David Steinberg’s Multi-Billion Dollar Mission for ZETA Global 🌎 E89

0:00The internet. These were all technologies that changed the world in an incredibly profound way. I believe artificial intelligence is going to be the next wave of that, where machines can help make decisions and do mundane tasks that today humans are required to do, but they can do them better, faster, and cheaper.

0:24Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a very, very, very special edition of the Money Mondays. Over the last 81 weeks, we've been the top 10 business podcast in the world, and we've never, ever, ever done the podcast outside of an RV motorhome. However, because of our guest today, I've decided I'm going to break the rules and come here to the Zeta Global Live event. There's over 1 ,000 chief marketing officers that are right outside this booth right now and 15 ,000 CMOs and brand executives watching live online. All because of this gentleman right here. Now, as you guys know, these podcasts are typically 40 minutes because the average workout is 45 minutes.

0:58The average commute to work is 45 minutes. This episode, we're going to keep short between 25 and 30 minutes for your listening pleasure because we've got to get this gentleman back out there on the stage. There's amazing speakers here. Simone Biles, Shaquille O 'Neal, Michael Milken, Deepak Chopra, the CEOs of Pepsi, Yahoo, Google. There's just so much going on, so much action right outside of this booth. So I'm going to go. I really want this to happen. A quick two-minute bio so, David, we can get straight to the money. Well, first of all, Dan, thanks. I'm obviously a big fan of your stuff and watch it.

1:28And we appreciate your being here to lead one of our panels. It's very exciting. Yes, we have over 1 ,400 people in person, over 15 ,000 online, although I think it's more to do with Shaq and Simone and Milken and Deepak than me. Fortunately, I was able to convince them to come. But, you know, for us at Zeta, this is all about thought leadership and, you know, where is the market going? And, you know, right now the market is all about artificial intelligence. And that, quite frankly, at Zeta, we're an artificial intelligence company. me. Personally, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I became an entrepreneur for the same reason many of us did.

2:04I came out of school in 1990 and I couldn't get a job. So when I came out of school, it was sort of the great recession of 1990. I thought I was going to be an investment banker. You know, Goldman and Morgan Stanley didn't agree. And I ended up founding a wireless company shortly thereafter because I thought wireless was going to sort of change the world. I have founded seven companies to date, taken to public, sold four, and I'm chairman of another one. Wow. So what is Zeta Global? So Zeta Global is a marketing automation platform that uses data and artificial intelligence to help very large enterprises create, maintain, and monetize customers at a substantially lower cost by using our software and our data than they could without it.

2:59So when you think, Dan, of the promise of artificial intelligence, right, you've got one side of the trade is cost savings for enterprises. The other side of the trade is revenue growth. Zeta's AI is purpose-built to do both. We're able to help large enterprises massively lower their costs to create and maintain customers while simultaneously for every dollar that is invested from a marketing perspective using the Zeta marketing platform, we return an average of five to seven dollars to our client. Wow. Yeah. It's been exciting. I think it's one of the reasons we're growing so rapidly right now.

3:37So back in the days, almost 20 years ago, April of 2005 is when I first went public. I was a kid. I was 23 years old. I did it for four years. And I always said, you know what? I'm never going to do that again. Mostly because of the paperwork, the headaches, the 10Qs and 8Ks and every letter you can imagine. Yeah, a lot of letters. A lot of letters. And a lot of CEOs and CFOs and auditors of auditors and auditors. You have a very large public company approaching almost a billion dollars in revenue. Talk us through why I decided to go public and what's the plan for Zeta Global? Well, I joke. I took my last company public in 2004, and I sort of joked I would never do that again.

4:12For Zeta, we went public for a whole host of reasons. I would say the most important of which was we had a challenge with people knowing our brand. Sort of the joke was Zeta who? Oh, my gosh. We would walk into RFPs, we would walk into processes, and nobody would know who we were. So we embarked on this sort of journey to go from Zeta who to why Zeta. Right. And as a part of why Zeta, we thought going from being a larger private company to a public company was a really important component of that maturation. The other big thing was Zeta Live. Right. And my long term goal is to get to must have Zeta.

4:54So instead of just saying, why do we need your product? I want us ultimately to be boardroom conversation around why is Zeta not in our tech stack? We need Zeta. And that's really what we're on the journey to. It's harder as a tech company to do that as a private company than it is as a public company. Even though, as you know, as a public company, there's a tremendous amount of reporting requirements, a lot of accountants, a lot of lawyers. but that also gives the credibility to the organization that you've been through that process and you've dealt with all that. So it's a bit of a double-edged sword.

