• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 30, 2019

Survata's rapidly growing ad measurement business grew 370% in 2018 compared with the prior year, prompting the company to create a new position -- president of ad measurement.

Tim Krozek, formerly CEO of Boost Media and consulting projects, joined the company in December. The official announcement came this week after a long holiday weekend in Yosemite.

Krozek, with nearly two decades in ad tech, also served as a senior vice president at multiple companies, including Flite, (acquired by Snap in 2016), Support.com, and Efficient Frontier, acquired by Adobe in 2012. He now oversees ad measurement revenue, client success rates, research and operations at Survata.

With money in the coffer after raising $14 million in Series B funding in the fall, Digital News Daily caught up with Krozek to talk about how Survata's new president of ad measurement plans to double performance within the next couple of years. We also talked about tunnel vision, and the best piece of advice he ever received.

Digital News Daily:  How does your work with Boost Media apply to the work being done at Survata?

Krozek:  At Boost Media we applied a technology driven optimization platform optimization platform to the creative process, primarily for AdWords (now Google Ads), and Bing. Survata is taking what has historically been a highly labor-intensive ad measurement process and applying an automated platform with sophisticated algorithms and data science.

This is my fourth startup. Generally, I look for a big market with many, many billions that's ripe for disruption -- which for me means a highly labor-intensive market where you apply sophisticated technology to create efficiencies. In this case it's ad measurement.

DND:  When you look across the industry, what type of data is missing, and how can it best be used?

Krozek:  There is a greater opportunity for everyone in the ad measurement industry to bring together offline and online data. And this is in our roadmap, to completely connect all channels. There are evolutionary steps that need to take place.

DND:  What is the best piece of professional advice you have received?

Krozek:  Half of this someone gave me and the other half I learned a couple of times before I understood it. You can always go back and fix something.

We tend to believe we are on a linear path in life, especially in a technology startup world, where you tend to make a lot of mistakes because for the most part we're in uncharted waters. Early in my career when I made a mistake I thought I couldn't go back and fix it.

One time I worked with a guy at Yahoo. He was a super nice guy, great boss, but I quit. It was completely stupid. I really liked my job there, but there was a moment in time I decided to leave because I thought there was a great opportunity. He told me I was kind of an idiot, things were great, but in my mind I couldn’t stay because I had already quit. He said, 'no, you can fix this.' I left and went to the other job and stayed for six months before I realized the mistake.  

I use this scenario a lot at work and even around my kids when they make mistakes and think they can’t go back to change the outcome. … You can press the reset button.

DND:  What books do you read?

Krozek:  I tend to read mostly business-related stuff like industry news, but I just read Hamilton. It was a huge task at about 800 pages, but it was unbelievably great. I also listen to a lot of podcasts.

DND:  Is there a theme within the book Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow that you saw within your own life?

Krozek:  When I think about Hamilton, not just what he did within the government, but his understanding of the development of what New York and the U.S. would become, I think about industrialization.

Even Hamilton -- and he was probably one of the smarter guys in the U.S. -- I don’t think foresaw the massive growth in terms of U.S. population and gross national product and productivity. I think about how he probably couldn’t have imagined that all of Manhattan would be dominated by massive skyscrapers. I also think about the growth in Silicon Valley.

No matter how big things can get, things can always get bigger. Not just population, but opportunity and growth.