Roundtable CEO James Heckman outlines company strategy in first investor webinar after NASDAQ debut

Hello, and welcome to this webinar on Roundtable. As you know, we have just gone public. My name is Aly Madhavji, CFO of Roundtable and Managing Partner at Blockchain Founders Fund. I am a big investor in Roundtable and a huge fan of all the incredible technology we are building here.

It is my pleasure to have James Heckman, CEO and founder of Roundtable, who was previously a senior executive at Yahoo and Fox, and is a successful serial technology entrepreneur. Without further ado, welcome, James Heckman.

Thanks, Aly. I am excited to be here, and thank you to those of you interested in learning about Roundtable. My team has been operating in this space for roughly 35 years and has launched 10 similar networks, which I call PaaS, or Platform as a Service. It is a little bit different from Software as a Service because it is comprehensive, covering all aspects of media operations, including taking the top line, advertising, sales, distribution, syndication, and technology.

We are more excited about this one than anything we have done over these last 35 years, and we are excited to be public. I think the idea is so profoundly far-reaching and reaches such a large market that retail investors and all investors should have a chance to participate in its growth.

Before getting started, I want to address a few general things based on some of the questions. We have done a reverse merger, and a lot of people have asked, "Why would you do a reverse merger?" This relates to what I was just talking about. I think it is a shame that all investors do not get a chance to participate in the highest-growth period. Once a technology is completed, there is a two- or three-year period where, based on what we have found in our past, it is scorched earth and growth. I think it is a shame for only a small number of people or funds to be able to participate in that.

We are also a consumer-facing business. While we do operations, we have distribution to hundreds of millions of people through syndication of the brands that we have rolled up over these decades. Unlike an obscure technology or B2B product, consumers are going to know about us. We have that incredible advantage, and that has worked out very well for us in the past.

There is also uncertainty in the market, whether it is war, inflation, or politics. We think getting on NASDAQ is important. In this case, I think we have positioned ourselves in a great way, with a very clean product. We will talk about that in a little bit. First, I would love to talk to you about the company and what we do.

Aly, my partner here, is someone I am very excited to have on board. He was actually an investor as we were building the technology. I think there is probably not a fund in the world that has more infrastructure-related investments in the blockchain space. He is the founder of Blockchain Founders Fund. We built that relationship over a couple of years. I think you participated in three rounds as we were growing. Is that right?

That is correct. We have made this the largest investment out of our fund.

Yes, so we are super excited about that endorsement and about bringing the Web3 and DeFi layer onto several decades of refining and developing this business model. Having one of the best minds in the industry is something we are very proud of.

There is a little bit of confusion about the executive team. Aly is the CFO of the company. He is taking a sabbatical from Blockchain Founders Fund to help grow our business into NASDAQ and beyond. I would invite you to Google his name and Roundtable with his background. He has an incredible amount of financial credentials and a wonderful track record. So, Aly, thank you for being here.

The way to think about this opportunity from both an investor standpoint and a commercial standpoint is that, 35 or 40 years ago, as a startup CEO in Seattle, I was fortunate enough to be close to a huge team of Microsoft product people. Those of you who understand digital media know that Seattle really led much of this, whether it was ESPN.com, Amazon, or MSN. MSN built the first truly web-based media platform.

I launched a company called Rivals.com there, but digital media, even before the internet, was Seattle. I built the first digital ad network and the first digital platform for the publication business of every NFL team and every college team. The concept is that there should be a single database, a single technology, a single Salesforce, one place, and cumulative scale, all enjoying the financial and distribution benefits of operating leverage from a single platform.

I really had an opportunity to lead in that. SoftBank, Intel, and News Corp funded me. We were very fortunate. We built the first blogging network. It was not called blogging then; we called it a micronetwork. It was the first social network, called Rivals.com. It was eventually filed as a Goldman Sachs S-1 and sold to Yahoo for $100 million. That was a lot of money back then, in the 1990s. It was really the first time we built this model, and we have done it 10 times since.

That was held by Yahoo for 20 years, generated billions of dollars of revenue, and is still in business, like all of the businesses my team has started since the early 1990s. They have been successful or are still operating and profitable.

Maybe, Aly, you could show a little bit of that history. I will just kind of fly through this, because the way to think about it is that every three or four years, there is a major innovation in technology.

First, there was digital publishing before the internet. We saved money on operations because, for example, all the NFL teams I was working with did not have to have their own staff. They did not have to just sell to car dealerships and restaurants. By consolidating everything digital and publishing, it was really the first attempt at an ad network and a digital platform. I was in my early twenties, but it ended up being highly profitable. Obviously, leading that network as president at a very young age for the NFL was a great success story, and something that all of you as investors benefit from through the relationships we built over those years.