5:35So with having so many clients, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, building this brand year after year, why spend months and months on this, a live event that takes months of headache and pulling your hair out to organize, to put on a show for literally Are they, what, 1 ,400 CMOs and executives? That's a lot of work. Yeah, it is. And you know because you do more shows than anybody, right? You're the best at this. I don't recommend it. No. I mean, listen, it continues to be this sort of evolution of the Zeta brand. And when you have multiple Fortune 500 CMOs presenting, when you have multiple CEOs presenting, When you have people like Shaquille O 'Neal and Michael Milken and Simone Biles and Deepak Chopra and others, Tiffany Haddish, who align their brands with yours, it really helps us along that journey of moving from why Zeta, I'm sorry, from Zeta Who to why Zeta.

6:34In fact, what we're seeing is our pipeline from a new customer's perspective is at an all-time high. And the RFPs we're getting asked to participate in are at all-time highs. I mean, blowing records. A lot of that is because of the brand evolution. This event, which is the premier technology event in New York City every year. Yeah, it's crazy this year. Is really a big part of that brand evolution. So, yes, it is a lot of work. I would go so far as to say it is a pain in the ass. But the truth of the matter is for us, the return on investment is exponential. We close one deal out of this. It can be 10 times what we spent on the entire event.

7:22And we often are closing many, many times that. Anything times one is one. You understood by the point. Totally. But after this, you go from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with 15 ,000 people watching it live online. You decided to rent out an entire freaking naval ship, the USS Intrepid, and bring the largest human on the planet, the largest personality, who to me is like a superhero, Shaquille O 'Neal. Yes. Talk us through why do you rent out a naval ship? Well, we rented out the Intrepid aircraft carrier because we thought it would be cool. It is cool. And honestly, but to get the type of people we want from a decision maker perspective, you need to be able to first and foremost provide experiences they wouldn't normally get, which by the way is hard because these people normally get whatever they want.

8:12And two, the group has to feel curated. They have to feel like they're in the right place with the right people at the right time. And that's how you create brand awareness and people start saying, wow, I want to work with these guys. And that's why you do this. It's why you rent an aircraft carrier. It's why you convince Shaq and Simone and Milken and Deepak to come. And it's just been, you know, it's been a journey. You know, we started this as this is only our fourth. Oh, really? And we're blowing out of this place. I know. We were already talking about we're going to have to double the size again for next year.

8:53And it's, you know, we had to turn away, unfortunately, large numbers of people who wanted to attend just because we didn't have the room. Okay. So let's take off the Zeta Global Hat for a second and put on David the Investor Hat. Okay. Talk us through investing, funds, private equity. Walk us through that side of your world. You know, listen, when I look, there's multiple ways of investing. I sort of joke last night, a very good friend of mine who's a super famous actress was asking me how she should invest her money. And I said, you should listen to Warren Buffett and buy as much of the S &P 500 ETF as you possibly can.

9:27And every time you make more money, buy more of it. And it's literally that simple. And I, by the way, could go through my family office's investments. We have 67 different fund managers, investment partners, you name it. And I would tell you the most consistent return we have is the S &P 500. I mean, we go into hedge funds that are like the biggest brands in the world. I mean, there's some that are incredible. We're happy to be in there. What I would say is if outside of that, always look at companies that are solving problems. And I think that's something that's missed by most investors. Most investors sort of look at this and say, oh, this guy's hot or that guy's hot.

10:11What problem do they solve? Airbnb, Amazon, Uber. Zeta. Zeta Global. So I have to say that. You can never fully take your hat off. But the truth of the matter is that if you look for companies that are innovative and really are solving a problem, they're going to be the winners in the end. So you have so much access to deal flow. You obviously have thousands of entrepreneurs around you, thousands of brands you work with. How do you decide which brand or product or service that you decide you're going to put your money into? It's a really good question. We sort of break my world into a number of different components.

10:46Obviously, Zeta Global being the most important, and I focus the most on that. I'm then chairman of an investment fund called Cavus Investment Corp., which today really focuses on doing early stage fund-to-funds. Got it. We don't really do a lot of direct stuff. Now, the beauty of that is if you get to the point where you can get into some of these very hot early stage funds, what happens is they get allocation into the next few rounds. Right. And they can't do it. They can't fulfill it. Because they're not big enough. Right. So then they do what's called setting up SPVs. And we try to get into as many funds as we can.

11:23Right. So we can look at as many SPVs as we can. You're like, hello, we got it. And by the way, we've done very, very well with that. And then our family office, which is called Excalibur, that's mostly dealing with public fund managers, whether it's hedge funds or it's managers of individual portfolios or it's very large positions in the S &P 500. Interestingly enough, I have very little to do with that. I spend most of my time focused on running Zeta, and a separate team makes most of those decisions for me. Got it. What about real estate? Do you like real estate? I love real estate, but you'd have to talk to my buddy, Tariq Al Moussa, standing right over there.

