In the Room with Zach Coelius
Welcome back to another episode of The Room Podcast’s Movers & Shakers series! Today we sit down with Zach Coelius, entrepreneur, founder, and current investor at Coelius Capital. Zach spent his early years in Minnesota before moving out to California after undergrad in hopes of striking gold.
One of the most unique first business experiences we’ve heard of, Zach got his start trading valuable pins at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Over the next 10 years his start-ups varied greatly in their product but consistently brought together him and his sister Susan as co-founders. In 2005 they started Triggit, an early ad-tech company that made a big bet on “real-time bidding”. To set the stage for you all, this is the year after Google’s IPOs and paid advertisements didn’t even allow dynamic personalization for each user. Zach dive’s into the lesson’s learned through this experience and what the ad tech landscape looks like through to now.
Zach made the transition to investing around 2017. One unique component about his strategy is to open the door to investing through his angel syndicates. Currently, there are over 4000 members in his angel investor community.
In today’s episode of The Room Podcast, we explore insights and themes such as having Olympic level entrepreneurship energy, the truth behind digital privacy, and a contrarian crypto perspective.
Let’s open the door.
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Key Theme 1: Having Olympic level entrepreneurship energy
Zach’s start in the business world is like no other. When he was 16, he got the chance to attend the 1996 Atlanta Olympics where he was introduced to the unique Olympic tradition of trading pins. He quickly realized that there was a huge market for these pins, and by the time the next Olympic games came around, Zach had expanded into the ticketing business as well. At the 2004 Athens Games, Zach and his sister Susan already had a 15-person team working the ticketing business. What can we all learn from this unique start? There are businesses to be built everywhere, but hustling is key.
Key Theme 2: The truth behind digital privacy
In 2005, Zach and Susan co-founded Triggit, an ad-tech market leader in dynamic retargeting with real-time bidding at the core of the business. Triggit was one of the key pieces of technology that changed e-commerce and how consumers interact online. However, with personalized ads that track behavior, there have been increasing concerns of privacy.
While he notes it may be on the cynical side, Zach says, “At the end of the day, when things are more relevant, they’re more useful to you, the consumer, and whether it’s a paid advertisement or whether it’s when you go to a website and you’re looking at.”
Having been in the room for a lot of the decisions made by big tech companies like Facebook, Zach says that companies go through certain realization stages regarding dynamic retargeting: first, hesitancy around targeted ads, second, approval of these ads when they realize the financial implications of being relevant, and lastly, the desire to increase privacy surrounding data in the face of ecosystem competition. In today’s Internet world, the ecosystem is largely owned by big battleships like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
“[They] control the stack and control the various platforms and control the data. And so if you want to navigate in that ecosystem, it’s very difficult. And building a really big business is challenging. It can be done, but it’s hard. So as an entrepreneur, I don’t know if I would go into the current dynamic because it’s hard, but maybe it’s like, where do you find real competitive differentiation? Where do you find real value? Where do you find real sustainability? If you find it, then you have to follow it where it leads.”
Key Theme 3: A contrarian crypto perspective
In 2021, Zach published a user manual where he stated “I don’t invest in crypto, hard sciences, bio, chips, chemistry or really any sector where my lack of a Bayesian base set of knowledge would be material.” While he admits crypto was potentially a missed investment in the short term, Zack still holds a skeptical view on the crypto landscape, arguing that he hasn’t seen active success cases that aren’t based on just financial speculation. Instead, Zach views government centralized digital currencies that adopt and copy the innovations of crypto but run to a centralized database as the future of money.
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Get excited for next week’s episode with another mover and shaker, airing April 19th Tuesday as 10AM EST or 7AM PST.
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