you had to go down to six 50 B and now not the case. Right. I can run 700 by 55 on my current bike and that's, that's ample, right? [00:38:21]Jeff Frane: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I love that. Um, like every once in a while, like a, like something that's really popular, like, I'm gonna use the example like blood stones are really popular the last couple years, right. And I just so happen to be amazingly comfortable. Awesome shoes, like gravel bikes are super popular and they're also the most versatile, most practical bike you can freaking buy. Like, it's spectacular when. The really good, smart thing also becomes the popular thing, cuz that's not always the case. [00:38:51]Craig Dalton (Host): Yep. Yeah. The, the idea that we have this one bike in our quiver that can do so many different things and have so many different personalities depending on where we wanna ride, is absolutely what's drawn me to the sport. There's no question about it. [00:39:05]Jeff Frane: Totally. And you know, um, so I designed the Rambler so that it can also flex into bike packing if you want. It'll fit a, a, a two two or 2 3 6 50 B. And, um, like on the Earthship, which is a, a dedicated gravel race product, um, I have just bottle mounts in the main triangle and a bottle mount underneath the down tube. Uh, but on the rambler we have three pack mounts on the top of the bottom of the down tubes. A little more versatility there. I don't have rack mounts on the earth ship because it's a gravel race bike. But the rambler being, because it's a little more of an all arounder, will have your rack mounts. Um, you know, all of our bikes have three-pack mounts on them because I think that's standard internal dynamo routing, you know, um, all the features that I think should, should be on a, on a, on a current modern gravel bike. [00:39:57]Craig Dalton (Host): All great stuff, Jeff. So if people are interested in finding out more about the brand or ultimately purchasing one of these bicycles, how, where are you encouraging them to go? I know you wanna work with local bike shops whenever possible, but what? Yeah. Tell me about your vision for how you interact with customers. [00:40:15]Jeff Frane: well, um, you know, we're working to expand our dealer network. Uh, we're trying to keep it, we were trying to keep it significantly tighter. Um, but now we're ready, now that we have a decent amount of inventory from Taiwan, like we're ready to expand. The reason I wanted to keep it tighter is because I don't wanna be a crappy supplier. I don't wanna open up all these dealers and then not have the product to serve them well. [00:40:37]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah, [00:40:38]Jeff Frane: So we're starting to expand a little bit. It's tough because people are like, oh, I saw this on your Instagram. Is there a place where I can go try it in my area? And for most of the people right now, the answer is no. There, there, there isn't really. Um, you know, I think we have 20 dealers around the country at this point, and then we have some in Canada and Japan as well. So, So it's a little tough, you know, here in Minneapolis, like Angry Catfish has all of our stuff on the floor and that's been a really awesome resource for it. I feel a lot of conversations, uh, you know, of emails and such from, from customers asking about the product, um, it's kind of handy cuz in a lot of cases I can be like, well, do you, can you write a space horse? Is there somewhere you can go check out a space horse or a cosmic stallion? Um, our bike is not the same geometry as that, but if that feels good to you, This was my previous, this was the previous work. Check out the new iteration. I dunno if that sounded like a d Was that a jerky thing to say? I hope not much love to, to all this stuff that, you know, we've done in the past and much love to all city. [00:41:43]Craig Dalton (Host): So are you guys holding inventory? Like if someone came to you today and said, I need a rambler, [00:41:48]Jeff Frane: absolutely, absolutely. Um, you know, the struggle that we're having a little bit is, uh, we're offering complete bikes. Which is important and we're offering complete bike shop bikes to our dealers. Um, cuz you know, it's one thing to sell a frame to a dealer, but chances are that frame's just gonna sit there. Like, people need to, like to need, people need to be able to test ride it and, and see it and touch it. Um, so we're selling our shops complete bikes as well, and it's proving a little bit of challenging to put together kits sometimes, but we're doing, uh, as good of a job as we possibly can. [00:42:20]Craig Dalton (Host): And then on the custom side, if someone came to you and said, Hey, I want you to build this dream bike for me. What does that timeline look like and what's sort of the process they go through? [00:42:27]Jeff Frane: Well, uh, I didn't answer the first part of your question, which is do we have inventory? Oh, yeah. We, we absolutely do. We have ramblers in stock. We have our bike packing bike Super Tramp. I have earth ships, US made gravel racers in stock ready to jam. Um, those are really interesting because it's some of the last stuff to come outta Waterford before Waterford closes its doors. And so if you wanted something from that historic, um, historic place, Um, we've got earth ships for you and every time I kind of sell one I'm like, Ooh, there's one less Waterford, Mike, like, we're getting down to the end. [00:43:00]Craig Dalton (Host): I hope the people who are buying them know that that's where they were fabricated cuz that is a meaningful origin of that bike. [00:43:07]Jeff Frane: absolutely. I mean, Waterford is American cycling to me, uh, Richard and his crew there. It's a legendary place with legendary people. You know, I was fortunate enough to work with his daughter Anna, at All City, uh, who I mentioned earlier. And, um, it's a huge, huge loss culturally to us and to the American bicycle industry, um, that they're closing shop, but at the same time, Richard, that's a freaking well earned retirement and what a legacy he li leaves behind. So many happy riders, so many great bikes. [00:43:40]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah. If you, if for the listener, if you haven't heard of Waterford, just do a little Googling and you'll see what we're talking about. [00:43:46]Jeff Frane: Um, to answer your question about timeline, usually takes us about three to four months for a steel or titanium, uh, frame set for a custom. Uh, some of that, you know, we've got a pretty good handle on production time. Uh, some of the variability comes with finishing. Uh, you know, we use a number of people depending on if you want a saraco or if you want powder coat, or if you want. Or if you want really, really, really fancy ano, like those are all kind of different vendors to get us that. [00:44:16]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah. [00:44:16]Jeff Frane: so there's a little bit of variability, but typically four months, [00:44:20]Craig Dalton (Host): Nice. Nice. Anything else that we didn't cover about the brands that you'd like to share, [00:44:27]Jeff Frane: man, Craig, um, you know, I, I, I couldn't be happier with where we are. Um, I get to continue to contribute to the, to the cycling world in some small way. And, you know, I'm super excited about that. Um, I do have something to say though, um, which is this brother. Um, when I trying to figure out how to, how to like, segue into this with, I'm just gonna say it, um, to all the people listening out there, the thing that. Um, has really changed for me in my career and that has really helped me develop as a human being is this, um, you know, we live in a a, we live in the United States of America. We live in a capitalist society and we all have to work and we all have to hustle, uh, to make, to make life work. And, um, you know, one of the big things that, that, that happened to me, Was that I was so, I loved all city, I loved Q bp. I was so emotionally connect, interconnected with this thing. And you know, I was Jeff from All City. Like, that was my identity. My work, my job was such a huge part of my identity that when it was time to leave, that it was like this huge crushing, I mean, it ended up being the best thing that could have possibly happened to me, um, because I was able to develop, um, into the human being. I am, I am today, which is a much healthier. But I had conflated that my work with my value and my identity, right? And, um, so what I want everyone to just to know and to reiterate, like, you're not your job. You're not your output. You aren't how many freaking widgets you made in a day. Um, you're a beautiful special human being who deserves love. And you know, for me, part of that deserving love is deserving to ride my bike every day. Because that's when I feel at, at most, at peace with the world, at most, at peace with myself. Like, that's what bikes are. Bikes are fucking, bikes are salvation. Pardon of my language. Um, and so I just, I don't know, like this is like the message that I wanna just tell everyone is that, um, you're amazing just the way you are. You don't have to make anything. You don't have to produce anything. You don't have to do anything. Just you being you, um, brings a big, big, big, big, big light into this world and. That I love you so much for everyone out there and, uh, yeah, [00:46:51]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah. Thanks brother. I appreciate the sentiment and I appreciate all the, all the good energy you've put into the world, into the bike community. I mean, I think we all realize this, that, you know, we're, we're. It's a luxury to be able to ride these great bikes that we ride. It's a luxury to have the time. It's a luxury to have the community and the environment to get out there and do what we do. And for people like you who are putting it out there in good energy and creating brands like wild, I wish you all the success in the world. [00:47:19]Jeff Frane: Yeah. Well, and thank you so much again for the opportunity to be here. It's, um, you know, it takes a village. Um, we're a little brand just trying to make our way in the world. You know, the, the biggest thing for us is like, people just, it's not that people aren't willing to choose us. It's like that people don't even know we're an option. And it's really hard to build an audience with, like, the way the algorithms are set up. These days. So, you know, opportunities like this to be on the Gravel Ride podcast are, are freaking huge for us. [00:47:47]Craig Dalton (Host): Yeah. Well, awesome. I appreciate the conversation, Jeff, and it was great to get to know you and we'll make sure everybody knows how to get in touch with you guys. [00:47:54]Jeff Frane: Yeah. If, if y'all are looking for, you know, if y'all are looking for bikes, we got 'em. And, uh, I think they're real nice. [00:48:01]Craig Dalton (Host): I love it. Thanks, Jeff. [00:48:03]Jeff Frane: Thank you Craig.    

