The Next Chapter: Relevancy and Reinvention - Bruce Buchanan, CEO and Co-Founder, Rokt [S9:E7]

I'm Ed Cowan and this is scaling up. Talk about our DNA internally as build a DNA and if you want to make a difference to the world you're in, you get up every day in a very different motivation. We move at pace and therefore learning at pace is important. And therefore you got to accept failure, and failure is the greatest unlock of learning velocity you can get.

This podcast aims to educate and inspire by telling the stories of great growth companies as told by their CEOs and founders. TDM is an Australian based investment firm that invests globally in fast growing public and private companies. For more insights, visit our website tdmgrowthpartners.com.

We last sat down with Bruce Buchanan in late 2019. At the time, Rocht was in hyper growth mode, having just raced through the US $100 million revenue mark and the business was laser focused on the transaction moment, unlocking its potential for merchants, advertisers and consumers alike. In the six years since, Rock's revenue has grown more than 8 fold. The company is now strongly profitable and has been built on its original insight, the power of relevancy.

Bruce and his team have transitioned the business to now be a full suite of AI powered products. Each new capability has deepened e-commerce partner stickiness, expanded both sides of the network, and delivered greater returns for merchants and advertisers. This episode dives into Rock's next. Chapter of Growth.

And the role it is playing as a neutral, trusted intermediatory for first party data. How the business is positioned to become an intelligence layer for e-commerce in a world that is seeing real time technological change with the rise and capability of AI agents. Just as importantly, we'll discuss what the last six years have revealed about Rocks Culture and how Bruce has leaned into the hard decisions needed to scale the business for the long term. Without doubt, this period has cemented Bruce as one of Australia's great entrepreneurs and leaders.

And yet, the story is still being written. Here's my latest conversation with Bruce Buchanan, Co founder and CEO of Rockt. Bruce, welcome back to Scaling Up. I'm very excited for Part 2 of what was a great conversation almost six years ago.

It's crazy to think we we covered some ground in that previous conversation from the founding story to the mission of Rocked, the insight from your time leading Jet Star about the opportunity about merchants and advertisers at the transaction moment. That was late 2019. I remember it vividly, mainly because soon after that the world changed dramatically. And this may feel somewhat irrelevant to a listener sitting here in 2025, but I bring it up because to me, it showcases so much about ROCKED as an example of the culture and the leadership of the business.

You can imagine for a business that, you know, had a large part of its revenue derived from live ticketing or travel, you know, that disappeared overnight with lockdown. So, you know, in my mind was a moment of existential threat, but you managed to emerge the other side resilient and in fact dominant. It's easy. Obviously talking about it in hindsight it was a a terrible time for many, but I do think it's worth getting a glimpse as to your own psychology at the time that enabled you to emerge so strongly.

Yeah. Well, thanks, Ed. It's great to be back and reflecting on the last six years, it's been a a journey and a half. I think in 2019, you know, we're just getting close to $100 million in revenue.

And we were vertically, as you said, heavily concentrating a few early verticals that we've done quite well in entertainment travel. And we'd recently at the start of 2019 acquired a business called off A Logic and gone into B to B and started to expand in retail off the back of that. And so we had some early shoots in retail and then I remember we had our global kick off, which we always do in January overseas and we got back in at the end of January and literally you know, a couple months later the world completely changed.

I remember looking at one of the charts, we're looking at the vertical based transaction growth and one of our biggest verticals was down 97% over about 10 days. And I just thought, how can you ever plan for what's a contingency plan as you think through going on, this whole industry is going to collapse by 97% in the space of like a week. And and that's what happened. It was kind of scary, frightening, surreal.

And I think what was tough at the time was just the fact there was so many unknowns, the fact that we're all isolated. You didn't actually have the human contact that you realize post COVID is so important. I think what the team did really well is we rallied around what was working well and we just doubled down and said we're going to fight for the stuff that's important for us. We're going to fight for the growth in the segments that we can do something about.

And we're not going to stress about the things we can't control. We can't control the fact that no one's going to go to concerts and no one's traveling. They're uncontrollables. And also remember having a chat to our board and in particular having a chat to Tom Callan at the time and just saying, how should we think about the investment horizon?

How should we think about the ability for us to be contrarian? Or should we be pulling back like everyone else is pulling back? And at the time, our board and in particular, Tom, I remember very vividly he said, look, yeah, these are the moments when businesses emerge so much stronger, the ones that lean in these things that will come back and the things that are not, you know, inherent weaknesses in the business but are outside your control, you should just forget about. And we really doubled down in terms of our investment in talent and people through that time.

And we got some of our best hires and we got some of our best clients through that time in retail. Our retail business just sprung up. And if I look at the business you went through this year where I think in Q2, like the results fell 60%, some crazy amount from Q1. And by the time we got to the end of Q3, we're back up to level performance and we finished the year largely flat.

