Real Career Stories: Tech Founder & Data Storyteller

real-career-stories-tech-founder-data-storyteller-datos

[[p]]Curious to know how others got to where they are today in their career?&nbsp;On the&nbsp;[[a href="https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/resources/podcasts" target="_blank"]]DMI podcast[[/a]]&nbsp;we get to chat with all sorts of digital marketing professionals - but their career journeys are all unique.&nbsp;[[/p]]

[[p]]We recently got to hear from Eli Goodman, CEO and founder of&nbsp;[[a href="https://datos.live/"]]&#8288;Datos&#8288;[[/a]].&nbsp;In this candid conversation&nbsp;Eli traces his career from humble beginnings in the Atlanta advertising scene of the late &#39;90s to becoming a data-driven entrepreneur whose startup was acquired by Semrush in just over three years. Eli shares how an early job in tech research sparked a lifelong fascination with data and marketing science, and how his passion for analysis shaped his career through the rise of the internet era.[[/p]]

[[p]]He opens up about the realities of founding a business during the COVID-19 lockdown&mdash;launched from his couch and built entirely remotely with co-founders he didn&rsquo;t meet in person for over a year. Eli offers honest insights into the challenges of moving from idea to revenue, why profitability mattered from day one, and what really goes through a founder&rsquo;s mind when acquisition talks begin.[[/p]]

[[p]]His company, Datos, is the provider of data to SparkToro, run by Rand Fishkin who presented a webinar with the DMI on [[a href="https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/resources/webinars/webinar-staying-ahead-in-digital-marketing-with-rand-fishkin" target="_blank"]]staying ahead in digital marketing[[/a]].[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (00:06)[[br /]]
That sounds like you may have spent a good bit of your career, most of your career being a champion for the top half of the funnel because you&#39;ve gone from working at BBDO. Was that in New York in the nineties?[[/p]]

[[p]]Eli Goodman (00:19)[[br /]]
That was actually in Atlanta back in the late 90s, right? But then I quickly then turned after that, because I found it to be interesting, but to be honest, I couldn&#39;t afford to work there. It was not a very lucrative entry-level job advertising in the 90s. And just by happenstance, and this was early internet, I got a job in sales at a big tech research firm, a place called Gartner, and that set me on a path 25 years ago.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (00:22)[[br /]]
interesting.&nbsp;Alright.[[/p]]

[[p]]Eli Goodman (00:48)[[br /]]
to where I am today, right? Because I love math. I believe it. could geek out. I love statistics. Like, it&#39;s interesting to be able to gamble, you know, playing cards, right? Things like that. So that entire universe is appealing to me. And it was really just sort of, it made sense even back in like the late 90s and early 2000s about where things were going as the internet was taking off. And it really, yeah, certainly, you know.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (01:09)&nbsp;[[br /]]
But what was that pivot point&nbsp;that led you towards specifically data gathering and the value of data? When did that become sort of blindingly apparent to you?[[/p]]

[[p]]Eli Goodman (01:20)[[br /]]
Well, like anything, right, better lucky than smart. Like you kind of start there. And I think that it became very apparent to me as because I didn&#39;t major in statistics or anything like that. Like I went to a liberal arts college and it was like a lot of history and, you know, like literature and things like that is different from a lot of mathematics that I had pushed in high school. And so what happened, it was it was almost like a[[/p]]

[[p]]A love story that began right back in like 1999 and began moving was when you really were working with analysts and people that were using the data in order to make decisions. And I thought it was fascinating, like the ability for certain people versus others to be able to look at the exact same piece of information and assess it and come up with different answers, like different ideas, different strategies as a result of it. So that was to me, I thought this is very powerful.[[/p]]

[[p]]Like I began to then learn about not just what was tech data at the time, which was really about how many cell phones were being sold versus different types of software that companies were using for ERP systems and whatnot. But I began to then learn about more marketing science, right? Going back to the, in the 1970s when UPC codes were on the rise, right? As a way to be able to analyze what was being bought and why at grocery stores. Onward to what was the classic way that television and print advertising were bought and sold, right? Related to Nielsen ratings or MRI, which was doing analysis around like, you know, ads and magazines and how much they mattered or didn&#39;t matter. And I just found that type of analysis, like that direction, very interesting. And that was really what set me on the path because the internet was so young, everybody was trying to apply like these classic offline advertising principles to online.[[/p]]