128. Pooja Midha - Giving and Creating Opportunities for Others “It is about giving and creating opportunity for others, and that opportunity can come through the literal opportunity you give them, it could come through the feedback that you give them…the context that you give them…,the kindness you give them…that unleashes their greatness. All those things are about giving and creating opportunities for others.” - Pooja Midha Guest Bio: Pooja Midha serves as Executive Vice President and General Manager for Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable.  In this position, she oversees the company P&L and a national team spanning all sales and sales development, operations, technology, product, data innovation and insights, and customer experience. Pooja is also responsible for driving growth in addressable, multi-screen and audience-based advertising.  Pooja was formerly chief growth officer for Comcast Advertising. In that role, she led global marketing across the division, which includes FreeWheel, a global technology platform for the TV advertising industry, and Effectv, as well as Effectv's sales development function. In addition to strengthening each unit's brand and differentiated value, she worked with the leadership team to enhance the company's products and solutions within a shifting, multi-screen landscape, emphasizing data and customer value.  She brings more than 20 years of experience in the media and advertising sector, with a track record of transforming businesses; creating new and innovative models; developing brands, partnerships and talent; and exceeding revenue goals.  Previously, Pooja served as president of advertising technology company true[X]. There, she was credited with leading the company through two acquisitions while also exceeding business goals, expanding its industry leading product suite, and growing true[X]'s advertiser, premium publisher and technology partnerships.  Prior to joining true[X], Pooja was senior vice president, digital ad sales and operations for the ABC Television Network. In this role, she created and led the network's digital sales vision and managed its digital sales, planning, and operations teams. Pooja and her team also spearheaded the development of several new video offerings, including programmatic and addressable advertising, major platform partnerships and new products around social, custom ads and branded content.  Before joining ABC, Pooja held a variety of senior sales and marketing roles at ViacomCBS (now Paramount), in both a domestic and global capacity, including positions at MTV Networks, MTV Networks International and Nickelodeon. She started her career in ad sales at Dow Jones & Company.  Pooja has spoken at several major industry conferences, including Cannes Lions and Advertising Week. Adweek named her a 2016 “Young Influencer,” Cynopsis spotlighted Pooja as one of its 2017 “Top Women in Digital: Industry Leader,” Broadcasting & Cable recognized her as a 2021 “Wonder Woman” and Multichannel News honored her as a “Woman to Watch” in 2019 and a “Wonder Woman in Streaming” in 2021. She is also a recipient of the IAB's 2018 Sales & Service Excellence Awards and ANA Business Marketing's “Communicator of the Year” 2022.  A noted industry thought leader, Pooja has been quoted and featured in several major media outlets, such as The New York Times, Advertising Age, Adweek, AdExchanger, Beet.TV, Variety and more.  She holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Business and Psychology from Lehigh University and a Master of Business Administration from Columbia Business School. Pooja also completed the National Association of Multi-Ethnicity in Communications (NAMIC) Executive Leadership Development Program from UCLA's Anderson School of Management. A mother of two, she resides with her family in New York.  R.O.G. Takeaway Tips: Explain the why behind an assignment, feedback, projects, initiatives  Be clear, honest, and fair with your feedback Ask people what they think to encourage them to share their ideas  Don't assume you know everything Give and create exposure opportunities for others Listen and ask quality questions Make sure there are seats at the table or expand the table Unleash greatness Resources: Pooja Midha on Instagram (@missmidha) Pooja Midha Speaker Profile — MCN Wonder Women 2021 "Pooja Midha Joins Comcast Advertising, Following Her "North Star" to TV Transformation" from BeetTV "Navigating Your Career in the Evolving Media Industry" by Pooja Midha "Pooja Midha To Oversee Comcast's Effectv Ad-Sales Unit" by Brian Steinberg Coming Next: Episode 129, Building Bridges Coaching Tips for Generous Leaders with Shannon Cassidy. Credits: Pooja Midha, Sheep Jam Productions, Host Shannon Cassidy, Bridge Between, Inc.