The next year we made-up all of the growth again from what we'd lost that year. And so that we just continued on with our compound growth of 40%. And there's just this one year where there's it's missing, but we caught it up the next year. But that year when you look at it a quarterly base or a monthly basis actually reveals a very different story.

It reveals this very big U shape where you had a big decline and the business really got together and the team said, OK, let's take this challenge and let's go make sure we get through this stronger than we went into it and let's do the things that are going to get us stronger on the other side. And that was such a powerful thing to do because we came out of 2020 in a very, very strong shape. And it really set the platform for this dominant position that as you just described emerged to to really give you a permission.

Now, once travel and and live entertainment of course did come back and you had this now huge retail business and offering as well, in my mind, gave you permission to build upon that singular transaction moment that the business had been built upon. And you know, if we Fast forward six years, now you really have, you know, 5 moments around the transaction instead of 1. You you've built a, a full suite of AI powered products. And so if you look around that transaction moment, from the moment a, a consumer's making a selection for a good and service to the ability to cross sell or upsell, but first party and 3rd party inventory, you know, choosing a payment provider, there are so many of them these days to give the best option to the consumer.

So I'd really love to hear the breakdown of the strategy, you know, almost walking through the the customer experience to give them their next best action in real time as you've embarked from, you know, what the layperson would probably think about as a product to platform transition. Yeah, great question. And I think maybe stepping up a bit and then I'll take you through the product strategy. Let me go through a little bit of business evolution, which I think will be interesting because I think at any point on these evolutions, you always get people that tend to doubt that you can get to the next level.

And I think at each point when you get to the next level, there's always another step in that journey for a business has a track record of, you know, every time you get a barrier and there's been 10 or 15 big steps we've made over the last 13 years, people think the next one is going to be the one you can't crack. And I think the real, the real interesting learning for me is I think teams that are executing on really tough missions and visions that have a track record being successful generally are going to continue to be successful.

And to me, I think the real insight there is a team and people more so than you know, the individual business or the the individual challenge that comes up talking about COVID, you get lots of things that come up that are unpredictable. How you respond to that I think is all around the team and the people because even the best laid plans in the world wouldn't have predicted a 97% decline in a particular vertical over a space of a week or two. And so that comes down to team and people responding to the challenges that are in front of them.

But if I step back up and say, look, the the original mission by which Rock was founded to solve was very much around how do we unlock the full potential of this transaction moment? And it was rooted in this core truth around the paradox of choice and relevancy. And this real understanding that having struggle with this for many years at Jetstar, it was a very tough problem to solve because you need to bridge the gap between these different businesses that come together in the transaction moment to really be able to unlock customer relevancy.

And that was always the mission from day one. How do we unlock this moment that matters most? By solving this relevancy challenge that will enable our businesses and partners to do what they otherwise couldn't do. And we had to start somewhere because that's an enormous mission.

If you want to sort of change the way e-commerce works in totality going into someone when you're a small startup in Australia and going let us take over your full e-commerce channel and we'll see we can, we can, we can turn that around is a hard thing to do. And so you've got to build track record and credibility and trust over time to be able to do that. And so, you know, we start in Australia quickly realized that we need to crack the US market. I think I remember everyone telling me at the time, very few Australian businesses cracked the US market.

Your success rates 10%, You know, they gave me all the statistics and I was like it doesn't matter, that's our mission. So we either do it or we fail on our mission. And we're builders, so we're passionate about achieving that broader objective and so we just back it up. You know, I travelled 2 weeks every month for two years, got to the point where my wife said we had to move and we moved to the US and it was the same.

I remember people saying at this time, you know, you're too concentrated then in a vertical once we got the US. So if you've proven yourself in travel and experiences, but you, you're not really going to be a serious business into your crack retail or financial services or food delivery or QSR or whatever it might be. And then we slowly cracked each of those new verticals. And then they said, OK, you've got too much concentration risks in in your big partners.

And unless you can crack reducing your concentration risk, you're a business that's not going to continue to succeed. And then we did that and then they said, well, you've don't have a business that appeals to broader segments of customers. And now we serve 40,000 clients across every single vertical. And then I remember them saying, well, now you're to concentrate in the US and then we end up cracking Europe and Japan.

And so at each point of the journey, you get feedback of like, you know, you're 2X. But generally if you have, if you stay true to the mission, you understand the building blocks of how you're getting there, you can continue to lay the, the success down piece by piece. And the product piece is the most important. There's two aspects of that.

Setting aside what we've talked about already on the client geography segment, they're all important for network growth. But the product piece is ultimately achieved the mission. There's two aspects of that, one of which is how do you orchestrate all the different things that happen across the transaction moment and how do you build an MLAI brain that's going to be able to continually drive better and better outcomes? They're the two key components of our value proposition and both of them are hard to do on the brain.

It's about how do you build deep expertise in a, in a highly sought after talent, How do you make it easy for clients to integrate? How do you make it easy to get access to data that would be very hard to surface? How do you invest the large amount of dollars required to operate a real time system that powers, you know, 7.5 billion e-commerce transactions every year?

