Matt Prohaska 6:05
Yeah, well, I had a lot of that experience a year earlier at bbdo is as you nicely mentioned, they’re an Omnicom agency and famous for Pepsi and visa and FedEx and, and Pizza Hut and HBO and and you know, some small brands that we had the privilege of I used to buy TV and radio for them. And I was lucky enough to have two people Arnie some skin, Steve Grubbs, who ran worldwide media and then ran the TV buying group, let me along with the partner and the research department create the digital media practice there. And what that meant it sounded glorious, but at the time, that was me as a 23 year old running a bunch of people. These are points of view, begging our account teams for money to be able to spend $25,000 to experiment and these things called banner ads. Because I would write things like you know, there’s a chance that people may actually buy stuff on this internet thing. And people would be people would be verbally through Megan’s the wall, like you’re insane. There’s no way I’m going to put a credit card in this computer, and then someone’s going to steal it. And why would I ever do that? I said, Well, I know. But if security gets good enough, and trust gets good enough. I mean, we have clients like FedEx and visa. And so I don’t know, like, people might be shipping stuff, and you can be ordering stuff to your home. And
John Corcoran 7:23
by the way, this is pre Amazon, even when Amazon started in 94, you started September 93, with bbdo.
Matt Prohaska 7:31
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, there were several of us that created our first we were the first marketing company or ad agency to have a presence on any online forum. We had our own area on compuserve to show you how old I am and how old this was. I mean, we would do text base chats live with heads of research. And you know, we get 14 people showing up talking about, Hey, you know, how do you even track this digital media thing and, you know, are you going to actually get The number of ads or is this going to be is Nielsen going to be in this I mean you know kind of early kind of crazy fun times but where again a lot of us were we’re learning as we went there was no school for this but taking fundamentals of media planning and and buying and just kind of marketing one on one and trying to place it in this new canvas that actually had this unique aspect of getting some feedback and being able to you know, marketing talk here you know, work the sale the whole sales funnel you know, you could actually go find new customers and then and talk to people differently and for the first time about your product and that you could actually get people to fill out a form or maybe buy something eventually or you know, see a video at some point when we got beyond you know, 14 dot four baud rates when you know, it took three years of age. JOHN, you remember when you were a fetus probably right. I
John Corcoran 8:47
do. I remember I remember back you know, I remember in the in the mid 90s, having dial up modems and before broadband became available and I got how painful it was and then if someone calls your house with You’re on the internet knocked off of the tongue.
Matt Prohaska 9:02
Oh, yeah, I mean, our office, we used to joke we used to get contracts, where we had to unplug our fax machine to be able to get online so that we could get our orders in. And yeah, I mean, it was crazy hackie manual times that, you know, old people laugh about now
John Corcoran 9:15
we mentioned so at CNET before we were recording, you said there was a young buck by the name of Ryan Seacrest who you worked with early on?
Matt Prohaska 9:23
Yeah, there was this good looking 24 year old I was 24. He was 2425 or whatever. I’d like to say it was a year older than I am just to say that he’s constantly older than I am. But he was still 28 still. But yeah, we, like I said we had we were the first to have several shows on USA Network and sci fi channel where we would talk about new technology and then say For more information, go to this, you know, website called cnet.com or eventually 10 other sites that we launched within our first two years there. And one of the hosts that I got to meet and work with a little bit was this la radio DJ named Ryan Seacrest, and I’m not sure what he’s doing these days. I hear he’s still a little bit busy.
John Corcoran 9:59
Amazingly, he is Still doing la radio every time I go to LA I hear Oh, God, the guy works hard.
Matt Prohaska 10:05
Yeah, you know, he stays to his roots, I guess, you know, stays grounded that way.
John Corcoran 10:10
Or another way of looking at it is he hasn’t gone very far in 25 years still
Matt Prohaska 10:15
hasn’t gotten out of LA. Yeah, I think the guy could travel a little bit or that his brand or his personality can maybe do other things. But when la radio exactly I haven’t, we haven’t seen much of him the last few decades. Right.