Rivals.com became the highest-traffic sports network in the world, again using the same model we are using today: consolidating thousands of sports sites around the world. There was a separate network in Europe and one with SoftBank in Japan. Without any marketing or cable television, we were able to consolidate on a single platform and become the highest-traffic sports network in the world.

Our next one, 20 years before Substack, was the first subscription network, called Scout. We sold that to News Corp, another major brand. So, after the NFL and Yahoo, the third network our team built was with my incredible COO, Bill Sornsin, whom I brought from Microsoft and who is still with me today.

When there was no advertising after the bubble burst, we built the first network subscription product, which later was used for Hulu, Netflix, and Spotify. The idea was one subscription that could reach hundreds of different brands. Again, that was a 10x win for investors. We were just doing a reverse merger, but Fox ended up buying it out.

Then I became Chief Strategy Officer for everything digital at News Corp. Again, using that same business model, my strategy team came up with the same concept of a single platform, and it worked for Hulu. That became a multibillion-dollar business very quickly. The idea of shared infrastructure, shared sales, single sign-on, and single sales to reach millions of people continued to work.

We did it again, this time with 5to1. You may not have heard of that, because it was purely B2B, but that is now a $200 billion industry. We started it by putting together AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Disney, and Fox into a single consortium. Again, it was a single database, a single pixel, massive scale, and high quality, instead of everything being separated out.

That became the premium marketplace. It was first called 5to1. Then I sold that company to Yahoo, became head of global media strategy for Yahoo, and put together the consortium with AOL and Microsoft. That exploded into a premium marketplace, and that is now a $200 billion revenue industry.

As an investor, when you look at it, we run the same game plan, and it keeps working over and over again. The game plan is to consolidate premium professional major media onto one platform. It may seem like, "Why would everyone not do that?" It is very hard to have the relationships and the great technology required to attract major media to something like that. But we architected it, and it became highly successful.

My team was able to lead with all of these brands and move on from there. Before we skip ahead to our new technology, I would like to talk about the last company I took public before I left in 2020. We took it from nothing after our technology was built, and in under two years reached almost $200 million in revenue. Again, we attracted 200 major media brands to join a single platform for advertising, syndication, operations, streaming, yield management, ad operations, and subscription services. Basically, it was a full stack of services for major media.

That is what we have done, and now we are doing it again with DeFi, which saves an incredible amount of money for our partners, user infrastructure with instant payments, and AI for IP protection, bot protection, and very efficient management. We will get to the product a little bit.

I would love to skip forward to our new partner, Eyal Hertzog, and talk a little bit about his involvement. Eyal is a co-founder. I would say he is known as one of the top engineering minds in the world.

Before YouTube, he invented the first video social network, called Metacafe. It had 60 million users, and he invented the algorithm that gives custom videos, way before TikTok and way before YouTube. It was an incredible business until Google bought YouTube, cut off all the links, and decided to monopolize the industry. But it was a world-changing invention.

He then invented, I think, one of the most important technologies in the world today. You have probably all heard of DeFi. He is the inventor of that technology. He holds the patents and wrote the white paper. He invented automated market making and the liquidity pool, which allows people to trade without human interaction. It is now a $5 trillion industry. All the banks are rushing to it so there can be 24-hour settlement and stocks can be traded 24 hours without humans. People can raise money, fund cars, and fund homes because of DeFi. This was Eyal's invention. He is one of the most brilliant men I have ever met.

Aly, you probably knew of him before I did. Did you invest in Bancor, or how long have you been aware of our partner, Eyal?

Yes, I am an investor in Bancor, and I pretty much read every word he published in that Bancor white paper, probably almost nine years ago now, maybe 10 years ago. I have been a huge fan of Eyal even before I knew him personally.

He is generally considered one of the top two or three developers in Web3. You look at Vitalik, who invented smart contracts and Ethereum. You look at Eyal inventing liquidity pools, automated market making, and DeFi as a whole. Maybe some people might also include Dan Larimer, who invented Steemit and basically built out EOS, which has not done so well anymore. But I think that was pretty transformational technology, along with some of the things he has built in the space.

Yes. Why that is important for all of you and for us is that there was this dream of being able to put a media company on-chain. They tried it with Steemit. They only reached 100,000 people. Block.one raised $4.2 billion and never really launched. Everyone has tried it, and we have succeeded. I think that will be a world-changing outcome.

Eyal, after building Bancor, started something called DeWeb. He invented DeFi technology and then started a company called DeWeb out of Tel Aviv, Israel. He basically figured out how to track, with immutable contracts, a smart wallet, and an API linked to a liquidity pool. So, instead of finance being able to do things without human beings, he figured out how to pay for every video, every story, and every transaction in real time with stablecoins, along with real-time reporting.