That's a tough ask globally to do as well. So there's that side of it. And then there's a product piece of the puzzle like how do you solve the payment page? How do you solve the thanks page?

How do you solve, you know, the after sale page, the review page, the selection page, and then it's the actual content in the network. So first of all it's ads and then it's first party engagement campaigns. Then it's a products and services that people also want to sell. And then it's a cool thing is you actually start to jumble some of these together and you truly innovate.

Like you build things like shoppable ads, you build little mini checkouts, these things we call dynamic product ads. You know, we've created a bunch of really new interesting areas, allow you to actually go into completely new environments to solve new interesting problems. But the truth of it is you get a great team around a core mission and vision. You stay true to that.

You just continue to execute. And then, you know, 13 years on, everyone goes, yeah, of course that was going to work. And, you know, we never doubted it. But for the 13 years before everyone's telling you the reason why you're going to fail.

Everyone's a genius in in hindsight, I think people just got a sense of why they wouldn't want to back against you in, in terms of unlocking what the future growth vectors are. You touched a lot on, on what we'll probably walk through over the next half an hour or so. But what I heard is ultimately, you know, whether it's new verticals, new markets, which I know partners have taken you to greater network utility through an amazing product road map is ultimately just providing a, a greater return for merchants and advertisers.

You know, with the former, it grows their transaction value, simply helping them maximize the economics. And for advertisers, there's a, there's a huge ROI given the relevancy and conversion. So you know what people would describe as network utility. And of course with greater network utility, it drives deeper stickiness of customers.

As you've driven into this transaction moment, you know, customers just don't leave the platform, send an amazing stat of gross logo retention above 95%, which is incredible for a transaction business. We're not talking about SAS here. And so you must be providing an increasingly so greater network utility. And so when I think about network utility, you're running A2 sided network here and it's driven a really powerful model.

So this hasn't happened by chance and you've kind of laid down some blocks here already, but I'd love to hear how you thought about developing the depth of the network and each side of the network and with it, of course, the network's strength. So let let me touch on a couple points there. Firstly, every piece of value in the rock business comes from solving a customer relevancy problem. And so a big piece of that is what you don't see in a transaction just as much as what each individual customer does see.

So a lot of it's about removing clutter, getting rid of things that are irrelevant because in in a mobile and a consumer is highly engaged and about to transact. The worst thing you can do for the economics of e-commerce is put something that that is completely irrelevant to them in front of them. You had a highly engaged consumer, you've got a core economic outcome you can drive that's just like transformational for the business. You put in a relevant thing in front of them, you just switch it off.

And every single piece of value in our business comes from the customer, which I mean the end shopper. The benefit flows to advertisers and brands that distribute product and our e-commerce partners, but it's important to note that all of our value stems originally from the end customer and what we do for them. When we think everyday about the problem we're trying to solve, we start with the end customer. How do we make this e-commerce transaction moment better for end customers?

How do we remove the clutter? How do we drive engagement rate? What's going to transform the experience of what it's like for them when they're shopping on XYZ? Because we start with that mindset.

We think about the world very differently than a advertising business or a distributed commerce business or e-commerce business. What we think about everyday is what's the truth about the consumer behavior and what's going to make this consumer experience better. How do you remove friction? How do you reinvest more of the advertising dollars that would traditionally be spent acquiring new customers back in customers?

We approach those problems very much from the customer mindset. So that's the first thing to note. I think that's one of the key ingredients if you want to build something very sustainable, don't get too distracted by the intermediary things that aren't the critical drivers of where the value comes from. The second thing for us is most people look at our business and think you've got a 2 sided network.

But as you can see from what I just said on the relevancy side, we really think about a business A4 sided network. We think about our business as the end consumer, the advertiser and brands that are wanting to distribute content and unlock the e-commerce ecosystem and our e-commerce partners that are trying to drive the economics and customer experience and important for their core success. And then our role in terms of being the trusted intermediary and the decision maker and providing the connectivity and the network and all of those sorts of things.

And we, we consciously think about that because it drives a different sort of mindset than the way people tend to think about A2 sided network. And so the analogies and the businesses that are most like rocked are more like a Visa card than a traditional 2 sided network where you're actually working with the biggest competitors in an industry. Just like Visa card. We work the two of the biggest banks and together they create a better proposition for the end consumer, which means it works better for the banks as well.

Our proposition is very much like that. We work with the biggest players in every vertical, but we help them bridge over other verticals to solve really hard problems for them to solve with customers. And by doing that, we bring the network to bear, which enables them to tap into all of those different products and the data and the connectivity. But ultimately it's done by solving that core problem at the front end with the consumer.

You talked about this paradox of choice and it's still rings true for sure. You know consumers are easily overwhelmed and the winners of those who can create simple, emotionally resonant and most importantly relevant offers at the right time. But this is really created a powerful flywheel for you. It has become very self perpetuating that ultimately attracts more advertisers to the network.