John Corcoran 10:25
So the next stop after CNET is talking about venerable brands that have been around for a long time. Sesame Street. We all know Sesame Street, but you really helped them with that transition to online. What was it like when you join them? You joined September of 97. And what was it like when you joined and what was that transition like?
Matt Prohaska 10:47
I had just turned 26 and I was in charge of being on the launch team responsible for all revenue for advertising. And again, Sesame Street or Sesame Workshop, the parent company that everybody knows probably from from the early days. Are some of us who still love watching the shows and checking out the the digital properties with our kids or without? Yeah, you know, everybody knew them through the TV show and through PBS, which of course doesn’t take full blown commercials. So when I was brought in to build out the ad, sales practice and department, a lot of folks internally we’re saying, Wait, why are we having advertising? You know, I thought we didn’t do that. Well, we didn’t do that. Because those are PBS rules and that our distribution was prohibiting us from doing that. But you know, we sell the time limited. That’s right. And at least joke we used to have joke all the time. Just because we’re not for profit doesn’t mean we’re not for revenue. Like you know, Elmo plush dolls are not going, you know, tickle me Elmo is not going to carry the company for the next 50 years. I’m actually lucky enough to be going to the 50th anniversary for the alumni and alumni in three weeks. So it’s a bet between CNET Sesame Street in new york times I’ve been blessed to work at, you know, some of the best brands ever in the world not just in publishing, but for Really the people that work there that have core mission and understand that there’s something above and beyond p&l? That’s sort of the point here,
John Corcoran 12:09
right. And now I know you haven’t been at Sesame Workshop for many years. But did that become a profitable source for them that the the revenue that came from online properties since they weren’t limited by the broadcasting rules?
Matt Prohaska 12:22
Yeah, it changed the dynamic of the whole organization because it helped them realize that they didn’t have to be reliant on one distribution source of television. At the time, there were a couple other startups for the history buffs a company called mama media that raised $50 million that wanted to be Nickelodeon. They were kind of the private sector, you know, well funded late 90s crazy insane valuations, you know, run with, you know, tech startup, you know, metrics and mentality and rhythm. And, you know, we were trying to bring some folks along to say, look at instead of just producing the award winning shows that we do every single year now we’re actually looking to produce content. on a regular basis, because we’d like parents and their small kids to be coming back over and over again. And then we were developing older kids, sites, and we helped actually broaden the demo of, you know, again, you think of Sesame Street, you think of two to five year olds, typically right with the core show. But you know, the entire operation has been doing things in six to 12 kids and an older for a number of years now. So, you know, it’s really changed the dynamic of how we produced editorial, what that rhythm of content production look like, and being able to bring folks back and again leveraging television, you know, where other digital only properties really couldn’t?
John Corcoran 13:37
Yeah, you have such a fascinating background in I think we’re only gonna have time to touch on all of them. I want to ask you about this working for listen calm, which is our first legal mp3 service, which is just amazing. But before that, you’ve got this little stop right around the.com bust air here, working for something called wait for it. Internet appliance network. Now I don’t technically know what it does, but I’m going to go home. And I’m gonna guess it was selling appliances online and it was just you your description on LinkedIn is just 11 years too early.
Matt Prohaska 14:12
Yeah was. So we had this wacky concept in 1999 that we thought people would be accessing the inner webs on devices other than a desktop computer at their desk at work, and at their revolutionary home. revolute. Yeah, we built the first iPad, it wasn’t called an iPad. We built it with American Express. It was a pad digitally that was touchscreen that had a slide card where you could swap your Amex card,
John Corcoran 14:39
and we ran 2000 That’s insane.