[[p]]And it worked for a hot second until things began to exponentially explode across not only the US, but the world. And new ways of analyzing data had to be considered, right? It was not as simple as like Nielsen television families, right? Like you really needed to innovate. So I think that was really the turn for me was when you saw the explosion of the amount of data and what broke between the old way of doing things and the new way of doing things. And then eventually watching those two things like bifurcate, but then have to come back together because they both apply. So I think that was watching that journey over the course of the early 2000s was, radicalized me, if you will, as it related to data and what I believe it could or couldn&#39;t do.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (03:49)[[br /]]
Hmm.[[/p]]

[[p]]But I&#39;m so fascinated by your kind of founder story.[[/p]]

[[p]]So we&#39;ve talked about your early career and all that, but as a founder, what have been the kind of hardest things about going from literally founding this, presumably in a coffee shop or your bedroom or something, or an office, spare office somewhere, to where you are today? What are the kind of hardest lessons you&#39;ve learned there, I think?[[/p]]

[[p]]Eli Goodman (04:38)[[br /]]
Well, so first of all, it was from the couch, right? To tell you exactly where it happened with myself and my two co-founders, Serge and Stan, and it was mid 2020, so it was COVID. It was during lockdown. Like this was done where Serge and Stan, we never even physically met each other for 18 months as a result of COVID. Like we had met basically over LinkedIn and then had some mutuals in common amongst us that led us together with Semrush as our mutuals between us and our initial seed investor. So that&#39;s one, right? It was definitely done from the couch in my condo here in New York City, all virtual right from the beginning. So a few things I could say, because this is also, you know, it&#39;s fascinating to me as well, because I look back on it. I am not a serial entrepreneur. It&#39;s not as if I&#39;ve been entrepreneurial, if you will, for the past 25 plus years. But sometimes, you know, an opportunity presents itself. And I would say that[[/p]]

[[p]]It&#39;s one thing to be in a position to be able to recognize an opportunity when it presents itself. But more importantly, when it comes to founding a business, you have to be in a position to be able to like actually take advantage of said opportunity. And through any number of like decisions and successes and failures and all of these things that blended together leading into mid 2020, I was finally in a position on a personal level to feel that I could take this chance, right? So that was one,[[/p]]

[[p]]is that past is prologue when it comes to founding a business, right? Like, you know, not everybody is just sitting on a trust fund or like, you know, people got bills to pay, you got stuff to do, right? Like it&#39;s not, you have rich benefactors to be able to take care of them. So that&#39;s the first one that I would say to anybody is that your ability to be able to found a company and then to be successful and whether what&#39;s going to be any number of ups and downs, you need to be able, it&#39;s what&#39;s come before you, right? It takes time.[[/p]]

[[p]]Right? Like diamonds are made out of like pressure and time, if you will. So, so that&#39;s the first thing that I would say is most important from there. First things first, every meeting that you have is going to be, when are we out of money? Like start there, right? Is that I don&#39;t care about raising money, not raising money. That&#39;s your first thing, right? Is that we need to keep the lights on. So our entire tact was not about just R &amp;D forever and like raising money and like building moats and like all of these different cliches, it was what is the purpose of this business? And it is to build things that we know sell, right? We look through a sales lens as our number one thing here is that we have to focus on selling things, revenue. And we moved into profit. Yeah, like, it&#39;s just not at all cost, but you you need to like sit down and think about what it is that you&#39;re selling and find a path to revenue.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (07:20)[[br /]]
revenue as soon as possible basically.[[/p]]