It is and and look with the way we think about that is what is a consumer doing? And what's the best way for us to help them achieve what they want to do? And so the concept of an ad or a product sale or e-commerce transaction, for us, a very blurry concept because the difference between an ad and a product sale is really whether you transact in this checkout or the next. And as that evolution of technology changes with things like digital wallets and things like Apple Pay that we're used to using with two clicks, you know, the concept of one check out and the next can be very easily collapsed and you can make consumer experiences very unique and frictionless.

And So what is an ad and what is a product sale become very blurry. So most people look at it at the checkout arrangement. We tend to look at it more about the customer and the data is a much more interesting lens for us because we think about it from the merchants perspective. Are they selling a product through someone else's storefront or rather actually building a direct relationship with that customer that they can continue to build an ongoing direct relationship with that customer?

And that's for us what we tend to separate the economics of advertising. That's the economics of distributed commerce. We build lots of tool sets that help businesses blur that boundary and solve problems. Ultimately in a way also that gives a lot more value to the consumer.

Most people will think about advertising as either performance or brand. Well, they think about offer and media costs. And because they tend to get themselves caught in one dimension of that, they lose the sight of the bigger picture, which is what's going to drive the best performance. Ultimately.

You know, brands are an exercise in in trust and therefore investment in brand often drives better performance. And investment in offer and giving the consumer often also tends to lower the trust barriers. And therefore, as you start to think about all the different parameters of the levers you can pull, you can get very different outcomes for the advertiser. That can be way better in terms of the customers that are driving the LTV, the incrementality, the long term performance of their media dollars or their distribution dollars in terms of driving the right outcomes long term.

But it requires you constantly step back and once again, just like relevancy, go to the core truth of what businesses are trying to do. What are they trying to do when they advertise? It's not like I'm trying to spend media dollars. I'm trying to grow my business and I've been trying to grow my business.

What's the right customer I want to get access to? How do I build a long term relationship? How do I keep churning down? How do I drive adoption and trial?

How do I penetrate new markets? Whatever it might be, it's actually understanding the core truth I think is really important. Just to round out this theme of relevancy, in my mind, the greater the relevancy, the greater the revenue per transaction for the partner. So you get more partners, it increases the network, it attracts more advertisers, increases data and insights to improve relevancy and the flywheel continues.

Something you touched on is, is around first party data and and Rock being a trusted neutral intermediatory of that. And of course, since the last time we spoke a privacy has changed dramatically globally, there's been a deprecation of cookies and you've been able to strategically capitalize on this. Given the growing importance of of first party data, I'd be really keen to maybe just give a quick market overlay as a starting point. But ultimately, I'm really keen to understand, you know, the importance of rock sitting as this trusted, neutral intermediatory.

Let's start with the market dynamics. You're right in terms of it's gotten a lot harder for marketers and e-commerce companies and advertisers. And this started back a few years ago. You saw Apple and Meta start to flex their muscle in terms of what was going to be allowed, not allowed in the broader advertising ecosystem.

You also saw some regulatory changes coming out of some markets that cause some additional changes to the practices that were going on. And generally, I would say most of those are being fairly positive. They're about transparency to the consumer, and they're about making sure the consumer knows what's happening with their information is done for their benefit. But prior to that, you know, it was a little bit of the Wild West and there was a lot of people playing in a very shadowy ecosystem where data would be bought and sold and information will flow about people without them knowing about it.

And I think what's happened now is there's been a real shift towards radical transparency and are making sure that you've got consent and the consumer really knows what's going on. So I think that's been the evolution of the data side of the equation. I will also say, I think the most important thing in a world where we're moving towards AI rapid evolution and relevancy at mass one to one scale, is the technology's actually becoming the easier piece of the puzzle. Data is becoming the harder piece of the puzzle.

And so I think both in how you bring that data to bear, how you can access the right data for that decisioning, how you can use it in real time. They all sound like really easy problems in today's day and age. But because of what we talked about previously, but also because of the very nature of an e-commerce transaction, which is real time and involves partnership, it's typically very hard, but technically to to surface data in real time and then also to surface multiple pieces of data in real time from two different companies for joint decisioning.

We'll talk about that in a minute in terms of what that means. But that's, that's that I think the harder problem to solve. We started our business early on with a knowledge that if we wanted to solve this problem, we knew from I knew from my previous Jet Star days that you know, I was trying to sell hotel rooms in Tokyo and I represent point 1% of the market and you know, trying to work with booking.com or Expedia.

I needed to actually have access to the data to sell the right hotel rooms to the right consumer when I was selling a ticket to Tokyo because I was tiny part of the market. And so it was clearly self-evident at a very early day that getting the data was going to be critical to unlocking the relevancy. Doesn't take a genius to work out. You can think about that across every part of the transaction flow to go that's applicable, whether it's payments or it's upsells or it's advertising or it's first party messaging or it's search or selection.