Matt Prohaska 14:42
99 2000 Yeah, Dan Stoller had a product and a great, great team, great vision, funded out of flat iron ventures, which is a couple of very, very smart folks at Fred Wilson and Jerry colonna. Fred Wilson is one of the top New York based or global VCs in our industry. Funding And a few other pretty good wins over the last 25 years. But yeah, no, it was it was great. But it was the classic story. And in March 2000, where we were on the rise and had an idea that was working very well, we were also the first company to be serving ads based on where you went online. So the concept was, we gave you a device looked like a skinny laptop, it was distributed to virgin megastores, if you remember those things called actual music stores, where you could buy these things called CDs. But virgin, you know, had a big presence in New York, LA and a lot of other major cities. We gave out 10,000 of these for free and, and all it did was email and browse the web, and we would serve ads embedded in the browser based on the URLs that you went to online. It works really, really well. Amazon’s kind
John Corcoran 15:43
of doing the same thing with their with their tablets these days, or they have some ad supported tablets.
Matt Prohaska 15:48
Yeah. And and I got to, you know, see that model work. We just couldn’t scale quickly enough when the world changed in March of 2000. And suddenly, every investor said you need to be profitable now versus three years. From that, right, and we were we’re more than a decade too early, obviously on both behavioral targeting in serving ads based on where you go. And then also on again, monetizing devices or hardware. You know, I got to be at a startup for a few years that did very, very well hundred and 50 million in revenue a year, early behavioral targeting and the adware space called claria. That would serve ads based on where you went in exchange for giving you free software. That concept was very controversial 15 years ago, and now it’s called apps. You know, ad supported apps where you get service in exchange for monetizing through advertising. So yeah, I was lucky enough to have have a wife and family that let me take risks and create a really long LinkedIn profile, where I got to take chances and have some stops and not everything worked out at the right time or with the right people or whatever. But every single time amazing learning experience. I didn’t
John Corcoran 16:56
know I didn’t want to ask you about that and I asked this a lot of different Guests in this show, but what did going through the.com meltdown? What lessons you take from that experience that you’ve applied to your experience as a founder, as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, and today,
Matt Prohaska 17:14
it renewed my faith and fundamentals about working with honest people and having real financial modeling and real businesses with real metrics. I mean, there were companies like the globe, com Go check out on Wikipedia or other insane companies that would not talk about revenue, they would talk about traffic and well, you know, I mean, by.com was one of those companies that almost sounds like we work today, where we’re scaling with growth. We’re losing money every single time we add a customer, but none of that we’re going to get it through volume. Well, no, no, you’re actually gonna just lose money worse. So, I mean, you know, back in the late 90s, it gave me renewed faith after that bubble burst that, you know, fundamental real businesses that provided a real service for real estate Change of money and or attention was better than Phantom metrics and creating a, you know, a snowball. I mean, again, we work and several other companies, Uber indirectly, are smelling very much like the late 90s, to a lot of us geezers that went through that cycle before. And what’s neat is that the learning curve has gotten a lot faster and kind of sniffing that out. And again, you know, you know, with social media and just other, you know, economics being better known and companies leaning more towards transparency or being forced to fortunately, you know, it allows everyone to kind of see what’s Bs and what’s real fast. Right,
John Corcoran 18:38
right. Yeah, I mean, whereas like, probably 12 years ago, uh, we work would have made it past the IPO much further right. No time around, you know, stopped in its tracks, I guess you could say.
Matt Prohaska 18:48
Yeah, I mean, Scott Galloway wasn’t being the great Bulldog, independent voice calling BS in a lot of places like he is now and you know, a lot of other analysts I mean, there were there were massive Conflicts of interest in late 90s as well, I mean, if you look at Henry Blodgett career and what he was doing the late 90s, versus what he’s been doing now building Business Insider successfully, I mean, there were there were there were a lot of folks doing things that weren’t exactly sniffed out properly on all sides. And so yeah, it takes a little bit of time for any market, especially developed ones like the United States, and especially in a new area of high tech in the gogo, late 90s. To catch up and realize, you know, that there was some real value created, and then there was a lot of garbage.
