Marcus Startzel has held some big roles at big companies — he was most recently the chief revenue officer at Millennial Media, a mobile advertising company that went public a couple of years ago, and before that, vice president of sales at AOL Advertising. Now he’s taking the reins at a startup that’s a bit smaller.
In fact, that’s the entire six-person team in the photo above. (Startzel is the one on the right.) MediaGlu was founded in 2009 by Sundar Nathikudi, Stephen Williams, and Justin Musterman. Nathikudi and Williams remain on-board as CTO and COO, respectively, and Musterman will continue to advise the company — but he’s stepping down from his full-time role as CEO.
Startzel said he actually left Millennial at the end of last year, and he said he’s been consulting with MediaGlu since March. The company has built what he calls a “cross-device map” that takes advantage of user behavior to determine when multiple devices are being used by the same person. That way, advertisers can tell if you see their ad on your smartphone and then buy their product on your laptop, or vice versa, and they can also target ads across devices.
It’s a big issue in the mobile ad world — that’s why there are some well-funded competitors, like Drawbridge, and it’s also why Google and Facebook have been moving into this area as well.
So how can a bootstrapped, six-person startup compete? Well, Startzel said he was impressed by the technology that the MediaGlu team has built so far, which he said will serve as “an incredible foundation” for further improvement. He added that while other companies are using their cross-device capabilities to improve their own ad businesses, MediaGlu is focused entirely on its technology: “We are going to be a technology company that helps our partners and our clients sell their advertising solutions and monetize their data across screens.”
And yes, he does plan to raise some outside funding, too.
“There is a time window here and there are people going after this — some of them have many millions of dollars,” Startzel said. “I’m going to try to compete with them [by raising] some millions of dollars, and a laser-sharp focus.”