Data is the key fuel that feeds the relevancy and feeds the technology that delivers relevancy. So we knew that upfront and we knew that it was going to be multi party. Like think about PayPal trying to make a transaction on Ticketmaster. Like the concept of getting that right involves you understanding a fundamental truth that that person is a customer of both PayPal and Ticketmaster.

And therefore how do you leverage the information from both businesses to get the right outcome for the customer. Now, generally what people would say is any one of these businesses could just build that knowledge base up and solve all those problems. But it's very hard for a business as they move through an e-commerce transaction to become an expert and have the data on every single one of those touch points. How do they become an expert on fraud and data and upsells and you know, hotels and rental cars and insurance and whatever it might be that's important for their particular customers.

That leads you down the path of partnership and it leads you down the path of these distributed ecosystems, which fundamentally how e-commerce works. Then you go, how do you bring the data to bear? And when we thought about that, we realized we had to bring first party data together, but we had to do in a way that's highly controlled because we want to be trusted by the way these brands could collaborate with that data would only be used for their purposes. And so we built the ability for them to use their data in a very whatever way they wanted, whatever data element they wanted to use, but in a very Safeway and a closed ecosystem just for their purposes.

And in the middle, what we've built up is what we call interaction data, which is a crossover of the billions and billions of ecommerce transactions we see in understanding when consumers do different things across these different brands, what data elements actually matter when making that decision. And that feeds out deep learning models. You can think about that like the underlying motor weights in a large language model. And every customer has to bring their own first party data to unlock that.

But when they do, they get the power of the 10s of billions of e-commerce transactions that are fed those motor weights and that real smarts in our in the rock brain. It's given us the best of both worlds. Everyone can safely use their own first party data. They only use it for their purposes means they don't have to get into this sareptitious world of using consumer data in an untrusted or third party way, but they can also get the benefit of rocks, model weights and smarts in the rock brain that understands the full extent of what consumers do on a right round every e-commerce purchase.

To those listening that there's some secret sauce in this process power, you know, processing in real time is uniquely hard. Let alone this year I think you'll process 7 1/2 billion transactions. You know the the motor around these unique identities, you know training on these transactions, you know over 11 billion over time has created a a real process power within the business. Yeah.

And look at the 1718 markets we operate in. I think we touch 80 or 90% of all actual shoppers in those markets and it's close to a billion customers we interact with annually, which is kind of amazing when you think about that. Just in terms of the markets we're in and the reach we've got. I would say one of the other secret sources of our business, which tends to get glossed over, but it's is super important to feed the user experience is most people when they build advertising or distributor commerce businesses, a pre developing the creative.

So if you think about when you go onto Instagram and you look at an ad or you go onto YouTube and you see that 15 second clip that's been pre produced, it's standalone content. It can easily be inserted into that thing. It's not really native to the experience. It's done in advance.

A display ad would be the same. Any of those typical piece of content are done like that. The way we've had to do it, because we want to solve, we actually want to remove content off the page. We want to solve the experience in the transaction moment is we have to generate all content in real time to make sure it's native for each individual consumer.

And then we have to put it through the AI brain to be able to work out what to actually show. The combination of those two things is actually really hard to do because you're bringing the how and the what you're going to show someone together to create candidates in real time, and then putting them through an AI brain to actually make the right decision on each individual consumer on what to show. You're listening to Scaling Up with Ed Cowan, a podcast brought to you by TDM Growth Partners.

Visit the website tdmgrowthpartners.com. I think listeners are are getting the sense that you know, you've been at the the forefront of AI and what was called machine learning since the founding of this business. But now the landscape is changing rapidly.

There's a transformative wave of technology that the consumer is now well aware of. And you know, invariably this will change the future of e-commerce. I'm sure a lot of listeners have started to hear the word agentic commerce, where AI agents act on behalf of you, the consumer, to research, compare, even complete purchases. So shifting the decision making from the shopper to the software.

So I'm keen to get a sense, given that you are at the forefront of this, what the future holds in in your mind. But also, I'm really keen to understand, you know, how rock thinks about this more broadly and potentially turning a threat of being dis mediated to an opportunity. You know, I think first and foremost as a builder, I get so excited when you get rapid disruption and transformation because those of us that are more mission driven, passionate about making the world a better place.

And when you can do that at speed and pace, that's a very exciting time. So, you know, I definitely think this is an age of builders and we're going to see rapid disruption. And so the way I approach that is I think both internally and externally in a period of rapid disruption, I think with the most important thing is can you move at speed? Because you can predict a lot of things, but there's a whole bunch of things you can't predict.

And like if I go back 100 years and think about the automobile and there's a lot of stuff that was obvious at the time, OK, we're not going to have people riding around on horses. So I don't need people looking after horses and stables and feeding horses and all that sort of stuff. And yes, I'm going to need service station and mechanics for cars. But some of the things are much harder to understand and predict.