Pay-TV may be in decline, but the TV screen remains a valuable piece of real estate for advertisers as more and more premium content gets pulled into various ad-supported streaming apps and direct-to-consumer (DTC) services. It's a trend not lost on FreeWheel, the ad-tech specialist that Comcast acquired in 2014. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mick Lawrence and Doug Moriellon joined to discuss the power of music and the influence on their lives

Vox Markets speaks to newly-appointed Mirriad #MIRI non-executive director Joanna Foyle about why she joined Mirriad and what her deep advertising and technology experience will add to the ad tech specialist BIO: About Joanna Joined the Board in July 2022. JoAnna has a depth of experience in the global advertising technology industry gained by holding executive leadership positions in operations, client services, marketing, and strategic partnerships. JoAnna most recently served as Senior Vice President, Global Inventory at The Trade Desk. Before joining The Trade Desk, JoAnna was Chief Operating Officer at OpenSlate ahead of its sale to DoubleVerify. Prior to that, JoAnna held executive roles at Rapt (acquired by Microsoft), FreeWheel (acquired by Comcast), Adap.tv (acquired by AOL), and AOL (acquired by Verizon). TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Intro 00:27 Career experience and work outside of Mirriad, and why Mirriad is a logical next step 02:10 How the industry has evolved, the further rapid change ahead and where the opportunity lies for Mirriad 04:49 How in-content advertising fits into the evolving media landscape, and how in-content ads could work hand in hand with traditional formats 06:32 The bigger picture for the advertising industry and the impact of an economic slowdown 07:44 How financial pressures will lead to increased scrutiny of advertising effectiveness 08:36 What specific skills and experience are you bringing to Mirriad, including supporting further growth in the US

Akshay Toshniwal speaks with Bob Bress from Freewheel about Breaking Into Data Science and AI. #datascience #ai #career #education #podcast #aitimejournal About AI Time Journal: Sign up for AI Time Journal's weekly newsletter: https://www.aitimejournal.com/subscribe/ Visit the AI Time Journal WEBSITE: https://www.aitimejournal.com/ Follow AI Time Journal on LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ai-time-journal/ Follow AI Time Journal on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/AITimeJournal/ Follow AI Time Journal on FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/aitimejournal/ Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms: https://anchor.fm/aitimejournal Do you want to be interviewed by AI Time Journal? Get in touch with us at https://www.aitimejournal.com/interview-inquiries.

Co-hosts Timothy John and Phil Jones, the Managing Director of Brother UK, use episode 18 of the Brother UK Cycling Podcast to look back on the recent Tour Series, look ahead to the 2022 Women's Tour, share more information on Brother UK's Green Zone sponsorship at the Women's Tour and Tour of Britain, and celebrate a second national title in three months for Brother UK - Orientation Marketing. Additionally, the episode includes clips from new interviews with Sammie Stuart (Brother UK - Cycle Team LDN) and Jo Tindley (Pro-Noctis - Rotor - Redchillli Bikes p/b Heidi Kjeldsen), in which each rider reflects on their Tour Series success: a competition in which Sammie won two rounds, and Jo led her squad to overall victory in the team competition. The pair also fought a season-long duel in the Freewheel sprints competition. The Brother UK-sponsored Women's Tour begins in Colchester on Monday June 6 and finishes in Oxford a week later. A world-class field will also contain the best British riders, including the British road race champion Pfeiffer Georgi (Team DSM) and British time-trial champion Anna Henderson (Jumbo-Visma), who began her career on a Brother UK-sponsored team. Phil and Tim discuss the race's stellar line-up and gruelling parlours. On stage four, the peloton will roll past the Brother Industries' zero carbon, zero waste to landfill recycling facility in Ruabon. Tim and Phil use this happy coincidence as a springboard to discuss Brother UK's sponsorship of the Green Zones: in-race sectors where riders can dispose of gel wrappers. Tim shares the technical process Enval, the race's recycling partner, will use to recycle the wrappers, while Phil describes Brother UK's sustainability agenda. Brother UK – Orientation Marketing is a development team, but few would guess from its recent results, including two national titles. Our hosts discuss the success of manager Mark Botteley's junior and senior women's teams and the pathway it offers to professional careers via its connection to the UCI-registered CAMS-Basso squad. Listen now on the Brother UK website or via any of the leading podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

In this episode, I answer a question on when riding inside, should you use ERG mode or freewheel.Send questions to tim@trainsmooth.com 

This week I had the absolute pleasure of talking to Ryan Rae Harbuck. She's the author of "When I grow up, I want TO BE A CHAIR", mother of 2, swim coach and a paraplegic.She talks to me about her experience of being pregnant, giving birth and early post-partum stages whilst being a paraplegic.It's an astonishing insight in a world which, most able-bodied, people would never even be able consider.From being told that she would not be able to feel contractions, to weekly "are we almost there yet" check ups that turned out maybe not to be quite regular enough and a traumatic post-partum experience after the birth of her first son, to the birth of her second. She shares some tips to make life a bit easier for other mums who are in a wheelchair and is overall a phenomenal story teller.This is the FREEWHEEL extension she mentions in the interview. I am sure other suppliers are available.You can find Ryan every where.Her website Instagram and FacebookYou can find her book at all major retailers, including Amazon, by going to this page and selecting your favourite retailer.In the news this week  I talk about an experience one of my clients had with NMN. I have addressed NMN supplementation before and my client's experience highlights the issue I raised before about dosage. Here is a little article where you can find some more information on rising estrogen levels.Remember to follow us on Instagram and Facebook for the competitions, wisdom and cute videos. And, of course, you can always find us on our YouTube channel if you like your podcast in video form with little pictures :) Visit healthypostnatalbody.com and get 3 months completely FREE access. No sales, no commitment, no BS. Email peter@healthypostnatalbody.com if you have any questions or comments Playing us out this week;  All over you by VAULTZ

There's a lot of talks about the rise of AdvancedTV (ATV) and, according to a survey FreeWheel's conducted at the end of last year, agencies and advertisers are very bullish about ATV platforms which are all seeing strong and continued growth across many European markets. The ability to bring data to TV-like environments is bringing a lot of excitements to buy-side players. However, to make these platforms attractive and valuable you need scale; but how does this play out in smaller territories such as The Netherlands?  To answer our questions,  this month we talked to Remon Buter, Chief Investment Officer at GroupM in The Netherlands. 

JOIN THE FAMILY@ https://qaraahfilms.com

JOIN THE FAMILY@ https://qaraahfilms.com

For this festive and last episode of 2021 we talked to our own Thomas Bremond, GM, International, FreeWheel and embarked in a journey across time. We explore some of the most striking events that occurred in the premium video and media industry over the past 5 years and reflect on some of the learnings and how the TV industry is evolving and preparing itself for the challenges ahead. 

On a very special episode of Bone-A-Fide Brews, Joe Hawk goes back to where it all began for a revisit episode with the brewery that was the podcast's first episode, Freewheel Brewing Company in Redwood City. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We just wrapped our Beet Retreat, an amazing gathering of 200 industry leaders for three days of conversations and learnings. In advance of the event, we spoke with several of the industry leaders who were part of the Retreat. Here are some of voices from the Retreat:  FreeWheel's Dave Clark, Comcast's Pooja Midha, WarnerMedia's Andrea Zapata, Field Garthwaite from IRIS.TV  and Matt Spiegel from TransUnion.

We are back with the second season of our Digital Dawn Podcast!In the first episode of the new season, IAB Europe's Marketing & Industry Programmes Manager, Marie-Clare Puffet talks to Virginie Dremeaux, Vice President, Marketing and Communications, International at Freewheel. They discuss working in the world of CTV, dive into Freewheel's latest research report - Advanced TV uncovered - and talk about what is in the store for the future of TV.

Talent is pouring into data science, even though it always seems like there's not enough to meet demand. Learning opportunities for people getting into the field have exploded in just the past decade. That means standing out from the crowd—both as a leader and as a practitioner—has become more important than ever before. In this episode, Bob Bress, Head of Data Science at FreeWheel, explains how professionals at all levels can position themselves to win in a burgeoning market. Plus, he offers advice on how data science leaders can stimulate collaboration and intellectual curiosity within their organizations. We discuss: - How to stand out from your peers - Intellectual curiosity, innovation, and collaboration in large organizations - Being the CEO of the data science project you're working on Tune in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, our website, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Can't see the links above? Just visit domino.buzz/podcast for helpful links from each episode.