For those of you who know much about digital media, everything is in a black box. Everything is delayed, and everything is paid late. For those of you who have worked with social media, people do not know how much traffic they have, which video is working, and which is not. He put everything on a single platform on-chain.

For those of you interested in censorship, it is unbreakable. Content that goes on-chain lasts for eternity and protects IP for publishers. About three years ago, someone said to Eyal, "You should meet Heckman. He has launched a lot of large networks and sold to every major media company, and he could help you launch this."

We ended up acquiring DeWeb about three years ago, along with his team of PhDs and geniuses. We took our 35 years of operational expertise running enterprise software and platforms for major media and professional media, and he was probably one of the earliest AI engineers. We were able to accelerate and grab that 35 years, put it on-chain, and build one platform available for professional and enterprise publishers.

We finished our joint development about a year and a half ago. Then we went into beta and launched a 50-site network that we took over from my last public company. If you would like to look at some of the quality and speed, you can go to TheHockeyNews.com. That is our first client. We have many more.

You can download the app and see how the app works. But it is not really what is up front, what the consumer sees. It is the engine behind it, the storage, the speed, the distribution, the syndication, the yield management, and all of the things that go into a major media company's operations. One client we are talking to right now will hopefully close just by using our software and save $40 million in operational costs.

The headline is that this business is not a new idea. This business is something we have been refining for decades, starting with print, then going online, then adding subscription, then adding mobile, then adding video, then adding the ad consortium. Now we are adding DeFi and AI.

You could probably go over that slide that has Walton's picture on it as well, Aly. If you look at the people involved with this company, not only do we have the inventor of social video and the inventor of DeFi, as well as our invention of blogging, the first premium ad network, and the first social media company called Rivals.com, but we also have an amazing entrepreneur working with us operationally: Walton Comer.

Walton is one of the founders and, I think, the biggest shareholder at Deribit. He spent 15 years as a quant with Steven Cohen and sold his data company for a little under $1 billion. They just sold Deribit to Coinbase for around $3.5 billion. He personally invested $15 million into Roundtable and has an AI company right now that is fully integrated for our media clients. It gives them IP protection and management help at all levels.

Of course, Eyal has been working on an AI project with the software as well, which keeps out fake registrants and bots and provides automated monitoring and moderation to make sure there is no unsafe content. You are talking about an incredible ad stack of technology and some of the biggest inventors in digital media, with a long track record of success.

Walton has had a multibillion-dollar win. I have been behind several multibillion-dollar platforms, and every major media company has been involved one way or another. Of course, Eyal designed DeFi, which is now a multitrillion-dollar industry.

As an investor, you ask yourself: we are just coming together and launching. We just got on NASDAQ. We have not announced any financials, but the type of horsepower involved in this project recognizes that there is well over $100 billion of revenue within this premium media ecosystem, which I have been working in for the last 35 years. A lot of money has been poured into it. A lot of effort has gone into doing this transaction so it could be on NASDAQ quickly. Decades and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on technology, which we keep reviving for every one of these companies we have built.

To give you an idea of how big the ecosystem is, think about this: if we have a wall between social, commerce, and search, we do not compete there. We are not going to compete with, and do not want to compete with, Meta, Google, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok, or anything like that. That is a user-generated content world. It is not that professionals do not go there to find distribution and meet fans, but that is a data-targeted, ROI-based advertising world. It is not a branding world.

The branding world is a premium marketplace. That is something I was deeply involved in when I was at Yahoo, essentially gathering what we called premium professional, scripted professional journalism. That includes things like History Channel, GQ, Wired, The New York Times, every television station in the world, and every professional sports league and team.

People do not think about it much because they think, "Wow, Google is big, YouTube is big, Meta is big." They are, and that is a whole new world of social media. But the premium media ecosystem has grown from zero when we put together the first ecosystem back in 2009 and 2010 to $200 billion. It is expected to go to $250 billion.

If you are General Motors, Coca-Cola, or a major brand, you have two missions. One is the immediate sale, and that is for social. That is kind of like virtual coupons or, if you are searching for travel, you want to put a special up for an airline or something like that. But branding is a long-term relationship. That is how you get people to pay retail price: you build a relationship with the customer. That is something that takes years.

That is why you see advertising around the U.S. Open or Super Bowl ads. It is an opportunity to introduce your product and have people fall in love with it. That is really the core of advertising: building the delta between utility value and what people pay for it. Major branding happens on major brands, and that is our world. That has been my world for decades, going back again to Turner and the NFL.