Like, oh wow, people are going to change the way they live and work because the automobile, we're going to have suburbs and we have strip malls and we're going to have highways. And that sort of thing is much harder to predict in terms of the 2nd order and 3rd order effects, which are often more powerful than the first order effects. So in that world, I think speed is most important because you want to be nimble and adaptive. So 12 months ago, I started on this journey with my internal team and said one of the things we have to do is be able to move five times faster than we are today.

And we have to get ourselves ready because our clients are going to go through a massive amount of disruption and change and we want to be ahead of the curve. And so we start on this journey of how do we get everyone ready for that? How do we get the organization, change talent philosophy, change strategies, give everyone the tooling where they can actually get familiar with this, increase talent velocity through the business, create much greater autonomy alignment and create a much greater culture around comfort with moving faster and understand that we'll make more mistakes, but we can learn at pace.

And so internally, it's been a radical transformation for us with AI over the last 12 months, and that's super exciting. On the external front, there's a whole raft of ways that AI is affecting our product already. You know, we've had the largest increase this year in our rock brains relevancy performance that we've had in the last 13. And we're not unique to this.

You can see this in the Google results and the metal results and businesses like app 11. But that means that our business, which is a network business that makes its economics out of driving these outcomes is accelerating even faster because of AI. And that's super exciting as well because you're getting much faster delivery of improvements in relevancy, which is a core thing that we built the business to solve for our e-commerce partners and that flows through our economics.

So things like creative generation, things like getting much smarter on the way to advise clients in how to run end to end campaigns and what sort of things need to go on on different pages. That stuff is just moving so much faster and it's gotten, it's gotten so much, so much smarter. So super exciting about that. You know, you do see some disruptions as part of that.

So you see like we're noticing products that we build that were more narrow in nature, like we build a product a few years ago called Adaptive Content Engine, which build up AI. We're finding now that broader based solutions to that product are actually producing better outcomes because it can look not just at the creative, it can provide much richer advice in terms of how to optimize marketing and advertising campaigns. So we are seeing that, but that's fantastic in terms of helping our clients achieve success and driving faster growth to our business.

The way we think about agentic AI more broadly in terms of what it's going to do to consumer behavior is, look, a lot of things aren't known, but there's some things that we can see happening already. We're seeing the research phase of most people's shopping journeys is changing rapidly. You can see this happening already in the way that people approach buying anything, all those pain points that used to maybe take X amount of time and now you're able to do them in 110th the time.

And so we're seeing very fast disruption to aggregation players. We're seeing very fast disruption to the research phase of e-commerce. What that's doing the first order effects, which kind of interesting is driving a lot more offline transactions online. So those things are a little bit more complicated to do tended to be stuck in an offline mode.

What we're seeing is a lot more of those are coming online. You know, find my local plumber research this do that. I must might have rung up 10 people before, but now it's much easier to do that with a genetic AI. Still, it's worth noting that I think you know, there's still only about 20% of the the total activity in our world happens online.

And so as you start to get more of that switching, that's going to drive a huge amount of tail wind in terms of more online activity for us to to work out how to make relevant to to consumers. Then what we're seeing is a couple of different things evolve. We're seeing people in the Magentic AI and the LLM world trying to start to make platforms. So you would have seen this Open AI announced just the other day that they're building an ecosystem where people can put apps in there.

They tried a few years ago, but I think the latest iteration is much more like iOS type approach where they're trying to build an App Store. I think that makes a lot of sense. And you, you know, we're already seeing clients start to think about how they build to those channels and how do they support them. But importantly, how do they do that while preserving the economics, which means just like with mobile, just like with voice, just like with M web, just like with every other channel subverge, they're now going to have to go deep and how do I actually optimize this as a new channel?

And so we're we're really working deeply there. We're also working with the AI companies to go, how do we help bridge the divide on the data and partnership side, which is our secret sauce to actually make this work more effectively on both sides. And on the other side, I think the partnership aspect is going to get really interesting as well. I think we're going to see deep partnerships emerge where a brand that might have a lot of data on a particular type of vertical or transaction, I think we'll want to do partnerships with AI companies to actually expose better consumer experience.

And that could happen in lots of different ways. But when partnerships happen and and data bridging is involved to drive interactive commerce outcomes, that's really rock sweet spot. And to me, people go, what's that going to look like? And I go, we could look like 20 different things.

But I said the best analogy I can give you is when e-commerce started to come about, everyone was like, these are mascoted dead and you know, they're going to be replaced by digital payments. And what was true was once Visa, MasterCard realized the importance of e-commerce, they became one of the biggest tailwinds ever because the core truth of providing A trusted way to facilitate payments became ever more important in an online world. And so that's the core truth we look at in our business.

The the fourth thing I'd say is there's going to be some agentic AI actually replacing e-commerce transactions. We think it's more likely going to be like 4 to one in terms of more transactions going online versus those getting replaced, but that mix could change a little bit. I think the core consumer truth also around consumers like to transact with a brand. There's a real endorphin hit when they do buy something.