On this week’s episode of Would You Data Scientist, Wendy is joined by guest Shuai Yuan, Director of Data Science at FreeWheel. Shuai manages a data science team working on optimization problems from the side of the buyer. Join the discussion on why you should get into data science, how you can get into it, and what different avenues the field offers. As always there will be chat on ethics and what you can do to impress recruiters. KEY TAKEAWAYS Shuai’s career got going while studying a PHD in Information Retrieval, studying sponsored searches, display advertising, and real time bidding for search engines. Shuai believes there are three avenues within data science that can cover a lot of roles. They are machinery researcher, machinery engineer, and data analyst. FreeWheel recently hired someone without any full-time work experience in data science. She was able to demonstrate her skills by showing a personal work portfolio she had built in her own time. Even though the applicant hadn’t had any actual experience, she had ticked that box off her own back. There is a war online for the user's attention, websites are bombarding people with ads to try and get noticed. The problem with this is that the user's attention is finite and they get tired of seeing large numbers of ads. The best way to be seen is to realise that it can be about quality, rather than quantity. BEST MOMENTS ‘Python is such a lovely langue and enables so many things’ ‘Everyone is trying to fight for the user's attention, the user's attention is a limited resource’ ‘We need to encourage people from different backgrounds to apply so we have more choice’ EPISODE RESOURCES www.freewheel.com ABOUT THE GUESTShuai Yuan is the Director of Data Science at FreeWheel. You can connect with him on LinkedIn using the link below. https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuanshuai VALUABLE RESOURCES linkedin.com/in/ethicalrecruiter qwerkrecruitment.com @qwerkrec on socials ABOUT THE HOST Wendy Gannon started Qwerk Recruitment in the middle of the Covid Pandemic to disrupt the recruitment sector with ETHICAL data recruitment and treat everyone with love, dignity and respect. Avid Music photographer of 15 years. PODCAST DESCRIPTION Interviewing successful Data Scientists to find out about their journey into Data Science and any struggles they’ve faced to help next generation Data Scientists from all walks of life to access their dream career. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's guest is Bob Bress, VP of Analytics and Business Intelligence at Freewheel. Bob is an Analytics leader with 15+ years of experience in developing and implementing complex analytical solutions for leading-edge technology and advertising programs. He is an expert in building Data Science and Business Intelligence teams from the ground up. Freewheel empowers all segments of The New TV Ecosystem. They power the technology, data enablement, and convergent marketplaces required to ensure buyers and sellers can transact across all screens, across all data types and all sales channels, in order to ensure the ultimate goal in gaining the best results for marketers. In the episode, Bob will discuss: Freewheel's current projects within TV advertising What he loves about his job How to add real business value through data science Key traits to have for a successful data scientist Building a successful data science team Advice on how to interview more effectively Future trends in media & advertising that excite him

Join the coach in the Coaches Corner as we "Freewheel" it on a recovery week and chat about taking a physical and mental break from structured training and add a talk about resetting you nutrition for less work on the bike as we add In the Feedzone to the Coaches Corner. To learn more, visit our website at https://www.endurancelab.fit Join the discussion on our forum at https://discuss.endurancelab.fit --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/theendurancelab/message

