Mr. Webb

The Undercover Ad Man

Of all the “if you build it, they will come,” social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr seemed the most advertising-averse. Floppy-haired founder David Karp memorably betrayed a visceral distaste for the stuff. It “really turns our stomachs,” he said in 2010, following that up with a vow not to become “wildly profitable” by slapping an AdSense ad on the otherwise elegant dashboard of all 80 million Tumblr blogs. But it seems as though the microblogging site’s methodical approach toward making money has paid off—thanks in part to guidance from Rick Webb, a 20-year veteran of the ad industry and co-founder of digital consultancy Barbarian Group, who was attracted to Tumblr for its aversion to the “crap” ads that permeate the web.

Tumblr, founded in 2007, released its first paid products (Radar and Spotlight) earlier this year, which offered, “exactly what people wanted, the ability to amplify the message to a larger audience—but they hadn’t built a business around it,” he said.

Not long after Mr. Webb’s arrival, Mr. Karp was showing up on Advertising Week panels next to reps from Pepsi, convincingly crowing about the “brave new world” his platform offered for “native” ads—Silicon Alley’s new favorite synergy. (Unlike intrusive interstitials or annoying banners, native ads help brands capture users’ attention by forcing them to act like any other publisher and create content worthy of getting passed around.) “All we do is ask for your birthday,” said Mr. Webb. “We don’t sell ads against you getting a divorce or getting engaged; we’re trying to do it without selling the soul.”

And unlike the fall 2011 Fashion Week flameout, in which brands eager to advertise on Tumblr were turned off by the dearth of ways to measure the effectiveness of their efforts, Tumblr now has analytics options. One is an in-house service that shows off the impact brands can get from ad-spend metrics—like how long your post lives before it stops getting reblogged, which the company is eager to show off. Union Metrics, which offers a similar service for Twitter, has also licensed Tumblr’s firehose of data. Its service, which is currently in beta, helps brands capitalize on where conversations are happening with their product and influence pick-up.

During Mr. Webb’s short tenure, Tumblr hired its first global head of sales, poaching Groupon’s senior vice president of sales Lee Brown. Listed beneath the site’s many job openings for engineers, you now see postings seeking “evangelists” in ad-friendly categories like consumer electronics and home decor. “We’ve had people come up to us like, ‘Don’t ever put ads on the platform!’ Well, we must be doing it right, because we already do,” he said.

As for Mr. Karp’s infamous queasiness, Mr. Webb said that, as a product guy, “David was speaking as individual who uses the internet and watches TV. Every once in a while, one of the TV ads surprises and delights you. How often does that happen on the internet?” Part of the reason, he went on to explain, is that the $50 billion in brand advertising on TV “is not moving over” to the internet, where it’s still direct advertising. But in a way, Tumblr’s insistence that advertisers go native and use the same tools as users—eschewing invasive behavioral advertising or geotargeting—has helped attract big clients like Adidas. Consumer packaged goods and automobile companies are also coming onboard, making Tumblr suddenly feel up to the size of its $800 valuation.

Right now, noted Mr. Webb, it’s “only really appropriate for big brand advertisers looking for a large demographic. Can we ever just buy America? Can we ever just buy Brazil? That is probably a thing they would like to do.”

Next: Deborah Estrin, CornellNYC Tech: the Entrepreneurial Egghead

Back to the beginning.

Ms. Komissarova.

Rallying the Robots

When longtime Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson left his post earlier this month, it wasn’t for another Condé title or a sabbatical to write his fourth book. He decamped for a robotics startup. It’s just the latest sign, along with drones appearing on the cover of every magazine from The New Yorker to The Economist, that robotics is no longer relegated to science fiction.

New York has never been known as a robotics capital, unlike Boston, with its MIT hackers, or Pittsburgh, with its Carnegie Mellon engineers. But one Russian oligarch wants to change that.

In June, Dmitry Grishin launched Grishin Robotics, New York City’s first venture capital firm devoted wholly to personal robotics. Mr. Grishin is the CEO of Mail.ru, a Russian company that recently unloaded a large stake in Facebook, giving him cash to play with and allowing him to follow the pattern established by Mail.ru cofounder-turned-venture capitalist Yuri Milner. As Mr. Grishin told The Observer back in June, “Most of the VCs are focused on mobile applications, but you really need risk capital to improve this area. I want to focus fully on mass-market robotics.”

But Mr. Grishin remains in Russia, running the show at Mail.ru. It’s his business development director, Valery Komissarova, who’s laboring to turn this town into a thriving robotics hub. Her role is part sleuth, seeking out quiet but promising startups, and part booster club president, talking up the high-risk sector to other investors and would-be founders. “Entrepreneurs know the Mark Zuckerberg success stories, but in robotics, they don’t have such clear role models,” Ms. Komissarova told The Observer. She’d like to change that.

Her job isn’t as simple as establishing a meet-up and cruising co-working spots, however. Unlike the self-promoting social media types, this is a tough group to wrangle: robotics companies are often outright secretive, and even the more open ones are commonly toiling away on very specific problems. But if anybody can pull this off, it’s the cool Ms. Komissarova.

Next: Phineas Barnes, First Round Capital: the Bottom-Up Investor

Back to the beginning.

Professor Estrin.

The Entrepreneurial Egghead

Of all Mike Bloomberg’s many initiatives to turn New York into the Silicon Valley of the 21st century, one stands out as the centerpiece of his master plan: the applied sciences campus. After a battle royale with other schools including Stanford, Cornell emerged the winner with its proposal to build a Roosevelt Island satellite. Now, with classes scheduled to start in January, the city’s techies are left watching and waiting for graduates to fill all their open jobs.

Cornell insists its campus is designed to boost New York’s tech sector, and the school’s choice of open-source advocate Deborah Estrin as its first academic faculty member shows that’s more than mere talk.

The professor was poached from UCLA, where her work on embedded sensing networks landed her on lists like Wired’s “50 People Who Will Change the World” and CNN’s “10 Most Powerful Women in Tech.”

But more important than her research is the tone she’s already setting as a founding faculty member. Her commitment to open source—the principle that the fruits of technological research ought to be shared freely—should pique the interest of even the most reticent founders. “Open source is a shared good from which everyone benefits and on which tremendously successful commercial and social ventures are built,” she told The Observer. It also means even the city’s scrappiest startups might have a chance to build on breakthroughs that emerge from the school’s state-of-the-art labs, without ponying up for pricey licensing fees.

What drew her to the school, she said, was the promise of  “innovation that crosses all sorts of boundaries: the boundaries between academia and industry, theory and application, teaching and research, commercial and social good.” In fact, her current focus—personalized, mobile healthcare—could have implications for that lagging biotech sector city officials are so desperately trying to build.

Next: Ryder Ripps, Jonathan Vingiano and Jules LaPlace, OKFocus: The Merry Pranksters

Back to the beginning.