John Corcoran 19:31
Right, right. We touched on it briefly, but I do want to close the loop. So listen, com The first legal mp3 service. This is back in 2000 2001. I forget exactly where Napster was at that particular stage. But obviously that was a that was kind of the big behemoth that was framing a lot of discussion around legal mp3 services. The iPod I think was not unveiled quite yet until later, right. Yeah. So tell me a little bit what that experience was like.
Matt Prohaska 20:02
This was in the middle of Napster, his rise of everyone, me included, you know, kind of saying, Hey, are you tired of paying $17 for CDs and wanting one or two tracks at Sam?
John Corcoran 20:13
Or Tower Records? Yeah.
Matt Prohaska 20:14
And so you know, there’s an understandable and again, something we’ve seen with movies, something we’ve seen now with TV shows something we’ve seen where, you know, there’s a culture of free content, and hey, I deserve to have this for free. Well, that started in music. And it started because of understandable blowback and the economics of the music industry and where it was a little sideways. But you know, Napster created the first disruptive tech that was, you know, technically illegal by its standards was found to be and listen came around at the time, I Rob Reid, and a lot of other good smart folks in San Fran in New York, started off working with the labels and saying, Hey, why don’t we legitimize this and get everyone’s permission, split the revenue all around, and, you know, we’re going to have this mechanism of the internet to be able to do that. And so I was, you know, cutting deals. Lycos or excite if you remember some of those early search engine and, and portals at the day, and we were powering their music service. And then, you know, at the time, you know, apples iPod had just kind of started getting going to be obviously a massive mechanism for that. And then the company realized that, you know, they wanted to go the subscription route, more than the advertising route, they sold the real networks, there’s a service called Rhapsody now that still exists that, you know, is is sort of a mid tier iTunes, if you will. And you know, it’s been part of the real networks Empire, and then, you know, the explosion of, of mp3 being distributed. You know, it’s symbolic of where, you know, a lot of a lot of services and we’ve seen over the last 20 years come from until, you know, you can get it mass produced and legitimize and the consumer experience is easy enough to be able to understand, okay, I push this button, I search for this song, I then push another button to buy it. It automatically gets out of my credit card and it’s sitting on my device, and I can play that music and that all happens in 30 seconds. That is complete game changer compared to where we were listening to digital music, you know, you know, from a from a total, you know, back back office, you know, blackmarket way or legitimately, you know, about 22 years.
John Corcoran 22:13
Right, right. Still, though, I mean, this seems to be a theme in your career, a tough challenge, right? Like a not easy explanation at that point in time, people were a lot of people were thinking that there was no way to control music and keep it legal. So you had to convince people that there were enough mechanisms in place that people would download, they would choose to pay for music, and that they would choose not to put it on some server wherever else could access it, and they could get a bunch of free and in return.
Matt Prohaska 22:42
Yeah, and the the ad model and this is symbolic of what’s happening in the Ott space now over the top TV or, or you know, any other streaming services that the economics of where advertising is leveraged to be able to help monetize and either discount or make services free. You know, a lot of things we were doing at Listen now in terms of rotation and targeting based on the genre of the music, or eventually the actual person listening itself, you know, we see in Spotify, Pandora and other places today. So, yeah, it’s been neat to be able to kind of see some disruptive things early on, take some of the early bullets in the industry and kind of get good learnings when it wasn’t me, or my own money, except for one exception, trying to create things. Insane them never do that again. But you know, and maybe this is what is, frankly, with our consulting practice now,
John Corcoran 23:30
and I want to get to that, but this may be might be what you were alluding to what was gift gang?