Liz Baillie @_lbaillie | GitHub | Blog | Tilde Inc. Show Notes: 01:32 - Becoming a Developer 07:54 - Website Building 12:03 - Understanding Programming 17:34 - Coming to Peace with Ignorance 22:25 - Systems Programming 26:46 - Making Goals for Yourself 28:57 - Math and Programming 38:08 - Open Source Resources: Wicked Good Ember Liz Baillie: Journey to the Center of Ember Test Helpers Fibonacci Number Freewheel: Volume One by Liz Baillie The Flatiron School Skylight Impostor Syndrome Twilio Letter to a Young Haskell Enthusiast Hello, Con! OSCON Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast Episode 57. My name is Charles Lowell. I am a developer here at The Frontside and with me is Stephanie Riera, also a developer at The Frontside. Today, we have with us Liz Baillie, who is a developer at Tilde. I am actually really excited to have Liz on the show. I saw her at Wicked Good Ember back in June of 2016 and her talk was definitely one of the more memorable ones. You come away from a conference kind of only remembering a certain number of talks that stick in your mind and as time passes, the messages may fade but some of the message just stick with you and the one I got from her talk was a feeling of empowerment that, even though I have a lot of experience, I could approach any code base and try and grapple with it and understand it. I came away thinking, "There are a lot of code bases out there that I don't understand but if I apply a certain set of techniques and a certain level of fearlessness, I will actually get there." You know, if I want to go attack something like I don't know like Kafka or something like that, I would feel better about that. That was actually a great feeling coming away from that, a feeling of great power so thank you very much for that, Liz. LIZ: Yeah, no problem. CHARLES: Why don't we start with a conversation of how you came to be a developer? Everybody's got kind of a unique path. What's yours? LIZ: Well, I went to art school and I studied comic books. I actually have a bachelor's degree in comic books. I was a cartoonist for a number of years and at some point, maybe like 10 years ago, I had a friend who was a programmer. He's a web developer. But I didn't even what's a web developer was. But I knew he worked at home and he made his own hours and he made a lot of money. It seemed like an awesome job so I was like, "How did you get into that?" And he's like, "I don't know. I just kind of mess around and figured it out." And I was like, "Uh... I don't know what that means." Like how do you start? I have no idea. I went to the bookstore and I look at the For Dummies books and I got Programming for Dummies or something and it was like Visual Basic, I think. CHARLES: All right. What year was this? LIZ: That's 2004. I guess, it was a little more than 10 years ago. But it didn't say that on the cover. It was like 'Programming' and I was like, "Oh, cool. I'll learn programming." I don't even know what the difference of languages was or anything like that. I did a couple of exercises in that book and I had no concept of how this would become a website ever. I was making 'Hello, World' and little things that spit out Fibonacci numbers or whatever. I kind of gave up on that and I was like, "I don't care. I don't mind being poor." I'm used to it so I kept being a cartoonist, putting out books and stuff. I did a little PHP and HTML type of stuff in making websites for myself in between but I don't really consider that programming. It didn't feel like programming. CHARLES: Did you ever put any of your cartoons on the web? LIZ: Oh, yeah. Google me. They're there. [Laughter] LIZ: I might have some stuff like my web comic, I'm not sure if it's still up. But I had a web comic called Freewheel, which was about this girl who runs away from home and joins a band of magical hobos. CHARLES: That sounds like a career change to programming. It was oddly prophetic. LIZ: Yeah. It's out there. Anyway, I got to a point where, long story short, I was tired of being broken for all the time and I have to figure out some way to make money that I like doing so I thought, "I would go back to school," so I went back to school. I didn't start out with computer science but I took some math and science classes and I got really into math a lot. I really enjoyed math so I started looking into what careers can I do that are math-y. Somebody said, "If you enjoy the problem solving aspects of math, you'll love computer science," so I took a Computer Science 101 class or something like that and I got really, really into it like I just killed it. I just loved it. It was awesome. But I still didn't understand how you made that a website. In the back of my mind, I was like, "We did this thing --" We learned Python in my class so there's some program we had that like move a little turtle around and do pictures or something. I was like, "I don't understand how this makes a website." CHARLES: You got to move that turtle around a lot, especially like account for the kerning in the fonts and stuff. LIZ: Yeah. I have no idea how you make that a job, like the stuff that we were doing like spitting out Fibonacci numbers and making a little adventure game or something but how does that translate into anything else. That was in 2014 and that was around the time that web development bootcamps were starting to be more of a thing. I heard about a school called the Flatiron School in New York which is right at the time and I thought, "This sounds great. In three months, they'll actually teach me how this makes a website and finally know how does this make a website?" I applied in kind of like on a lark. I don't think I'll get in, I didn't know how can I afford it or anything and I applied and I got in. I was really lucky that my stepdad help me pay for it so I don't have to worry about it. I did that in three months and then I got a job. In November 2014, my first web job and now I know how those codes make a website so here I am today. CHARLES: What a journey. LIZ: Now, I live in Portland, Oregon and I make websites. Not really, I work on web apps, I guess is more accurate. CHARLES: So you actually went straight from the Flatiron School to working at Tilde? LIZ: No. I was in New York at the time and my first job was at an ad tech company called SimpleReach and I worked there for a little over a year before I got the job at Tilde, then I move to Portland. A year ago yesterday was my first day at Tilde. CHARLES: Fantastic. Knowing that company and knowing what they do, they must have you doing some really, really fascinating stuff. LIZ: Yeah, I do a lot of typical web stuff. I work on the Ember side of our app, Skylight. I also, more recently have been working on Rails engine that's also a gem that spits out documentation automatically, which is pretty cool. CHARLES: Now, is this documentation for the product or is it just documentation for any real site? LIZ: No, it's for our products specifically but I don't think it would be very difficult to alter for someone's personal needs, other than ours. But it's basically like if someone can write a markdown document, then we'll parse it and spit it out into HTML and all these different places so that it just updates the whole documentation site around our products. CHARLES: Basically, there's an infinite amount of stuff that has to happen to make a website because there are literally so many moving parts. What's been your favorite kind of area, I'll just say the whole website building because that really is like the tip of the iceberg. The actual iceberg goes way, way, way beneath the surface. But what's your favorite location on the iceberg so far? LIZ: I kind of like the middle, I guess. I always feel bad saying it because everybody talks badly about CSS but I just don't like it. I tried it really hard. One of my resolution this year was I'm going to try really hard and I'm going to like it more. But what I like the most is whenever I get to do pure Ruby. I learned Rust in the last year or two and anytime I get to make the stuff behind the visual aspect work or kind of like meta stuff. I'm saying this and it's totally wrong but I did my first meta programming the other day or last month. The metaprogramming that I did ended up getting cut out of [inaudible] but I got to do it before it got deleted. It was pretty cool. CHARLES: That's generally how it works. Metaprogramming is the program we do that we end up hating ourselves later for but it's really fun. LIZ: Yeah, they're like, "This is cool but this is not the most efficient to do this." It's like, "I guess, we don't have to dynamically create methods based on all our filenames. CHARLES: As far as the CSS goes, I actually see CSS like raw kale. It's actually really good for you, if you like to it eat in large quantities and it's like fantastic but it's not always the most pleasant going down. LIZ: It tastes bad. It has a terrible feel. It's like eating rubber. I am really lucky, though that I worked with a couple of people who are incredible at CSS and when I get to pair with them, it's like watching magic happen. CHARLES: Yeah, you realized, for all its quirks and strange ways that you approach it, is an outlier but it is kind of a fully-formed programming model that has a lot of depth and a lot of people have really, really generated some pretty neat abstractions and ways of dealing with CSS. But it is like, "I just want to fix this one thing," and it's basically a sea of things that I have no idea how to navigate. LIZ: It's one of those things. I always think it's funny, anyway that I come from a visual art background but the thing I like about programming is anything visual. CHARLES: That is actually really is fascinating. LIZ: Yeah, when they hired me here they're like, "You're going to be really good at design," and I'm like, "I just want to do programming." CHARLES: Like never the temptation, like this is just because you've actually kind of drank your fill of that in a past life? LIZ: I think I've talked to my coworker, Kristen about this because she actually has a design background and we paired together all the time. She's one of the people that I was talking about who are geniuses at CSS. She's a genius at it. She has a design background. We've talked about this how art and design are kind of different, like the brain stuff that I use to make a comic is