Not making his taking stock debut, but coming back onto the broadcast.
David Steinberg, co-founder, chairman, CEO of Zeta Global, and here to ring the closing bell today.
Nice to see you again.
By the way, I'm shocked you had me back after last time, so this is great.
The interview went so well, backed by popular demand.
First of all, how about the experience doing the bell?
Have you done the bell before?
I have done the bell before, but it Still one of the most exciting things you can do in business.
It's really cool and it's awesome to have you back today.
First, I've got to ask about growth.
We got the ticker symbol up here behind us, 3% today, up 8% on the year.
The stock is now up 50% off of the year to date lows.
We're seeing a lot of growth.
What is driving that growth for the?
Well, first of all, in the first quarter, The business grew 50% top line, grew 30% organically.
Profits, free cash flows both grew at exponential paces.
And what's happening, what's happening is our pivot in 2017 to make AI and data foundational to our application layer is working, and clients are buying more.
And you know we continue to win in the marketplace.
I want to ask about this big pivot for the company here, the push AI infrastructure for enterprises.
What does it mean to actually be the intelligence layer for companies and in what way is that maybe a bit different than your previous priorities?
So great question.
When you think about it, our business has grown up really.
As a business intelligence platform, we have 535 million active people opted into our data cloud, 5000 to 7000 data elements per person, trillions of signals coming out of digital, and we use them to create the highest return on marketing spend possible today.
We generate greater than 600% return on marketing spend.
In the last year we've signed agreements with OpenAI, Palantir to rearchitect our entire platform on top of Foundry and then rolled out with a number of other partners including Snowflake.
What that's done is it's allowing us to add 1/4 use case.
So you have customer acquisition, customer retention, customer monetization.
Now you have real-time business intelligence.
Intelligence.
How do we help enterprises better select their next location for their retail store?
What should they be manufacturing or ceasing to manufacture?
How do inventory levels look at different locations across the world?
Our platform using our real-time signals can now inform in forward view.
In the past, all business intelligence has been in the rearview mirror.
Let me get your take on a few of these can't miss partnerships.
You're moving your platform onto Palantir's Foundry software.
What do you expect or hope that will most allow customers to better do?
So first of all, it's going to allow us to expand out of just marketing and into true business intelligence and business decisioning because they have built the world's greatest ecology and data layer.
So by layering on.
Top of that, our clients will be able to seamlessly move data in and out.
So what is it going to do?
It's going to make us substantially faster, substantially smarter, and by the way, a 7 year joint go to market with Palantir where we're going to sell their clients as will be their marketing partner and then we're going to sell to our clients a better platform because it's.
Going to be foundational on Foundry.
We think the Palantir Agreement is by far the largest thing we've ever done, and we think right now the market doesn't understand how valuable that's going to be.
David, the last time we had you on the show, you and I were talking a lot about your AI assistant Athena, which itself is looking a bit different now using open AI's voice technology.
What did that, what does that mean and how did that even come together?
So when you think about the way humans interact for thousands of years, it's been like this, we speak.
And then in the 1950s we created this thing called the keyboard, which really is a barrier to really creating the outcomes you want.
Athena is a voice enabled super agent that you just tell it the outcomes you want.
So I'd like to create 2 million incremental customers this quarter while simultaneously lowering my cost to create a customer by 7%.
Athena can then navigate the entire platform to get you to those outputs with Athena, which is powered by OpenAI, one of their first enterprise partnerships, and now built on top of Foundry.
She's going to become the true operating.
System for our clients' entire businesses going forward.
David, I always say it's a great interview when I'm upset that I'm out of time because I have so many more questions I want to ask him.
Do you have to come back for a third time at some point.
If you want me, I will come.
David Steinberg, co-founder, chairman, CEO of Zeta Global, congratulations.
Thanks a lot for being here.
Thanks, nice to see you.
Thank you.