Matt Prohaska 23:36
Yeah. gang was basically, it was Amazon’s wish list meets Facebook before both of them existed. So the concept was, you know, I was tired of, you know, not to be selfish about it. But I think we’re all tired sometimes of getting gifts that we don’t need or want because of what other people either guests or think we want And it’s hard getting gifts for family members or friends, even if if you know them really well in terms of things they want. So the concept was creating a shared list where you could casually you know, change a little bit of behavior and you know, not be selfishly a jerk about it and say, give me this or I hate you. But to be able to it was a browser extension in 2004, that would go and follow you around. And you can kind of add things to your gift list. As you went through. And you’re shopping, you’re just searching for different things like you know what, that’s $82 that isn’t something I’m going to buy now. But yeah, that’d be great to get for my birthday in seven months. And then you forget about it, but six other people who are important to you go and see that and they either see that item or they see that type of item. And so obviously, there’s monetization and advertising model and e commerce play as people are then looking to buy gifts for folks. So the whole idea was to just give and get the gifts that more people want and create happier experiences for birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, when heavy was that an idea that was also a little too before fourth time I see you did sell,
John Corcoran 25:01
you sold the company. Ah,
Matt Prohaska 25:03
yeah, I was I was Aqua hired by a company that was one of the first three ad exchanges when the CEO told me that the strategy was to have the data that was created off of this service be part of this other attention vault service, which is actually still a major issue now in terms of consumer data and how much control we have over it. The CEO of this other company that I had known before had sold me on that idea. I was wanting to just take care of the friends and family and the little angel round that I had invested in So yeah, I sold that company to this company called rude markets and oh five. Unfortunately, the gift game concept was mothballed. And we saw Amazon and Facebook and others rise in terms of socially commerce do pretty well, where this was kind of a nice early test back in the day, because the CEO and board had been in the mortgage business actually the Chairman of the Board of this company, that acquired gift gang was the creator literally the guy who created the board. Back security. So if you remember anything in the financial crisis, you remember all these crazy mortgage deals that were done. This guy invented that at Salomon Brothers in the 70s. And was heralded up until about 2009. And it was suddenly, oh, that’s the guy that created this whole mess. And obviously, he wasn’t personally responsible. There was a whole industry around it. But yeah, the company pivoted did a classic, you know, 2000 2005 move and moved into an area in the mortgage area that became a total disaster. And so unfortunately, gift gang got thrown on the scrap heap as what might have been.
John Corcoran 26:36
Right, right. All right. So tell us about going to join the New York Times. How did that come about? What was that experience like?
Matt Prohaska 26:42
So I had been consulting I was in between jobs like a million other people in our industry do the reason our company’s called braska Consulting isn’t that I have that massive ego. It’s just because it was me originally, like, all of us do. You know we start the LLC, we get the 1099 we put up a shingle and hey, I’m going to help people while I’m looking for a new job. Back in 2011, we had done about 2000 clients over a couple years. It was it wasn’t like this, but it was it was nice and it was okay. There was an opportunity at the New York Times to help build out their programmatic practice, thought they were going to be a client of ours. Turns out they were looking for someone to actually build and start the practice full time. Fortunately, I had hired only four or five freelancers with our Pratt, our first version of presque consulting, and they had just finished their projects when methylated buddy off so we just put the LLC on the shelf and had the opportunity to join a guy named Todd Haskell who I’ll be indebted to forever and he’ll be part of a thank you speech I give. He let me have the chance and hired me there. He’s now part of Hearst doing very well there but yeah, he let me execute this crazy strategy that programmatic buying and selling or basically using audience data and some technology to be able to speed up the accuracy and transaction of buying and selling of media should be part of what all buyers and sellers do. Everyone else kind of had it departmentalized and had as a separate group, and we thought this was something that ultimately is just gonna be part of what a seller and buyer do going forward. He was the first to let us do that we were the first to train sales people around the world. And so that was a fantastic run for eight of the 10 months that I was there until Todd ended up moving on to another opportunity and someone else came in and kind of wanted to take over the fastest growing division that the company had at that time, and run it herself. So we had the opportunity to, frankly, take all the lessons learned and all the great, you know, case study, frankly, within the New York Times that one of my favorite brands ever that I’ll always be very proud that I had a stint there and, you know, reopened our doors and we’ve helped about 350 clients now around the world since
John Corcoran 28:46
I want to ask about that. But first, you know, early in my career 20 years old, I joined the Clinton White House and you know, people Yeah, absolutely. People have different experiences, different obviously, political backgrounds, but one of the things Parents is one of the one of the great things about that, as I worked with top people, people I worked with were amazing. Was that the experience for you at near times?