What we do is provide the infrastructure and operations for companies like the ones you are seeing on the slide. We are not saying we have these as clients, but over the last 35 years, we always get companies like this as clients. We think we are in a better position now than we have ever been.

We are the only company with a full stack of services. You could show our software feature list if you would like, Aly. Usually, people have to string together vendors. What that does is slow down the platform, create super-high costs, and require staff for each vendor.

We are now one of these companies that, through AI, DeFi, and a single database, dominates from a technical standpoint. There is no company in the world that can touch us in terms of offering full service. Think about Boeing. Boeing does the whole thing, whereas maybe Raytheon does a navigational system and Rolls-Royce does an engine. We do everything from automated sales to yield management, streaming, hosting, building apps, technology, publishing systems, community, and comments.

Every one of these rows you are seeing on this slide represents billions of dollars' worth of startups that were built just to do one of these things. We have spent the last 30 or 40 years integrating this through our various companies, and now we have everything together on a single platform.

Here is what it means. Maybe you could show the growth chart for the vision. We had a question here about what the future looks like for revenue and what our KPIs are. This is illustrative. Think about it this way: we are just starting. We are just kicking off the company. We have 10 consecutive profitable wins. I do not think there is a software Silicon Valley CEO with that many consecutive profitable wins. That purple line is our cost structure, meaning growth does not come from marketing. We do not have the cost of consumer acquisition. That just does not exist.

We are a pure PaaS or SaaS business, and we provide operations for major media. We grow by signing professional media publishers. That is what we do.

To answer the question of what to look for: every quarter, we will announce how many publishers have joined our company. When I say "joined us," I mean allowing us to use our software and services. The average media brand has about 5 million users, and those users, on an annualized basis, generate $1 to $3.

You can see that by generating 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 customers, a little like the classic SaaS model, I think this company has the opportunity to reach hundreds of millions of dollars very quickly. It is all really just one KPI, and that is how many people agree to work with us on a commercial basis.

Aly, I know when you were originally thinking about investing, you had a few questions: one, why would a company want to work with a third party to run all of its technical operations; and two, the speed of growth. I would love to ask you to comment on that. I see you have made three investments into the company in the last two years and now have actually joined the company. What analysis were you doing in the beginning? What is new about our company now compared to past years, and how fast is it able to grow?

Absolutely. Just before I answer that, remember that if you have any questions, please share them in the community section on RTB.io. We have already been getting a whole stream of questions, so we are going to answer those in just a second.

In terms of when we diligenced Roundtable and looked at this extremely closely, I went through nearly every public company document that you and Bill Sornsin, the other co-founder here, had basically been part of with these public companies you helped grow. One of the big things I looked at was how we get more comfort around the scalability and how you are going to approach and bring on customers.

One of the big things we looked at was Maven, your previous company, which is now called The Arena Group, a New York Stock Exchange company. It is basically the same type of company as what you are building here, just with dramatically worse technology. That was originally, right? Now they are no longer a technology company, but when they were a technology company and you were running it and had your engineering team there, one of the big things I saw was that when you came out of beta, in just about two years, about two and a half years, you grew from zero to $189 million in annualized revenue.

You had pretty strong margins and were profitable at the time. When you look at that ability to scale, and then dig into the technology that was there before, that technology was eight to 10 years older than it is today. Then you look at the changes.

One of the big changes in the market is that, when I did a competitor analysis, it historically took about a year to move a customer over to a unified platform such as this. The reason is that any of the existing competitors need to move over every story in the customer's history. 

Imagine someone like The Hockey News, ESPN, or any customer like this. Imagine having to move them over when they have 30, 35, or 40 years of stories. You have to move over every single one of those stories, every single headline, every body, every photo, and every video. All of this needs to get moved over.

One of the big innovations that Maven had, James's previous company, was that instead of doing this in a year, they could do it in 40 days. That was dramatically faster, and that is what allowed James to take it from zero to $189 million in annualized revenue in two and a half years.

One of the big things about Roundtable, with dramatically better technology and leveraging AI, is the ability to bring over these customers much more instantaneously. Everything outside of video, the stuff that is not extremely heavy, can be brought over in under two hours. There are examples of this already that are public.

If you can do that in under two hours, then the whole exercise changes. Instead of the bottleneck being onboarding, which historically was a big challenge, onboarding is now extremely quick and efficient. Now it is really about the sales exercise.

When you look at the ability to scale from zero to $189 million in annualized revenue in two and a half years with a 40-day onboarding period, and now that onboarding period decreases significantly to a day or two days, depending on the amount of video content, it is dramatically faster. If you are 10 or 20 times faster on that piece, we looked at this and said, "We believe Roundtable has the ability to scale revenues much quicker with this technology."