[[p]]Eli Goodman (07:30)[[br /]]
you know, as quickly as you can, right? Like I think that, you know, everybody, especially like how things were done over the past 15 plus years related to raising money and, you know, the gold rushes at various times related to crypto or AI right now. And like, don&#39;t worry about profitability, it&#39;s revenue growth at all costs and so on and so forth. Well, that was also all during like what was effectively around the globe, a zero interest rate phenomenon environment, if you will.[[/p]]

[[p]]ZERP is what would be called here, zero interest rate phenomenon tends to be the shorthand that we&#39;ll use here in the United States for it. During ZERP times, nobody cared about profit, margin, things like that. So that&#39;s a second piece when I think back to how we went about founding and running the business was we took that tack that the salad days of low interest rates were going to end at one point. So we needed to make sure that we had an idea that was going to get us to actual revenue much faster than it might have been back in the 2010s.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (08:34)[[br /]]
Interesting, interesting. And then you were acquired by Semrush.[[/p]]

[[p]]Eli Goodman (08:40)[[br /]]
That is correct. That was December of 2023.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (08:43)[[br /]]
That&#39;s pretty good going. Three years, just over three years and you get the acquisition. What was the first thing that went through your head when Semrush first mentioned, used the word acquisition?[[/p]]

[[p]]Eli Goodman (08:56)[[br /]]
Sure. Well, I remember it very specifically because we were out to dinner here in New York. I&#39;ve known them, they were initial seed investors. So I certainly have a relationship with Semrush and I&#39;ve known them also as clients many years before that. So again, going back to the how it passed this prologue in your life, in your career, it&#39;s not like lightning strikes. These are things that build up over time. So anyway,[[/p]]

[[p]]I knew that we were going to be sitting down to have a discussion. I didn&#39;t know it was exactly this. It could have been in any number of ways. But listen, to be honest, the first thing that goes through your mind is the money. You immediately are like, how much? But you get over that real quickly because it matters. Money matters in the world. But put that aside for a minute. Is that the real question that you start with is why? Start there. Because[[/p]]

[[p]]The selling of a business is about not just, it&#39;s like planting a tree. It&#39;s not what it looks like today, but what is it going to look like in another five or 10 years, right? Like that&#39;s sort of the landscape architecture of Central Park, if you will, right? What&#39;s all this going to look like in 50 years? So on a much shorter scale, the why is you start with, it&#39;s not just about the money. Remember that, know, Datos...is a collection of people and everybody that works here and their families that depend on them and like investors and all of the wealth that gets built. It&#39;s not just about like financial wealth, but about like the perpetual ability for people to be able to succeed. So you sit back and you say, well, why does Semrush want this? Why would this be appropriate for us? Why would this work for everybody? in, because again, when somebody comes to acquire you, they don&#39;t just say, well, here&#39;s the money, thanks and peace out. Like they&#39;re looking at[[/p]]

[[p]]we will acquire you and then we need to continue to build, right? Over the course of the next however many years, right? Because there&#39;s more money to be had. There&#39;s, you know, you have like earn outs, you have all these different things. So again, it&#39;s not about just what the business is today. The value of businesses is also about their worth many years from now. And then not only the founders, but the team and the product and all these things that you&#39;ve built. So it goes back to, again, you then really like, once you get past your like,[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (10:50)[[br /]]
Yeah.[[/p]]

[[p]]Eli Goodman (11:15)[[br /]]
The monies, you&#39;re just like seeing dollar signs or what have you. You get past that real fast and then you really have that, you start to just have a call to come to Jesus moment, right? If you to use that, is just why are we doing this? Like, why does this matter? And then that begins a set of discussion to me that is much more fruitful, right? Because[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (11:21)[[br /]]
Yeah.[[/p]]

[[p]]Eli Goodman (11:41)[[br /]]
just because somebody comes up and says, hey, we&#39;re thinking about acquiring you or making an offer. You got many months of like diligence. it&#39;s now going to like, everybody is now going to dive in. It&#39;s all just based off of like surface stuff. But now we&#39;re talking about a deep dive into everything that like your business and you personally have done and all these different types of things. It doesn&#39;t happen overnight, right? Like it takes a long time. So just because somebody makes an offer, it doesn&#39;t mean deals close, right? So that&#39;s what I say by,&nbsp;You put the money aside because that doesn&#39;t matter. That&#39;ll be the end result of what is a successful acquisition. But you need to start to get your head around about why this is important to the acquiring company, why it&#39;s important to your company, and then figuring out how to be able to circle the wagons around what&#39;s important to you and your team and your employees and your business. Because it&#39;s easy to get swallowed up right by somebody else and then not have, and as we talked about earlier in the podcast, agency. Not to have.[[/p]]