really different from designing a book cover or designing an experience. It's all part of the art side of the brain but it's different compartments of the art side of the brain. I don't really have a design background as much as I have like a narrative and a drawing background. STEPHANIE: That and your interest for math that probably has a factor. LIZ: Yeah. STEPHANIE: Going back to your journey, I wanted to ask about it seems like it took you awhile to knock on different doors and finally feel like, "Now, I understand. How do I work with what I have to create a website?" We have similar backgrounds in that. We didn't start off in programming and I also went through a code boot camp. But mine was a little different where when I finish, I didn't really feel I understood what programming really was. I still felt like I understood a primitive level like just building something, just a 'Hello, World' using HTML CSS. When I finished, it took me a year and a half to actually get a full time programming job, like a legit job. Before that, I was scrambling doing three part time jobs and lots of WordPress grunt work. Even though I thought it was actual experience, it was enough experience but I feel like a lot of the programming concepts that I've had to learn and just basic functional programming, I've learned it on the job. I don't yet feel like I am a legit 'real programmer'. We were talking about the Pinocchio thing like, "I'm a real boy." But I want to be a real programmer. [Laughter] STEPHANIE: What I'm curious about is at what point did that happen? When did that click and when did you stop having -- I'm sure at some point you had -- impostor syndrome? When did that just evaporate and you're okay? LIZ: I still have impostor syndrome all the time. It's weird that it's like I have a sense of, "Oh, I can figure anything out." At this point, I know who to ask or where to look and I could figure anything out if I really wanted to. But I also feel like everyone else is better than me. I get impostor syndrome in that sense, not that I'm not a programmer but that everyone else is better than me. When did I start feeling like I was a real programmer? Definitely not at my first job. When I started my first job at SimpleReach in November 2014, I had two months in between bootcamp and the job. In that time, I made some weird little apps but nothing super serious. I made an app that I use the Twilio API to anonymously text Seal lyrics to people. It sends either lyrics from Kiss From A Rose or a fact about Kiss From A Rose. You can choose which one. I made stuff like that. CHARLES: [Singing in the tune of Kiss From A Rose] There's was so much in app can tell you so much it can touch. Okay, I'll stop. I'll stop right there. I promise. LIZ: Yeah, so I did stuff like that and I sort of wrote my own crowdfunding to go to RubyConf because I gotten an opportunity scholarship ticket that year. But I couldn't afford to go otherwise. I did a little crowdfunding thing but I did little things like that. I didn't really feel like I understood everything so I was looking on other people's code and forking stuff to make all that happen. Then I got my job and it was small-ish start up at the time and they didn't have a whole lot of on-boarding at all. It's kind of like I showed up, they gave me a computer and it took me three or four days to get their app running locally. It was just a lot of leaving me to my own devices a lot of the time in the beginning and I was kind of like, "I don't know what I'm doing. What do I do?" It took a while. As the company matured and as I matured as a programmer, they kind of develop a little more infrastructure, I guess for supporting junior engineers. As time went on, I became better and they became better at mentoring me. I don't know when I felt like a real programmer, probably sometime in the middle of that job. I gave my first technical talk, I guess or conference talk at EmberConf in 2015. I gave a lightning talk at the behest of the Leah who is now my boss. It was a five-minute talk on why testing an Ember sucked at that time. It sucked for me to learn and it was really hard. I wanted to learn it but it was really hard. Then after that, people started talking to me. They came up to me after and they are like, "Oh, my God. Blah-blah-blah." I was like, "I don't know half the stuff these people are saying. I don't understand what you're talking about." I'm going to smile and nod. But maybe a little bit after that, I kind of started feeling more that I could solve problems. I think public speaking actually helped me a lot with that like when I realized that I had something to say and that people want to hear it, then I could help other people feel empowered to learn stuff, I think that was part of it as well. CHARLES: Yeah, I really like that. Obviously, I'm going to push back a little bit on Stephanie, just in terms of the day-to-day. You definitely deliver daily as a programmer so you can look at that. You've mentioned this at the very beginning of your answer and it almost really sounds like what you came to be was more of a kind of a peace with the things that you didn't know, rather than feeling confident about the things that you did. You said something and I'm going to paraphrase it but it's like, "I got to the point where I became sure that I would be able to figure it out." Or, "I had strategies for being able to figure it out." Maybe we can unpack that a little bit because I feel that's actually very, very important and that's a skill that's important to have at any level of experience in your career, whether it's one year or whether it's 20. Certainly, that message when I saw you speak that's something that I took away as a very experienced developer. I felt actually empowered by it. What are some of those mechanisms to feel at peace with your own ignorance? LIZ: I think part of the problem for me, I started learning how to program before I went to dev bootcamp or whatever, that I was really good at stuff. I actually think that was a problem because I was used to succeeding immediately or like always doing everything right so it's hard when you start learning something and you don't realize when you first start learning programming and it's not supposed to work immediately, like you're starting with something that's broken and you're making it work. CHARLES: Right. In fact, 99% of the experience is like every time I look at a piece of software, I'm like, "Someone sat with the broken version of this for a year and then it work and that's what I got." They got to live with the working version for two seconds before it came to me and they spent the rest of the time, totally broken. LIZ: Yeah, totally. It's hard when you're used to creating something from scratch like doing comic books and like writing stories and stuff. It's never broken it's just blank and then you add to it so I'm used to that sort of workflow. Then I started in this new field where Rails is new or whatever then it's just errors as far as the eye can see until you fix it, until you configure it, you made it work. It's hard to change your mindset into that. It's easy to feel like a failure when all you see is errors and you don't know that that's normal. I helped a couple of my friends to learn to program and I think the biggest hurdle is just mentally overcoming that it's not you, you're not a failure. It's just that everything's broken until it's done. STEPHANIE: I can definitely relate to that. I was always one of those overachievers, straight A, AP class. I'm not even kidding. In my high school, they called me Hermione, which for those that don't know, that's the girl from Harry Potter. It's like you take it really personally when you feel like you're a failure. You feel like you can't deliver, you don't pull your own weight. For me, it's actually so overbearing that it can even inhibit you from doing things like public speaking or other activities. But one of the reasons why I do like to teach whenever I can is because that's when you realize, "I do know a lot of things," like how to do stuff on Git and just basic things that you don't even think twice about. I volunteered for this these high school girls and no one really gave me any instructions and I just rolled out of bed for this thing and just have them build a basic cute little web page with their picture and this and that. I had to really think hard to how do I put just a regular image tag and I had to peel back all the old layers of stuff that I don't do anymore. You don't think about those kind of things in Ember or JavaScript frameworks. I caught myself in keep on saying dom and this and that and they were like, "What is a dom?" And I'm like, "Urghh." But then I realized, I do have all this context, I guess I don't appreciate it or something. LIZ: I think talking to beginners when you're slightly above beginner-level in helping other fresh beginners is one of the best things for you as a new developer because you realized, you're like, "I actually know stuff." STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's usually the type of advice I like to give to other aspiring junior programmers. I also wanted to ask about it seems like now you're going through something similar because you tweeted or you're asking about systems programming. What's that like? LIZ: I'll start at the beginning. When I started at Tilde about a year ago, I knew that we use Rust, which is a systems programming language, a lower level language than Ruby or JavaScript. We use it for some aspects of our stacks. I thought, "That's really cool. I want to get into that nitty-gritty type of stuff so how do I learned that?” I started learning Rust but I didn't really know how to apply that knowledge. I wrote like a little adventure game in Rust and it was almost exactly the same as when I first started learning about web development, it's similar to how does this become a website, instead of like, "How does this become a computer thing?" I don't even know what systems programming is but I hear Rust is a systems programming language so I want to learn that stuff, like what is that stuff? A couple months ago, I think it was, I tweeted like, "Anybody have any probably three systems programming resources so I could learn more about systems programming?" And I got huge amount of responses. Everybody was super kind and helpful but