Then you add the DeFi components, which we have not really talked about yet on this call. Instead of having to wait 60, 90, or 120 days to get paid, publishers can now get paid like that. Instantaneously, they can click a cash-out button and collect on that. I think that is a very big factor. In any of the meetings I have seen, that has been one of the features everyone in the industry is excited about: the fact that you do not have to wait so long.

Keep in mind that a lot of these media companies, while they might have reasonably significant revenues, generally are not running EBITDA-positive, or they are breakeven, because they have so many costs. When you look at the fact that Roundtable can replace 17 different SaaS software vendors, you are able to cut 60%, 70%, or 80% of the total costs at these companies and turn companies that were basically breakeven into cash machines. That was a big factor as I looked at this and diligenced this, and I was very excited about it.

I appreciate that, Aly. I think you have looked at over 2,000 companies in the last few years and invested in a couple hundred, and we are really excited that we are your top investment.

Stepping back a little bit, think about how the financial model works. Aly mentioned one of the biggest reasons we have never had trouble signing hundreds and eventually thousands of clients over these last few decades: a single media company is actually small. They are not like Google, Meta, or YouTube. In relative terms, when you have $200 billion of revenue running through a company, even companies like the NFL, The Guardian, or The New York Times are small compared to these huge companies.

When they have to spend money on R&D and build out their own infrastructure, look at our feature list. There are so many different components, and with each component, you have to get a contract. With each contract, there are monthly fees. With that, you have to have personnel working at your office.

It does not make any sense. It would be like Delta Air Lines deciding it wanted to be in the airplane business. Media companies should really be focusing only on content production. They should not be doing ad serving. They should not be doing yield management. They should not be worried about streaming, putting the components together, or negotiating with dozens of different vendors.

Our all-in-one, one-stop shop is, I think, the best model in the world. It certainly is in terms of Google, SEO, and speed from a consumer experience standpoint.

A lot of you understand that when you are reading a story from a major newspaper or radio station covering a sporting event or whatever, you will notice the download time is slow. That is because they have to make calls to all these different vendors. The data leakage is slow. The audit ends up bad for Google, so you end up getting fewer page views. It is a bad consumer experience. By adding that time, the consumer actually consumes less product, and revenue goes down. It is just a bad experience.

Having a single platform is really important. Because it is all-in-one, it is so efficient. We are the only company in the world that does not charge for these operations. We do not charge for them. One client I am looking at right now is wasting $40 million on operations for bad operations. If you look at WordPress, it does about three of the 17 things that we do not charge for.

When I was consulting with the Los Angeles Times, it took a year to go up on Arc, which is the Washington Post company's platform. These are things that cost media companies a tremendous amount of money, but the incremental cost for us to add a company is zero. After onboarding, and onboarding now, to Aly's point, because of the AI system built by Eyal and his team at DeWeb over these last few years, we are able to bring sites up literally the same day, republishing everything and putting it into a single database.

We think the layers and layers of software that have taken us decades to build, now put together in one all-in-one package and offered at no cost to customers, will make a huge impact on the market. We just take a revenue share.

The way to think about that, from what we learned at Hulu, Rivals.com, Scout, 5to1, and the various companies I have been involved in, is that when you put together premium, that branding experience, and combine it in one vast data pool, then when a branding company wants to filter by gender, economic analysis, geography, and habits, it filters down. Only by having a vast pool of data can you be valuable and efficient for ad agencies.

The magic is that by putting everything together into a consortium, media companies actually have much more bid density and much higher CPMs, so revenue explodes.

I will give you a few examples of recent successes. At my last company, by putting that consortium with 250 brands together, we put Sports Illustrated on my last platform. It had 10 million users. In under a year and a half, we grew it to 89 million users. Assuming the economics are the same, that is like a $10 million to $80 million jump almost overnight, by using our formula that we have been perfecting for the last 30 years.

TheStreet, which you have all heard of through Jim Cramer, is another example. I took over that company in 2019. It had only 1.3 million users when we finally acquired it. Nobody watched its videos. It was too slow. The technology was horrible. Within two years, we grew it to 30 million users and saved the company. It exploded overnight.

The Hockey News is a 70-year-old publication. With AI, we have been able to grab every story that has been done for the last 70 years. They are on the new Roundtable platform, RTB Digital, and we grew it from almost nothing to millions of users. Once they went on our new DeFi AI platform, their engagement doubled. In other words, revenue doubled per person visiting the site. I hate to say it is free money for the SaaS client we are working with, but we take a revenue share.

