Nathan Thomas

Congrats to LiveRamp and the team for the sale to Publicis. This deal was a steal for Publicis (more on that below). LiveRamp was a shining gem and still is such an important part of the ad tech and marketing tech industry. It has so many amazing people and has a really incredible product, which has not changed that much over the last 10 years or so. It has bittersweet seeing a company that one created and was a part of for almost a decade go into decline. But despite that, the company is still in really good position. Unfortunately they were not able to take advantage of their position. For the last decade they traded long-term positioning for short-term gain. That trade resulted in the ire of their customers and even more so their partners. Now that they will be in a new home in Publicis, I hope that we will see a renaissance of LiveRamp and LiveRamp will continue to be an incredible part of the industry going forward. The company has a lot it needs to do: It needs to focus on the core product. The core product is 70% of their revenues and 500% of their profits. They need to focus on making that product better. The core product really hasn't changed in about a decade. They have to focus on making the middleware product better: making it easier to use, making it so you can onboard partners faster, onboard customers faster, onboard connections. the most important LiveRamp metric The number of connections per customer is the most important metric for LiveRamp. That number is surprisingly low. Most customers only have a small number of connections using the LiveRamp system, not because they don't want to use LiveRamp but because either LiveRamp is way too expensive or takes too long or it's too bureaucratic or too burdensome (or usually all of the above). Now that there is going to be new ownership of LiveRamp, hopefully they can focus more on the product and customers can go from, let's say, 10 connections in LiveRamp to 400 connections, 500 connections, even 1,000 connections. That's how we know LiveRamp is really doing a good job. Also the next way we know LiveRamp is doing a good job is if they can increase the number of customers. Today most of the customers that use LiveRamp are quite large ... which is great. They have still the largest B2C customers in the world. It would be amazing if everybody can use LiveRamp: mid-market companies ... even small companies (would be awesome to have a self-service system). all that said, I'm long the core engineering team and product team of LiveRamp and LiveRamp's position in the market. This deal was a steal for Publicis. It was a great deal for Publicis, assuming they can even make LiveRamp a tiny bit better. this definitely could be a deal that transforms Publicis. There's no reason why LiveRamp can't be a $100 billion market cap company by itself. It should be. It should have that position. It should be well over $100 billion and with the right product vision. it can get there. Let's make LiveRamp great again!

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