a third of the responses were like, "Well, what kind of systems programming?" And I was like, "I..." [Laughter] CHARLES: "The kind that happens on a system?" [Laughter] LIZ: I don't know. It was kind of the same thing. I think I used this metaphor earlier but it's similar to when I first started learning programming it was like I was standing at the front of a forest and I knew that the stuff I want is in the forest but I don't even know what a tree is, you know what I mean? Eventually, I learned what a tree was then I learned what a map was and I learned how to get through that forest. But then in the middle of that forest, I was like, "Oh, there's a tunnel," like there's another stuff. "I want to get on to this tunnel," but I don't know anything about living underground, you know what I mean? Like, "What do I need? What even is there?" I have no idea so that's kind of how I feel about systems programming. At the moment, I'm trying to go into this tunnel but can I breathe down there? I don't know. Where does it lead? CHARLES: I feel like at that point when you're about to enter into the tunnel, can you intentionally apply filters for information that at that point is not useful like the difference between a stalactite and stalagmite is not useful when you haven't even gone into the cave yet and you're just like, "How do I actually just get down there with a flashlight?" How do you go about deciding which information is useful and which is not at your particular stage? Because obviously, it's all going to be useful at some point but at what point it becomes useful and what point do you just catalog it and put it for later? I feel like that's very, very hard thing to do. Do you feel like you're able to do that? LIZ: I'm not sure. I think I said this earlier but I feel like I can figure most things out at this point like if I really want to. One of the things I learned just from talking to people on Twitter about systems programming is like, "Oh, some examples of systems programming are operating system," or like a browser engine because I'm still learning Rust and I gotten to write as much lately but I know that there is servo which I believe is a browser rendering engine written in Rust, it's something like that. CHARLES: Supposedly it's going to powering Firefox at some point. LIZ: Yeah, stuff like that, I think is really interesting but now I know a little more about what to look at in terms of as far as I understand, there is probably an infinite amount of different kinds of systems: operating systems is one, maybe a browser engine is another. I can't remember the others but I'm sure people tweeted it out to me. STEPHANIE: I feel like we touched on something which is it can get overwhelming when you're starting off in something new. Trying to understand what you don't know that you don't know. LIZ: Yeah, that's the hardest thing. STEPHANIE: How can you make tangible goal marks for yourself if you don't even know what you don't know? When I first started off, when I would pair with someone that was more advanced, I remember having a realization that every time I would look for an add-on or I'm looking at someone's repo, I would take my time to read everything about it, all of the Ember documentation and I need to know everything. Then later I realized that is totally not the case. Like Charles said, people develop this filter for noise and only focusing on not the entire tool box but that one tool that they need for that one specific thing that they're doing and I realized it only when I was pairing with people and seeing that. They go to this repo, skim it, "No, this is not what we need. Let's go to the next one. Let's try to find a method that what we need," and then they would just search on the page. "Oh, this looks kind of similar. Let's plug this in," and I'm just like, "What? You can do this? You can just copy/paste someone else's stuff?" and it was amazing. But when you're starting out, you don't know all of these things and unfortunately, kind of waste a lot of time thinking that you need to know everything and you don't. CHARLES: Yeah, Cheating is totally a virtue in so many cases. [Laughter] LIZ: Totally, for sure. CHARLES: Just being like, "I don't need to understand this," but I just know that it works. You pushed at what point that happens like further and further back but that boundary of understanding is just simply always going to be there. No matter where you are, that kind of veil of ignorance, you can push it out but it's just can be further away. I am actually curious, you mentioned you got really into math, this is when you went back to school. What drew you to that and how have you applied, if you've applied? Have you found it to be an asset in your development career? LIZ: For sure. When I first went back to school, it was with the idea that this is totally different now, obviously. I thought I might become a veterinarian -- CHARLES: You need a lot of math for that, right? LIZ: Well, it's like a lot in biology and there's a lot of math and science and stuff. I had to take a bunch of science classes and take biology and chemistry so that involved taking some pre-calculus and calculus and more calculus. What I realized, though was that I hated biology and chemistry but I love the math that I was learning. I loved the process of problem solving and just figuring out puzzles. When you get into calculus, how you solve problems, they're similar to how you solve problems in programming where you have sort of a framework like I have this certain language which would be the different theorems or whatever in math and you can just pick and choose which ones will fit your problem and if you're taking a calculus test, you could be sitting next to the same person and you might come to the same answer in different ways so it's similar in programming where you have all of this documentation, you have these languages, you have use other frameworks and you can solve the same problem in a million different ways. But in terms of how people talk about needing math for programming, I don't necessarily think you need math for programming but if you already like math, it's definitely sort of a happy path, I guess because you get the same joy out of programming that you get out at solving calculus problem. But if you don't like calculus, it's okay. I don't think it's necessary. CHARLES: One of my favorite blog posts of all time is this letter to young Haskeller, I don't know if any of you guys have ever read that. It's fantastic and it's an experienced person in the Haskell community talking to someone who's just coming in and it's incredibly empathetic and wonderful. I think it's a message that needs to be heard more generally. I think it's ironic coming out of the Haskell community as it does because they definitely have a reputation for being a little bit salty and a little bit exclusive. But it's actually a very inclusive message. One of the great points they make is they say we've got the whole equation reversed. It shouldn't be, "Math is hard, therefore programming is hard." It should be, "Programming can be really fun, therefore math on which programming is based, can also be really fun." You can go both ways. If you find math fun, you can find programming fun and if you find programming fun first, you can later go and have fun with math. You can pick and choose which parts you want. I think it's a great message that needs to get out there. LIZ: I think it's also really, really important to note for anyone who might be listening that is getting in to programming, that is scared of math or has had a bad experience with math that it is not necessarily to love math. I think that scares a lot of people away and a lot of the stuff that people learn when they're first learning programming are math based. When I was in the Flatiron School, Some of the exercise we did in the beginning with just pure Ruby were Fibonacci sequence. They were sort of math-y and that turns a lot of people off and makes people scared. If someone is hearing this and has experienced that, don't be scared. You don't need to worry about it. But if you love math, then it's great but you don't have to. STEPHANIE: I'm one of those people that always had this mental block of like, "I'm not good at math." I was good at everything in school. I excelled at everything except math. I think a lot of it came from my struggle when I was a kid so you have this self-perpetuating thought that you aren't good at something. Every time you take a final or something, you blank out because you have this mental wall in your mind. What I found weird was I was doing the exact same thing. I was taking calculus for bio-sciences and physics too at the same time. In physics, I loved that class. It was so awesome and I realized that half the stuff I was doing was going backwards in all of my problems and it was fun for me. Eventually, I was taking a final for my calculus class and I didn't remember the equation that we needed for that class so I took out all the variables and I solved it as if it's a physics problem and I got the same answer and I was correct. I realized at that moment, if you just remove the negativity from your mind and you try to apply yourself in the same fashion as you would in something that you enjoy, you'll just forget for the moment that it's math, that it's something that you 'suck at'. You actually could do good in it and not get stuck. I realized I actually do like math when it's veiled as chemistry or physics. LIZ: I think a lot of people have that experience with math. They have a really bad experience when they're young and then they get stuck and they feel like they're just not good at it like somehow, on this subatomic level, you just can't change it or you're not good at it. It's not really true. STEPHANIE: Yeah. CHARLES: I actually love that example because it is, it's all integrated. We are constantly doing things like math without even realizing it. Actually, one of the things I love about the Montessori education is that's the way they actually teach it. They have all of the different great lessons, they want to convey to the children which is things like courtesy and grace, things like taking care of your things, things like music. But for all, I think they've got a bunch of different categories but they make sure that they always intersect with each other