Matt Prohaska 29:08
Yeah, I mean, to be in the lunch line with Nicholas Kristof or to, you know, again, have the, you know, the family has owned it and run it forever in meetings with you to have the editorial team a couple floors down. And, you know, certainly one thing as a former journalist and graduate of the Syracuse and the Newhouse School and the business school, you know, proud of the separation of editorial and commercial that the times and others have had around the world and understanding that, you know, respected real journalism, obviously, now more than ever, has incredible value. And so to be able to kind of set up a little bit of the financial framework so that you know, the growth that they’ve experienced now in the last three years, probably not by coincidence, based on who might be in the White House today.
John Corcoran 29:56
You know, it’s been good for business for the New York Times.
Matt Prohaska 30:00
It has, you know, I think, you know, they’d be short citing, you know, the situation and maybe, you know, not not fair to their investors or anyone else that they didn’t recognize, of course, a Trump bump in the last few years to folks wanting to make sure that the Real News is still is still carried out. So yeah, to be to be in that building, and to be able to probably put that on my LinkedIn forever or to say that I help in a in a pretty small way in the grand scheme of their, you know, hundred 50 year history. But to help a little bit with setting them up to succeed going forward with subscriptions, that advertising is, is some will, will take to the grave.
John Corcoran 30:35
No. I mean, I read the New York Times every day, it’s something you should be proud of certainly being part of that organization. That’s a pro houska. So your consulting shop, you said to us it started very small with a couple of freelancers. Now, at least according the LinkedIn, it seems like you have 50 or so people working for you. So what is it and this is just since really the last five years since it was after you left the New York Times. What Has What do you attribute all that growth?
Matt Prohaska 31:03
Yeah. Fortunately, it’s been three things staying independent and agnostic. So we get to help everyone in the entire marketing and media ecosystem, because we have different divisions that unlike other firms, we don’t get paid on both sides of the transaction that have conflicts all over the place. So they respect the fact that we’re independent and actually give Straight Dope on what company should do. We have both strategy services and execution services. So we’ll put hands on keyboard if we need. And then we can actually again, just help people move. They’re helping with their tech helping with their targets or their audience data, or their talent, you know, the teams that work on things. So you know, it’s the variety of services and then it’s our model of being able to kind of plug and play different people around the world. You know, we only have 11 full time people right now will be 15 by the end of the year, but still relatively small, full time based but we had more than 75 part time people get paid something in third quarter and we have system people across all our different verticals and globally, where we can kind of plug and play a little differently. So we don’t have to be like more bloated firms that need to charge three to 10 X, what they should be charging only because they have people kind of sitting around, not working out as many clients so we can be a little more dynamic in real time sort of symbolic of the whole industry of, you know, real time marketing and advertising today,
John Corcoran 32:23
what has been the hardest part? You know, you have a lot of different stints and director sales and impressive, different stops along the way. But what’s been the hardest part of being a founder and CEO of your own company?