We will not share individual contracts with the public, but the incremental revenue that we gain costs us nothing incrementally from an operational standpoint. It is one platform. The way to visualize it is that at Rivals.com we had 2,600 clients, and the cost for one client was the same as the cost for 2,600. Especially now, with bandwidth costs so low, with AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle all competing to keep bandwidth and storage costs down, the incremental cost is negligible at best.

If you want to see how fast it is and how it works, you can go to TheHockeyNews.com. You can also go to the App Store, download the app, pick your favorite hockey team if you like, and see that this is live. We have another couple hundred small publishers that were in this data phase, and we are now going to be launching to the entire major media industry.

That describes the business. Again, the KPIs are signing publishers. The way to think about it from a revenue standpoint is that there is no risk that people have to "catch on" to Roundtable. We are not a consumer-facing brand. Our brands are our clients, who already have traffic and already have revenue. We put them on our platform and work as a revenue share.

Now, going back to the transaction, I think there was one question about the share price. I think there are silly people out there who are playing with the stock before we have made any announcements, signed any major clients, or done any forecasts. I understand that there are retail investors who buy and sell and do things like that. But if you are a real investor and want to invest in a company, where we are today is in the gates, like at the Kentucky Derby. The door just opened.

Selling now, again, if you are a trader, I cannot give you a recommendation. I see this thing go up and down. But it would be like selling the horse before it runs. It does not make any sense. We have a 10-0 track record. Every company that we started, going back to 1987 for me, is still in business, even my first publication, and profitable.

I have taken three companies public and sold two to Yahoo and one to News Corp. I had one joint venture with the NFL and built a multibillion-dollar platform for MySpace. We have a very good track record.

I cannot tell you to buy our company. There are a lot of good options out there to consider. But I would not buy it and sell it before we have even publicly launched our platform or taken it to market with major media. That does not make any sense.

I think there is a great opportunity right now to be in at the ground level with a great track record. I can say definitively that there is no company in the world that has anything close to our technology. I can say that this is not a new market. We are not inventing a new market. This is a market I have been in for nearly 40 years.

Every major media company wants to take its operational costs to zero. Nobody wants to spend money needlessly. Our technology does that. We have a track record of working with every major media company one way or another, so we have great relationships. We have great relationships with advertising and a long history of working for major media and bringing businesses to market.

Right now, this is the pre-launch period. I think there are investors smart enough to know that when you have Walton Comer, with two billion-dollar exits, putting in a lot of personal money, and you have the most prolific blockchain investor, who is on this video right now, making this his largest investment, and we have no debt, those are important features.

Somebody asked a question about other features that are very unusual in some of these RTOs. I like RTOs because you can get public fast. I have found in the past that going through the regular route takes years to get public, and major hedge funds end up taking a huge bite out of it. This was very low dilution at the end of the day.

If you look at the cap table right now, we have publicly announced that the share count is, I think, about 13.5 million outstanding shares. Eighty-five percent of all those shares agreed to lock up. A lot of times, you see on reverse mergers, like these DATs last summer, which have nothing to do with this, obviously, because this is a very comprehensive software business, that people exited. None of us connected to the business did that.

Aly's investment fund, all the largest investments, all the big investors, all the executives, and all major shareholders have signed a lockup for at least a year, followed by a slow opening after that. We have about 2 million shares that are free trading out of the 13.5 million. We have only added 800,000 shares since merging. RYVYL has 1.2 million shares.

This is not an opportunity where you would think there would be some bunch of PR and then a bunch of founders selling off. We are very serious senior executives with decades of experience operating very large businesses at the public level. We are not doing this and putting tens of millions of dollars into this company already because we are trying to exit short term.

I look at this as a five-year commitment. I think over this next year we will be signing a lot of new clients. Once we get traction, as we always do, and that scale comes, everything after that accelerates. We are looking at this as a five-year business. I do not know what is going to happen to the world after five years. Nobody can predict the future. But this is day one.

From a technical standpoint, to give a summary, there is no digital media company in the world that has anything close to our technology. Nowhere. From a senior management standpoint, we are talking about decades of experience at Microsoft, working with Google, News Corp, the NFL, Yahoo, and Amazon. It is an incredibly experienced team, with a very high-level, highly credentialed financial leader in Aly and his team.

I think ours is not a company to bet against, but it is a company to watch over time. What to watch for are the announcements of professional media companies signing platform agreements with us. That is it. The rest is a domino. The revenue comes with the traffic. The traffic comes with us offering our services to major media.

We have some other questions we can bring up. We have a series of questions, so let us fire through these.

First, we have Kurt Weber. "I was reading an article that cited ad fraud and protection of user information issues on these social media platforms. How do you guys protect against that?"