12:05He's book signing right now. He's book signing literally right over there. You know, what I would say is I don't know enough about real estate personally to invest into individual assets. What I do love are investing into funds that have an investment thesis around real estate. I'm seeing a pattern. Yeah. Yeah, right. And years ago, we started investing into management teams that owned large numbers of residential apartments and rented them out for very meaningful cash flow return. It's been great. We invest with Blackstone, which is a large investment vehicle. We're in all of their real estate funds.

12:48We're in their infrastructure funds. So I'm not the guy to talk about what piece of real estate you should buy and manage. but other than that and by the way, I'm a humongous fan of real estate as an asset class and as they say location, location, location so once you're in California we're going to do a long form episode I know you've got to go so I want to go to the last section I want to get you back in California I'm going to bring the motor home over to you remember, I'm only in California very rarely just for that two days that would be perfect for me Great. So the last section is on charity.

13:28Why do you think it's important for, let's say, the 1400 CMOs here? Why do you think it's important for their brands to have some sort of charity philanthropic for their brands? They're not all CMOs. There's a lot of CMOs, a lot of executives too. But to me, what I can tell you is, first of all, we have a thing called Zeta Cares, which is literally our entire charitable ecosystem at Zeta, where we don't just donate meaningful money. We donate large amounts of time. Nice. And we do multiple days a year where we go pack lunches or we help with food drives or we're fixing up parks or we're going to, you know, we do a lot with a number of they don't call.

14:09I'm trying to remember the new word for it. Like we used to call them soup kitchens. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Call them anymore. But but they should. That's a good name. Yeah. Well, that's what they call them. I'm old. So that's what we used to call. You do something with Michael Blackson, right? You did something with his orphanage. Yeah, so Michael Blackson has started a school in Africa that my foundation built the entire computer center, donated every component of it, because I believe if we don't help kids who are at a disadvantage with technology, they're going to raise the next generation to be disadvantaged as well.

14:45So at our foundation, which is the David and Kristen Steinberg Foundation, we're very, very focused on disadvantaged youth. Feeding, you know, there are tens of thousands of kids in this country who don't get breakfast. They have to pay for school lunch that they can't afford. We have a big program around feeding kids every day. Very, very focused on what the Milken Institute is doing around education and health care. And we've been very involved there. so I would say that our foundation takes up a meaningful part of my thought process and it's something I spend a lot of time with my three older children I have Isabel, Amelia and Carter, my three older kids and they really I'm trying to get them involved and they're very interested in the charitable component of my life so that actually leads me to the one question I ask on every single episode so 100 years from now with modern technology and science, hopefully you've got bionic arms and bionic legs.

15:46It's time. Hopefully we don't. Hopefully we have organic arms. Organic arms. Regrow, but keep going. At that time, it's finally time for David to pass away. He's 162 years old. Okay. What percentage, hopefully you amass billions of dollars over the years and you help billions of people with your charities, what percentage does that go to those children? Yeah, it's a good question. I don't honestly know. So what I would say is like many people in my position, I put 30 % of my total adjusted gross income on average into my foundation every year. That's the taxable, allowable amount, but it's meaningful.

16:23For sure. So I tend to do that. We have a sizable series of trusts that roll to the foundation. They roll over 10, 15, 20 years. and it's something that I'm very, very invested in. I can't say what percentage of whatever I amass I'm going to be giving to charity just because at this point I'm still too young to have thought about that. No one's ever answered the same, ever, not once. Yeah, I don't know. It's been fascinating. Shaquille O 'Neal, when you interview him, ask him. I'm not going to ask him that today. We have a bunch of questions we've already gone through. He loves saying, he's like, I'm rich.

17:04My kids aren't rich. He's like, I'm rich. You need three degrees to get money from me. He likes to. There's a lot of people who feel that way. Final question. What is the future? Why do you have AI so integrated into this event? Why is AI important? You know, if you think about the sort of advent of technology, you really can go back. I mean, I wouldn't go back quite to fire. But if you start with the Gutenberg printing press and you move up to the telegraph, the telephone, the computer, the Internet, that, these were all technologies that changed the world in an incredibly profound way. I believe artificial intelligence is going to be the next wave of that, where machines can help make decisions and do mundane tasks that today humans are required to do, but they can do them better, faster, and cheaper in a way that they can process and synthesize information into intelligence in a way that no system has ever been able to.

18:02So as that embeds itself into every single component of our lives, it's going to change the way we function as a species. And, you know, we firmly believe that it's the next wave of technology. I can feel it in the room. I can feel it the way you integrate into this event with all these brand executives. Thank you for being here. So everyone watching, check out David A. Steinberg across Instagram. Check out Zeta Global if you have a big brand or you work with someone. Maybe your dad, mom, uncle, grandfather has a big brand. Check out ZetaGlobal.com. work with their company they're a publicly traded company i appreciate you for being here i know you got to go start interviewing shaquille o 'neal and all these fun guests but i appreciate it and we'll see you soon dan i love your show and i think you're the best thank you