TV ad tech company MNTN’s CEO on IPO and growth plans

00:00 Host

TV ad tech company MNTN is set to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday. The company, which provides ad services and software for TV campaigns, saw revenue grow 47% on an annual basis in its most recent quarter, though it still reported a net loss for the period. Joining us now, we’ve got Mark Douglas, the founder and CEO of MNTN, alongside Market Domination co-host Julie Hyman. Mark, great to see you here. Congratulations on this milestone day for the company. Why was now the right time, and ultimately that pathway to profitability that the street is going to be grading the company on going forward?

01:15 Mark Douglas

Yeah, so I mean, in terms of the market window, now is a really good time. We’ve been prepared to go public for quite a while. We think it was something important. We drive revenue for our customers, small and mid-sized businesses that entirely use digital marketing to drive their revenue. We enable them to do that on streaming TV. And so they are dependent on us, and we wanted to be transparent in terms of the growth of the business, financials for the business. In terms of profitability, on adjusted EBITDA basis, we did $39 million in profit last year. We had record Q1 for the company, and so, you know, adjusted EBITDA is kind of the metric that I think a lot of investors use, and we’re really confident in our growth and EBITDA also as some of the stock-based comp burns off.

02:55 Julie Hyman

Hey Mark, it’s Julie here. So, um, what are you going to use the proceeds from the IPO for? What are you focusing on sort of as your next phase of growth?

03:31 Mark Douglas

Yeah, so we intend by the end of the year, half of the people at MNTN, of our team are engineers. So we think to be in this market, to compete, to give our customers a path where they can use paid search from Google, paid social from Meta and use MNTN Performance TV on streaming TV, that takes a lot of engineering technology and a lot of engineering talent to do that. And so we’re focused on that. A third of our headcount right now is engineering. We plan to end the year at half the headcount of company is engineering.

04:41 Host

And so, as you think about what this would rely on, it sounds like it would rely on there being more ad tiers that come forward. What are your anticipations? What are kind of the rumblings of the ground that you’re hearing from some of those major streaming companies who are trying to figure out their own plays for the next five to ten years?

05:22 Mark Douglas

Yeah, so MNTN, we have partnerships with virtually every streaming network in America, like all of them. And they and the all of smart TV manufacturers, Samsung, LG, partnerships with NBC Universal, um, Warner Brothers with HBO Max, Paramount with CBS. And so we partner with these companies, and we essentially bring the SMB market, um, channel, I should say, and advertisers into this market again by giving them a performance marketing platform. I think increasingly those companies see that as their source of growth, just like, you know, people say in the US economy, small mid-sized businesses account for most of the growth in headcount. In this industry, most of the growth is going to become from small mid-sized businesses, and we’re partnered with the entire industry to make that happen. So that’s what we’re focused on. And when we talk to these companies, that’s a big part of what they’re focused on also.