Thanks, Aly. We have a layer of AI that no media platform has. Certainly, the social giants do, but major media are left unprotected. All the data, audience data, and customer data is actually put on-chain with private keys for our media brands. We are also able to identify bots and fake registration. Eyal's team at DeWeb has worked on that for a long time.

I think fraud is a global problem. We are addressing it with AI in a profound way. A lot of times, fraud happens because of social companies where people can build profiles. The problem with social media is that anybody - cartel people, porn stars, whoever - can sign up on an open platform. Because they are not professional media companies, they can generate fake content because they are trying to get paid by the social platform.

This is a whole different level. We only work with professional media companies. People cannot sign up for Roundtable. Users cannot sign up. YouTubers cannot sign up. We see clients. We contact newspaper companies, magazine businesses, and sporting companies. You may have noticed the announcement with PSG, one of the largest soccer teams. We approach and filter out.

You are not going to see somebody like The Dallas Morning News, the Dallas Cowboys, or somebody covering a major sports team doing fake traffic. They would be sued, it would be criminal, and they would be disgraced. But with unknown robots on YouTube or TikTok, that does happen. It is not a major issue for us.

We also have automated moderation for people who are doing destructive, damaging, unsafe, or similar types of content. We have AI to make sure that is immediately removed and that accounts are banned for people who are commenting and doing sordid activity. Again, it is because we are here to protect the experience of professional media companies and major brands.

Perfect. You touched on part of this, but we have a question from Ajeet. "You mentioned that a large portion of your shares are locked for a year. When do they start getting unlocked?"

A year from now, but they do not unlock all at once. It is spread out over a year. A lot of them, from a management standpoint, are all new stock options. So even if they were to become unlocked, it would be a small portion.

Stock options typically for tech companies, and certainly ours, happen over 36 months. I would say there is no chance of some major, crazy dump. Again, you have seen it in the blockchain or DAT space, but we are very careful. All of our investors, founders, and employees are holding on for a long time.

There are a total of 2 million shares that are free trading out of the 13.5 million. I hope that answered the question.

Absolutely. We have a number of questions on the RTB community platform. One of them is about one or more executives from the past company, RYVYL. Some of the past management team and executives have survived the merger and joined Roundtable. Can you address that and the strategy there?

Yes. First of all, we are really fortunate to get the services of Aly Madhavji. Again, I invite you to look up his background. He has brought in some supreme financial minds to help as well. We have built a new board, and there will probably be some more additions.

I do kind of chuckle a little bit. I cannot help myself from going into some of the stock forums and message boards, and people are still talking about RYVYL and talking about people as if they are operating the business or anything like that. But this is a new day. We ended up spending millions of dollars housecleaning and putting everything from the past to bed.

I have always found that is way less money than trying to do an IPO over years. Getting right to NASDAQ was important. There have been a small handful of people who survived that merger who we think are talented, but the governance and control of Roundtable, from the CFO standpoint, are in Aly's hands, with his impeccable track record.

My COO, who runs operational finance, is a Microsoft technical executive with an MBA and a background as an electrical engineer. He has decades of experience working with the various major media companies that have acquired us. We have been in and out as public companies and have never had a single investigation about any of us, ever, in the history of operating public or non-public companies. Not once. Our track record is impeccable in that way.

The old era of the past is gone. It just does not exist. There is not a single person from the past who has governance control of our business or who will be signing off on financials without decades of high-level experience.

Again, I think there were some people who did some great stuff in the last business and who we find talented. There was an environment that was not positive, so I do not think it is fair to gather those people together. The buck always stops with the CEO. They are the decision makers: the CFO, COO, and CTO.

Our CTO is one of the best engineers in history and invented, I think, one of the most important things ever in DeFi. I love our CFO. Our COO, who runs daily operations, is incredibly talented and led the engineering product team for building out MSN when that was world-changing. He has built 10 networks with me around the world, in Japan, Europe, and elsewhere.

You are talking about a world-class team that has built companies acquired by billion-dollar companies. Anybody who mentions anything about the past is just being silly, trying to pump, benefit a short position, or act like schoolchildren. That has nothing to do with the future that is coming.

Fantastic. Let us do one last question. You touched on a little bit of this in the deck, but maybe you can go into a little bit more detail.

The question is: "What is the company's short- and long-term advertising revenue vision and strategy? Has leadership identified brands and opportunities to grow through events, direct partnerships, sponsorships, or lead generation platforms?"

You can maybe touch on how reaching 200 brands illustratively helps get to $1 billion in revenue.

First of all, I am not going to make any forward-looking statements. I am not making any revenue statements today that investors can rely on.