Matt Prohaska 32:39
hardest part well, logistically, it’s been doing it with my own money, but you know, so we haven’t raised any money but it’s not like I’m one of the 13 Instagram guys that Zach bought sitting on 80 million apiece on average. So you know, we’ve just been steady Eddie, growing as we go so hard part has been not being on offense as much as other companies. You know, raise 20 million, go hire a bunch of people go into debt, and then have to try to overcharge the climb out of it. That said, we do get to move very quickly because we have no Board of Directors, and it’s just us. So I basically report to the team, you know, and they help guide, what we do, we get to, again, make decisions pretty quickly and pivot or take advantage of new opportunities wherever we want. The so scaling has been has been the hardest part, I would say. But you know, also, managing a culture of mostly part time and freelance people is very different, you know, there’s a different dynamic, when you are all in full time and going to work, you know, for the man or the woman, you know, and kind of that’s your that’s your job. We’ve sort of helped evolve this gig economy that has obviously taken part and scale globally in the transportation space and, and and other services with TaskRabbit or what have you, and kind of brought that into a higher end but you know, being able to create some more automation to know who was available when and where and what time and what they can do and be able to plug and play and kind of bring together. You know what we, without ego jokingly called the superfriends. If you remember that cartoon from the 70s, where it was the first time you remember that john mayer barely old enough. So it was the first time that Batman and Superman were in the same cartoon and they meet at the Hall of Justice. And you know that, you know, there’s there’s trouble at the old mill and then all right, suddenly, you know, Aqua man and Batman are going together to serve. So we kind of, you know, in real time bring together you know, holy cow, there’s a guy from four years of Zack says this large, original kind of one Dotto programmatic buying service, that’s now part of a large agency group. You know, holy cow, we’ve got that person we can combine them with this person over here who’s been in the travel space and this person who’s in you know, London and Okay, great, and get the consistency from our global team leads. So the methodology and the standards and the Intel is all still there. So to be able to, you know, get that in rhythm to move quickly was was We’re here. We’re still not there yet, but getting better.
John Corcoran 35:02
Yeah, well, great. I wish you the best of luck. I want to wrap things up with the question that I always ask. We’re gonna pretend we’re at an awards banquet, much like the Oscars or the Emmys. And you Matt are receiving an award for lifetime achievement for everything that you’ve done all up until this point. You’ve mentioned a number of names so far but who are the people that you acknowledge and your remarks?
Matt Prohaska 35:21
How much time am I allowed to have for the band plays me off?
John Corcoran 35:24
Exactly right. You never know. You never know or secret. I come out here and tell you this stop.
Matt Prohaska 35:31
Y’all thank him just to get more attention in the press later and you know, get the longtail the PR now. You start with family because they they help you build your character and determine really who you are and, and they know you best. So I’m going to start with mom and dad and sister and my wife and daughter and aunts and uncles and grandparents. And then you know my first mentor Dan lunger and Turner Broadcasting when I was 20 years old, recognize that, you know, I was kind of an early disrupter. I was trying to you know, change that You know us from doing inventory management on accounting green sheets with pencil and this concept of Lotus 123. I thought we could automate some things. So from there in the last 25 years, we’ve tried to disrupt so all the people along the way, Todd Haskell at the New York Times, and, and Jeff Haley and Tina Sharkey, and Sesame Street and all the folks that gave a young kid a shot and the 350 clients and teammates around the world as part of press consulting, that have allowed us frankly, to just help and trusted us with their business and really with their careers, not just with their money and with their audiences. So we’d thank all excellent
John Corcoran 36:35
pro houska Consulting, PR o h a s k, a consulting com, is the website where else can people go to learn more about you that?
Matt Prohaska 36:45
Yeah, LinkedIn is always a good place. You’d have to scroll a while to see all the great history that john pulled out here but you know, open invite would love to connect with you there. Obviously, you know, any ways we can help your firm or help you with finding a new job, we’ve got a recruiting practice, and you know, we only Just trying to start with how can we help you and then you know, business tends to build from there. But even if it isn’t for anything monetary, you know, any way we can provide any assistance to help with marketing or media would love to. That’s great. I love that I love talking to people who have had their finger on the pulse of the changes that have happened so dramatically over the years. And so this has been a pleasure talking to you, Matt. Thanks so much, john. Thank you.