and you get that in surprising ways to make sure that if a child likes music, use the music as a way to introduce them to arithmetic. If they like arithmetic, use that as a way to introduce them to music. If they have things doing design, I don't want to say, interior designer or clothing design but practical life stuff and if that's something that a child really is drawn to, then they'll use that as an introduction to music or geography. There's all these parallels that are constantly there and you can ride whichever rail works for you to whatever area that you want to go. There is no set way to approach math. You literally can find a way that works for you. STEPHANIE: The subjects aren't mutually exclusive, "Because you're not good at this, probably you shouldn't become a programmer." CHARLES: It's not expected that every child will grow in one subject at the same rate that they'll grow in every other subject. They just let the children explore the area that they're interested in and let them go crazy. If they're really into art, they just let them explore and learn as much as they can and then slowly entice them and just show them the connections that art has to courtesy and grace to math to music to other things and let them see those connections and then follow them on their own. That's why they call it -- the kind of grown up in there -- the guide. It's really there. The way that they push is by showing them the connections but then using the kind of internal motivations of the children to move. I actually have some pretty strong feels on this. I feel like our education does leave a lot of people behind because there's this expectation that in every single subject, everybody will goose step forward at exactly the same rate and that's just a fable. It's not real. It's not how the human mind works. LIZ: Yeah. CHARLES: But yeah, I actually think, certainly for me and my connection to math has been helped by the fact of programming and now, later on after having done a lot of programming, so much more is interesting to me about math and I can see beauty in it, I think where I didn't see beauty in it before. STEPHANIE: For one of the projects that we've been working on, we have been doing an Ember upgrade. I basically needed to get some changes for one of the dependencies and I have no experience in open source, whatsoever. That happened for the past two weeks. I was making a lot of PRs to two different dependencies and that was my first experience with open source. It was less scary than I had imagined and I actually got a lot of great feedback from it. Now, I realized that it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be and most people are very receptive to your PRs or if you have questions about their open source because they need help, they need people to help them tackle all the issues that they have so I'm curious, do you have any advice for people that are interested in contributing to open source but they may find it daunting and they don't want to look dumb or do things the wrong way? LIZ: One of the things I've been interested in since I started learning programming is open source because I enjoy collaborative atmospheres and just the idea of a big group of people coming together to solve problems. It was something that I wanted to do since the beginning but it's super intimidating because when you think of people who are open source maintainers, at least to me in the beginning, they seemed way above me like Gods so I'm like, "How can I possibly be useful to these Gods?" At my last job, my manager was like, "I got a couple of goals for you and for your career." One of my goals was I want to contribute To Ember CLI Mirage. That was a goal. I just thought, "This is a great add-on. This is a great project and everyone uses it and I love it and I would love to contribute to that." I made it a goal but then in that in the middle of that time period, I got a job here at Tilde and I went to Portland. Shortly after that, I went to the repo and I was like, "I'm going to do this thing," because one of the reasons why I chose it as a project to contribute to is because I heard Sam is a really nice guy. One of the things was that I was really intimidated by the people maintaining projects is like, "Well, he's not intimidating." I feel okay about this so that's a good first step. The second step is let's find a thing to do so I look at all the issues on the repo and I find something super simple which is just adding in-line documentation. That's what I did and I was like, "Can I pick this up?" I was feeling super shy so I didn't even want to put it on the issues so I think I just pinged him on the Ember Slack and just like, "Can I help with this?" He's like, "Yeah, yeah. That's great," so I made a bunch of in-line documentation additions to the project and I made my first PR and it felt like such a way that it's not as scary at all as I thought it would be so I started contributing to other projects, things that just came up. Not so much like in your situation where it was a dependency I was using but more like I saw somebody tweet about it and like, "I just made this project and I think there's a bunch of typos. Can somebody just spell-check this for me?" I'll go in and do a couple of typo fixes. Another situation when I was reading through a repo because I want to learn and there's a project called intermezzOS which is Rust operating system, like a tiny operating system. I was just reading the code and I was like, "There's a couple of typos. I can fix this," and stuff like that and I found, through that experience, that open source maintainers are super happy to have you help in any way that you can, even if it's a little things. In the last couple of months, I started my own project which is like an app -- it's not an add-on or anything. I actually got my first couple of PRs from other people and other people are helping me build it. I don't think I've ever met but every time I get a PR, I feel like I won a prize. Every time someone contributes and I'm like, "Thank you." I cannot give you another -- [Laughter] LIZ: I love that you're helping me. You know, like I only have one hour a day to work on this thing so anything, anyone people can do to help me is so great. Now I have the experience of being on the other side and I can attest to the fact that most open source maintainers are incredibly stoked for any help they can get. Even if you're new, just find someone who's nice and ask them how you can help. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that was a realization that I had because I was communicating directly with this person in the Ember Slack as well. I had submitted a PR and later he was like, "Hey, while you're at it, do you mind adding in this one property that's missing?" And I'm just like, "All right. Sure." Later he offered if I wanted to become a collaborator because I was putting in so many PRs and like you said, he hasn't had the time to cut out a new version or to fix the things that you keep in your head, "Okay, I'm going to go back and fix this," and then someone else is like, "I want to fix this thing," go for it. That's the best. LIZ: Yeah, totally. It's a great way to learn more stuff too. CHARLES: I like the point about choosing a project that you know is not intimidating because unfortunately, there is a lot of negativity that happens out there. LIZ: Totally, I knew that and that was a big blocker for me, for a long time. CHARLES: Yeah but knowing that there are actual, I would like to say, a majority I don't know if that's true but it can feel like it's enclaves, just because negativity has a way of clouding everything and propagating but there are certainly areas where we put that way and it's very healthy, it's very collaborative and welcoming and making a definitive effort to first know that they're out there because if you have a negative experience, you make sure that you don't bounce off of that and then define them. I really like that, how you were deliberate about that. LIZ: Yeah, it seems like the most important thing, if you're a new programmer and they're like, "How do I get involve in open source," and your first advice is like, "Find someone who's really nice." It doesn't sound like the right advice but I think it is the right advice. CHARLES: That's because that's where you'll stick. LIZ: Yeah and you'll want to collaborate with that person and that project because you're not scared of being insulted or something. CHARLES: Well, that was fantastic. We can wrap it up. LIZ: I have two talks this year so far coming up. One is going to be in Toronto at the end of this month at a new conference called 'Hello, Con!' I built a type space adventure game in Rust and I built it side by side with the same game in Ruby so I can learn Rust by doing the same thing on both sides. I'm going to be talking about the similarities and differences and things I came across learning Rust as a Rubyist. I also have a similar talk in May at OSCON in Austin about learning Rust as a Rubyist but at a slightly different, longer talk. I did a version of it at RustConf last year. It's kind of in comic book form so it's all of drawings and it's sort of a story about going to a place called Rustlandia as a Ruby person and how you literally navigate that world, not just everything is sort of a metaphor. I'm getting that talk again in a longer form at OSCON in Austin in May. CHARLES: Well, fantastic. You have to stop by the office and come see us. LIZ: Yeah. CHARLES: But thank you so much -- LIZ: Thank you. CHARLES: -- Liz for taking the time to talk with us. This is a great conversation again. You know, I feel like I'm going to come away feeling that I've got more tools to deal, certainly with my daily struggles -- LIZ: Yeah, get pumped! CHARLES: -- In programming. Yeah. LIZ: Programming! Yeah! [Laughter] LIZ: -- One of the Mortal Kombat music comes in -- Tun-tun-tun-tun-tun-tun-tun-tun-tun... [Laughter] CHARLES: I remember actually seeing Mortal Kombat in a theater and I actually getting up and dancing in the theater and then the rest of the movie just sucked. It was like they spent the whole budget on the first 20 seconds of that movie. Anyhow, all right. That's it from The Frontside. Remember to get in touch with us at Frontside.io, if you're interested in UI that's engineered to make your UX dreams come true.