Russ Fradin says he moved to Silicon Valley in 1996 and was the first employee at the first online ad network.
“I moved out to Silicon Valley in 1996, and I was the first guy at the first online ad network”
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Russ Fradin
1 episodes · 16 quoted claims
Fradin says the internet advertising stack was built by firms including DoubleClick, Flycast (where he worked) and Omniture, alongside comScore.
“You had companies like DoubleClick or Flycast where I was, or companies like Omniture building a different part of the stack”
Fradin says Google initially resisted third-party measurement, then bought Urchin and built Google Analytics.
“Google, at some point, fought it and then actually bought Urchin and built Google Analytics, right?”
Fradin cites Gartner's figure of roughly $700 billion being spent on enterprise AI.
“we know this from Gartner, this, like, $700 billion being spent in enterprise AI”
In Larridin's survey of IT leaders, about 70% said they were sure they were wasting money on AI.
“something like 70% of leaders we talked to said, We are sure we are wasting money here.”
Fradin says most Larridin customers discover employees using many more AI tools than the company knew about or licensed.
“80-something percent of our customers find far more tools being used by their employees than they know about and they've licensed.”
Fradin recalls that JPMorgan Chase spends roughly $18-19 billion a year on IT and a couple hundred billion dollars on people.
“JP Morgan Chase's global IT spend is on the order of $18 billion or $19 billion, and they spend a couple $100 billion a year on people.”
Fradin says Larridin was about a year old at the time of the recording.
“this is a journey, right? The company's about a year old.”
Larridin trained a customized Llama model to block employee prompts that are illegal or that the company disallows.
“basically trained our own kind of customized Llama model to block people from asking questions that are illegal or the company doesn't want you to”
Fradin says comScore's surveys were strong because they combined behavioral data with survey responses, and he ran its survey market research group.
“one of the reasons the comScore surveys were great is we had the behavioral data married with the actual survey responses.”
Fradin says old interviews show Larry Page planning for Google to one day have a million employees.
“You can find old interviews of Larry Page talking about his plan for how Google was gonna have a million employees one day.”
Fradin says comScore's pitch worked once it offered specific answers, such as Visa's market share against Mastercard in Japan.
“we can tell you the market share for Visa versus Mastercard versus others in Japan. Turns out Visa really wants to know that.”
Fradin describes a company that incentivizes engineers with a leaderboard of each engineer's spending on Claude Code.
“they have a leaderboard of the amount of money each engineer spends on Claude Code.”
Fradin recalls that Ford had a major problem with Bridgestone tires, and comScore data showed whether searches for Ford got worse.
“Ford had some giant issue with Bridgestone tires setting on fire”
Fradin recounts a large European bank that held a global call in which a 28-year-old banker spent an hour teaching colleagues to use ChatGPT.
“And they did a global call for everyone in the investment bank for this guy to spend an hour walking people through how to use ChatGPT”
Fradin says some European companies read the EU AI regulations as barring AI from being used to write employee reviews, and he does not say whether the law is good.
“we're not allowed to use AI to write employee reviews”