There are several thousand, I think 5,000 to 10,000, media brands, newspapers, magazines, TV stations, radio stations, and online sites that are considered premium. It is an actual thing. It is not a compliment; it is an industry. You will find them in Apple News. You will find them syndicated on Yahoo. You will find them syndicated on MSN. Go to Apple News right now and look at fashion, sports, pets, and other categories. 

People do not realize there are thousands of premium media companies that are online, totally separate from social.

In terms of how we grow our revenue, the question said, "Do you do this, this, or this?" We grow our revenue primarily by signing a media brand. That media brand has traffic, and when you put them all together into massive traffic, we then manage the ad sales.

When you have that kind of scale, the ad agencies want to interoperate with you. It is not like old school, where you are walking around with a briefcase trying to sell an ad. Advertising is incredibly automated now, and very few media companies are connected with WPP, Omnicom, Starcom, Dentsu, and the various ad agencies that have buying platforms.

Those buying platforms want as much efficiency as possible because their margins have been squeezed over the years. It used to be 15%, but now, as consolidation is happening, they are all trying to win accounts from each other. Their margins are sometimes as low as 5%. They cannot afford to be running ads on a bunch of single publications. In fact, they do not. They have limited it to only large networks.

When we put our consolidation together and become large, we integrate from PMPs, or premium marketplaces, and ad buyers to PMPs on the supply side, which is major media. Our model is the OPEC model: putting together high-scale companies in a single platform, with a single pricing structure, single database, single infrastructure, single audits, and one Google Ad Manager.

Again, I want to make sure we are clear that we do not compete with Google. We do not compete with Amazon. We work with those major platforms, but as a single vendor, instead of them having to work with hundreds of different media brands, which is completely inefficient.

Our model is to consolidate, create scale through consolidation, and provide operating leverage to our media brands in the form of zero cost. Our competitors charge millions of dollars. We charge zero. By consolidating and adding that sales layer, we are able to generate revenue that otherwise would not be available to media companies that simply do not have the massive scale a consortium has.

Aly, do you think that covered it, or do you think there are other issues?

No, that was perfect. I think that was a really good summary of basically replacing these 17 different SaaS software vendors, putting them onto a single platform, and moving these big, large customers, whether they are in sports, fashion, finance, or other categories, onto this technology layer.

When you bring on a customer with 5 million users, all of those users, if you go to TheHockeyNews.com as an example, are still going to The Hockey News. It just loads faster, is much more integrated, has substantially more features, and has an app that people can use effectively. The publishers also have the ability to cash out instantaneously.

I think you covered it there. We are on the hour.

Yes. One other issue on the scale, and then we will get off. There are a couple hundred billion dollars of revenue in the branded area. I think one of the questions was about scale. Scale comes by signing, but the marketplace for premium is, I want to remind you, billions and billions of dollars in revenue. If we are successful, we have an opportunity to be as big as that.

We think the multiple on a PaaS business, which is B2B2C, typically for my companies ranges between seven and 15. One of them sold for kind of infinity pre-revenue, but SaaS businesses or platform businesses range anywhere from seven to 15 times revenue, depending on the economy and depending on the efficiency.

Yes, you do see a lot of those at seven to 15 times revenue. Figure is a really good example of using blockchain technology for the mortgage industry. This is very similar, but for the media industry.

One of the big differences in the mortgage industry is that you could actually have multiple providers. Here, you cannot. You choose one, and you choose the best software. That is where Roundtable fits.

Thank you, everyone, for joining. This has been fantastic. If you do have any other questions, please reach out. You can always still drop them into that community section. We will be doing more of these types of things going forward, so we can definitely address those questions or make sure we find ways to get you the information that you need.

Thank you so much for joining, and stay tuned because there are lots of exciting things to come.

Yes. Go to RTB.io. If you register there, we will put you on the newsletter, and we will answer your questions live on the platform. You can even do video questions using our software. Thanks, everybody.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This video and script release includes information that constitutes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These forward-looking statements are based on the Company's current beliefs, assumptions and expectations regarding future events, which in turn are based on information currently available to the Company. Such forward-looking statements include statements that are characterized by future or conditional words such as "may," "will," "expect," "intend," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," and "continue" or similar words. You should read statements that contain these words carefully because they discuss future expectations and plans, which contain projections of future results of operations or financial condition or state other forward-looking information. By their nature, forward-looking statements address matters that are subject to risks and uncertainties. A variety of factors could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those expressed in or contemplated by the forward-looking statements. Risk factors affecting the Company are discussed in detail in the Company’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except to the extent required by applicable laws.

Investor Relations Contact: 

Richard Land, Alliance Advisors Investor Relations

973-873-7686, rland@allianceadvisors.com

Public Relations Contact:

Mehab Qureshi, RTB Digital, Inc.

+91 90289 77198, press@roundtable.io