[[p]]the agency to be able to do what you need to do because you get acquired, you&#39;re giving up control, right? Like that&#39;s, you have to come to grips with that. So there&#39;s a degree of protectionism that you have to take towards the exercise, which is slow down. Yay money, but slow down and think about like why this is, why now? Like why not later? Like, so that to me is really the core. the, once you get past the emotional reaction,[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (12:43)[[br /]]
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.[[/p]]

[[p]]Eli Goodman (13:10)[[br /]]
the thing that really matters is that.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (13:11)[[br /]]
Yeah.[[/p]]

[[p]]Yeah, interesting. mean, it sounds like I was going to ask you about, you know, advice for aspiring founders who dream of an exit via acquisition. And you kind of answered it there, but is there anything else quickly to mention there to founders who dream of that exit?[[/p]]

[[p]]Eli Goodman (13:30)[[br /]]
Yeah, there&#39;s actually a very tactical thing that I would recommend to everybody, which is when you found a company, there are that&#39;s that&#39;s all great. You&#39;re like, hey, I found something. But there&#39;s a lot of like legal and financial things that go into. Founding a company, right? Am I going to do, in America you would do, am I going to do a limited liability corporation is a partnership is that a C Corp, which is like a corporation?[[/p]]

[[p]]What are the accounting rules I&#39;m going to apply to what we have going on that impacts how you pay taxes and so on and so forth. But I mention all of that because if your intention is that you are starting a business, that you are eventually going to or would be acquired by a big, a much bigger company, as soon as possible, you need to start setting up your business in the way that big companies set themselves up when it comes to finance, accounting, legal and whatnot. Because if you set up as[[/p]]

[[p]]an LLC and you eventually take on investors, they&#39;re going to want to reorganize here in the United States as what&#39;s called a C-Corp, right? That is a corporation that has different, that&#39;s like stock structure and that governs like the taxes that you pay and like any number of things. Accounting, right? Here in the United States, you can set up and you have what&#39;s called cash-based accounting, which is you just run it based on money in, money out.[[/p]]

[[p]]Right? Be like, we made profit this year because we brought in more money than we sent out. But in big companies, especially public companies, they have what&#39;s called gap accounting, generally accepted accounting principles. And that is like very formal ways that they look at accounting and they call it a cruel basis. So there&#39;s a big difference between what a cash-based business would call profit versus what a gap accounting business would call non-working capital. Right? And I can explain that in detail.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (15:07)[[br /]]
That&#39;s right.[[/p]]

[[p]]Eli Goodman (15:24)[[br /]]
But I&#39;m using that as examples here is that if you want to sell your business, right, the sooner that you can start getting it set up in ways that big businesses look at things, it&#39;s going to be able to help that transition, the ability for them to acquire you. Because that type of thing is going to come out in due diligence. And then you have to figure out like, how do we all get together and agree on the value of the business in the end?[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (15:25)[[/p]]

[[p]]Yeah, that&#39;s true that in fact, funnily enough, some of the things you sort of mentioned in there take me back to when I started an agency, I co-founded an agency in London and I went out and bought, literally bought a business accounting for dummies from the four dummies range of books. But because I thought I really need to know about things like gap accounting and EBITDA and stuff because I just, someone&#39;s got to know about this. The other two guys weren&#39;t interested. So I thought, yeah. So I think,[[/p]]

[[p]]Eli Goodman (16:01)[[br /]]
Run![[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (16:16)[[br /]]
A bit of financial literacy as well is probably quite good, isn&#39;t it?[[/p]]

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Real Career Stories: Tech Founder & Data Storyteller

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