Hitesh Chawla, CEO of Silverpush: Everyone in #adtech Says They're AI Native. It's Not True."

In 2015, Silverpush embedded inaudible ultrasonic tones into television commercials so that mobile phones could listen for them and link your TV viewing to your device. In March 2016, the FTC sent warning letters to twelve app developers who had integrated the code. Hitesh Chawla's account of what happened inside the company is the most honest thing anyone has said on this show: "We did not take it seriously, we did not respond, so that's why they put it on the website and that became a bigger deal than it was." Then he did something almost nobody in ad tech does. He killed the product when he was under no legal obligation to, and bet the entire company on contextual targeting five years before the rest of the industry discovered the word. Today Silverpush scans roughly half a billion seconds of video a day across YouTube, connected TV, TikTok, Meta, and open programmatic, on about $20 million in lifetime funding and 150 people. He also spent a decade building YouTube contextual targeting without ever having a conversation with YouTube. In this episode: 00:00 The FTC letter nobody in the building opened 04:00 Why contextual, and why video was the hard problem 05:00 Where the growth came from, and why South America still doesn't work 06:50 What MIRRORS actually does when a brand hands you money 08:30 Trend Intelligence, and how "real-time" really means every 24 hours 10:30 Humility, IIT Delhi, and what Western buyers keep misreading 12:20 Dennis Pickle's three questions, including whether the whole business is just a platform gap 17:55 Agentic AI, and why the sales team is learning to code 20:30 The attention economy versus the distraction economy 21:50 Brand safety versus brand suitability, and the news problem 23:15 "We have not had a conversation with YouTube" 25:00 Why connected TV is harder than YouTube, and the subtitle workaround 28:00 Seeing five years ahead 30:00 Failing at a startup because he couldn't code, then learning to code 34:10 More talk than substance: why he says US ad tech is behind on tech The best engineering decision of his career and the worst one turn out to be the same event, viewed from opposite ends. He says both out loud, on the record, without being cornered into either. #Silverpush #AdTech #Programmatic #ContextualAdvertising #Privacy #ConnectedTV #CTV #BrandSafety #AdvertisingTechnology