The transaction moments at the end, you think about booking an Uber or buying something on Amazon or whatever it might be, it's actually a fairly efficient process today and there's a high trust and that the UX is fairly optimized for that experience. I think, I think you're going to see disruption in other parts 1st, but I think there'll be lots of opportunity here for businesses that want to lean forward and create the economic models that enable these businesses to still succeed in those channels and allow the consumer to still get the relevant experience they want in these new channels.

That's a fascinating view. One thing on my mind as a consumer is you know the importance of trust, and that's never going to go away. You know, I need to be confident and, and trusting that my payments secure, that my personal data's safe, that the product is going to be delivered and, and in fact turn up. And it does feel that Rocked can play a role in that as a as a trusted intermediatory.

I would also say, Ed, you know, it's, I don't think we've ever seen this sort of transformation happen and the pace of change is like nothing I've ever seen. And I think that's exciting times. We're going to see a lot of opportunity ahead. Something that that won't change is the importance of people and culture.

Have loved your views previously and and you've woven them already through this conversation since the last time we spoke. You mentioned that you've done some small tuck in strategic acquisitions. And often where there's moments of, of cultural integration, it gives the benefit of clarifying what the culture is actually and importantly what it isn't. And so I'd love to hear what's the archetype of person that has succeeded at rocked in the last six years, given the scaling journey that it's been on.

Yeah. So we talk about our DNA internally as build a DNA. There's really these four key things that tend to be really important. One of them is tournament alignment.

Second one is win or learn, which is really about speed and and comfortable iterating high tenacity resilience. So you can, you know, you get through failure and and move ahead from it. Trust, you know, transparency and fairness is important when you're moving at pace and talent velocity. They're the sort of four things because you can't grow a business any faster than you grow your people.

And so those those four tenants of things you'll find threaded through everything we do. And they're all built around how do we move fast? You know what we build this business to go, OK, how do we how do we make a difference the world we're in? And if you want to make a difference to the world you're in, you get up every day in a very different motivation.

Then I think a lot of people that are doing different sorts of things in different fields, but we get up every day going, how do we make a difference? And that means speed is important and growth is important. So we're a very rapid growth business. We grow 40 to 45% every year for the last 13 years, which is kind of amazing if you think about that from a compound perspective.

And as you get bigger that the numbers get bigger and the people numbers get bigger and that gets harder to do every year. And so the type of person that succeeds really well at rock to those that love the personal challenge and the personal growth that comes from taking on those audacious sort of problems that we try to take on. We want the the people that really want to work hard, change the world. And generally the type of people that do really well in our business are the people that want to put in the time to make a difference.

They tend to be more missionary LED, they're very comfortable with change, and they've typically got very high AQ, which is what we call a versity question. So tenacity, resilience drive, because they know that they're going to, when you're building something that's never been built before, you're going to fail 10 times before you get it all worked out. And therefore learning at pace is important. And therefore you got to accept failure and failure is the greatest unlock of learning velocity you can get.

So we have a couple sayings in our business. We know alone we fear irrelevance more than we fear failure. We're very missionary LED as well. So, you know, we believe in unlocking the potential of our clients, but also unlocking the potential of people in our business and the communities we work in as we put a lot of time and effort into that.

And so some people are drawn to that dimension. What I would say is like for a young person starting their career, spending two 3-4 years at a business like Rock is like, you know, 20 years in a normal corporate, you will accelerate your career faster than you could ever imagine and that will set you up for tremendous success. But it's hard, you know, getting up every day to solve really tough problems that no one solved before involves putting in time and effort that is not for everyone.

If you want that, that's going to be one of the best jobs you could ever hope for. It does remind me of people seeing sports, people walk onto the ground and the adulation at the end of the day, what they don't see is everything that's happened before that the, the graft and in the background. And it's bloody hard work, but always worth it. In 2019, you, you stress the most problems that you have as a leader of people problems, that they're not technical problems and that the transparency in, in leadership is really vital.

And, and in the last six years, revenue has grown over 8 fold. And so as you say, the people problems have probably got larger and there are different people for different stages of the journey. I'd love to kind of unpick quickly what you learn from making hard decisions or or trade-offs since 2019 as it relates to people and culture. You know, there are a few key moments of maybe moving people back into the office from remote moving executives to New York, reorganizing various segments of the business from a people point of view.

Any reflections on on those hard decisions and trade-offs? They were hard. The, the, the people decisions are the hardest decisions because I said the business won't continue to grow if you don't get the people right. So the first thing that typically happens, you notice when you got a structural or people problem, you wind up with part of the business that's stagnating or stuck.

And so there's lots of signals for an entrepreneur to see when something's wrong on the people side. The challenge is do you want to lean in and have that hard conversation and solve that problem? And that typically is an uncomfortable thing for a lot of us because it involves having that uncomfortable conversation. What we typically do is reframe that.

But what does the success of the team look like? What happens if you're on a football team and you knew a part of the team weren't performing and it was dragging down the team? What would you do? Would you want to continue to just not win the games and not go to the next league?

