Sold My Startup for $780M: the Good, Bad, Ugly with Jack Smith, Vungle

👊🏻 5 THINGS YOU'LL LEARN:

- How Jack's curiosity from a tender age carried him through as an entrepreneur

- The value of an incubator - should you join one?

- What it takes to get to product-market fit, and then scale

- What it means to outgrow your startup, and what you can do

- The harsh reality of a startup's PR nightmare

⏳ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 - Intro

02:29 - Jack's early start in entrepreneurship

05:03 - Mediaroots evolution into Vungle

08:36 - Hacking screen record & how that led to San Francisco

10:49 - Should I join an incubator? Jack's learning from AngelPad

16:31 - The crappy engineer, launching to the next few stages

21:33 - What metrics mattered, that affirmed the Vungle vision?

24:42 - Jack's reflection on how the startup outgrew him

28:06 - Micromanaging to enabling others

30:50 - Handling a PR nightmare, and standing by his co-founder

32:40 - Jack's reflection on "making it" with the BIG exit

About Jack Smith

Episode #488 I Jack Smith - 33Voices

Jack Smith is a serial entrepreneur, investor and advisor. Originally from England, he founded his first startup at 13 years old, studied at King’s College London, where he founded an incubator named IdeaBox and moved to San Francisco several years later, in 2011, to attend one of the best accelerators in the world.

With his idea Vungle, the leading mobile in-app video advertising platform, Which later sold to Blackstone in 2019 for $ 780 million. Jack also co-founded Shyp, which reached a peak of $ 250m valuation and then went to $0.

He sits on the board of COVA Acquisition Corp, (next to Austin Russell, the youngest self-made billionaire to date) and The Hustle, Which was acquired by HubSpot, Both companies are listed on the NYSE. He is an advisor to various startups (Survios, UJET, Coin (acquired by Fitbit), Intricately, Onfleet, RCI (acquired by Addepar), Ameelio) and most recently has helped shape The Prison Mathematics Project, a non-profit which teaches maths to prisoners.