Or would you actually lean in and address it? Generally, I think as a couple aspects I think that are important on the people dimension as well. I mean, I think having frank, transparent, clear feedback and addressing problems head on is important. Means you say whatever needs to be said and make sure you've shine a light on the problems that are holding the team back.

But I think another thing that is really important is there's a natural human condition where we want to be good at everything. And generally modern performance management has spends a lot of time pointing out everyone's weaknesses and wanting to focus on fixing everything. So they're like Unicorn or superstars. I mean, our general observation is the stuff that we're not good at takes us 10 or 20 times longer to get moderately OK at.

And our superpowers, if we lean into them, they can become much, much stronger and deliver much better outcomes. And so a common saying I have for the team is let's play to our strengths. It's a team sport. I don't think you have to be good at everything.

There's someone who's good at cracking really hard problems and someone's good at the emotional terms and connecting with clients. There's someone else here good at project management, someone else here really good at drive and making sure that when we get in a tough situation, they keep the team on track. You know, that's what actually makes teams really succeed. It's not just having a team of everyone plays the same position.

It's understanding to win as a team. You have people that play a lot of different positions on the field and if you put people where they're playing to their strengths, the team will actually really, really shine. That involves 2 really interesting observations, one of which is a functional designed organizational chart typically is not well suited to that because you need the functional outcomes mean you need to be good at everything. The other problem of rapid growth business is the problems you solve different every day.

So you have to have a much more fluid ability to approach problems and team structures. Now, if you can crack those problems, you can get massive unlocks in team and capacity and culture, but it requires you to have a very interesting culture that can address the challenges head on and for people to understand that they're not going to be wedded to the title or they're not going to be wedded to a particular outcome. They're going to be wedded to the outcomes they achieve over a period of time, the development and the team success which ultimately creates the best outcomes for them.

It's a fascinating view that that mirrors my own thoughts. Do what you're uniquely good at and if everyone focuses on that rather than papering over the the cracks of their weaknesses. Last question, I know you're someone who when you're thoughtfully presented with data can change your mind. Is there anything that you've changed your mind on?

I guess since 2019, a lot of things I've I've heard today accelerating views around previously established thoughts. Has anything been presented to you by the team or or the board that your views have changed significantly on? Yeah, I mean, you see it every day. You got to have the the antennas up constantly going.

Sometimes it's it's course correcting a little bit. Sometimes it's like, oh wow, I didn't think that would work as well as lots of examples. We had an interesting debate not too long ago on the board about acquiring some real estate in New York. And I thought, wow, wouldn't it be cool to for us to be master and destiny.

Imagine the economic gain when you own the building, because then you develop it and you see, you know, this big unlock. And you know, I had this really interesting debate around just like people focusing on their strengths, businesses focusing on their strength. And that was an interesting wake up call to go look, you don't have to be good at everything. And it's really focus and prioritization is super important.

And so that was a good reminder. Had another one recently also in our product organization, our chief product officers being very passionate about building this new concept called shoppable ads. And I was somewhat skeptical around the consumer experience of what that would mean. And wow, when I saw the data, was I wrong.

You know, the, the performance of this new product is just insanely impressive. And so you see those sorts of things and you've just got to lean in and have a good debate. I think what's important with team is you create the license to have those experiments. We have a process internally where we have switched a lot of our planning cycles, particularly on the RPDS into what we call bedding and shaping cycles.

That comes from a concept called shape up and we will shape a cycle and better cycle. And we call it bedding because we want the concept of knowing really to create this understanding of the win and learn concept, which is not every bets going to work, but we should be comfortable making bets that can have big payouts, big payouts, both in terms of business results, but also in terms of learning. And that creates a very different mindset just in terms of a person's willingness to take risks.

Because if you've got something like an, OK, I'll tell you the behavior like I'm going to tell you, hey, Ed, your target next quarter is to deliver 10% improvement on that. And you go, I think I can get 8. And you see they're having anxiety, Baiji, and you might have this big, big breakthrough in like Week 2 and you get to 12%. You're like, well, I don't want to actually continue to achieve more because next quarter then they're going to set me up with this 20% improvement.

And that creates this really weird dynamic where people actually want to just hit an expectation. And it doesn't encourage this real breakthrough, innovative thinking where you're actually trying to challenge the status quo, where the real breakthroughs that happen are. So moving to something like betting is being one of those concepts being really, really powerful and unlocking that behavioral aspect of look doesn't really matter if 60% of the bets don't work. But what does matter is that we're willing to take the risk that 40% will work.

And that's the that's the mindset I think is really important in creating that breakthrough. And just like me on Sharp, all ads, every day we find interesting insights that we didn't expect, and we all learned because of that. Bruce, it's been a pleasure. Hopefully I can lock you down in another six years to recap the tremendous growth of the business.

Appreciate your time and now with me. So now that you're not building, so there's a big trade off there and appreciate that. That was fantastic. Thanks, Ed.

Great to talk to you.