Eric Franchi

Huge congrats to @aperiamventures portfolio company @tv_scientific on its acquisition by @Pinterest. Thrilled for @jasonff and team. We first invested in 2020 when tvScientific was basically an idea, and a very non-consensus one. Everyone believed CTV’s future was brands, not performance. Jason saw it differently and willed that vision into existence. The team built an exceptional business and helped create one of the hottest categories in adtech. More reflections to come. What a way to close out 2025.

Fun conversation with @tonytonymarlow of @GeniusSports covering live video ad formats and lots of other stuff.

@aripap can you edit my post

@ericfranchi Vibe: $22

Straight line from speaking at Marketecture Live to massive success, LOL. BranchLabs raises $26 million (!) series A to activate pharma data. Question for the group -- is this the largest ad tech A round in history? branchlab.com/insights/branc…

@aripap I appreciate you giving me time to do this ahead of the pod

@aripap Top of range! Firsthand $26m, Rembrand $22m, Scope3 $20m, tvScientific $20m

@AdtechGod Built AI-first from day 1. Not retrofitted onto a legacy stack. We are investing in the former quite a bit at Aperiam and this is my lens.

WTF does AI native mean !

@EricTilbury_RTB @BradAT YOU BROKE THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB ERIC

@BradAT drink after, haha! @ericfranchi would be a much better teacher than me and actually teaches. I'm still a white belt that relies on my wrestling base.

I want to get a heat check on this. At one of these conferences, if I rented out a local jiu-jitsu gym or wrestling room and hosted a jiu-jitsu/wrestling/happy hour hang out where you can grapple or just hang out, would there be any interest? I’m looking to start AdTech Fight Club.

Just discovered that adtech legend @michaelpwalrath has recently become active on X.

There are a bunch of AI chatbot-focused ad networks chasing the same AI chatbot app inventory.

@hypersoren Welcome back, lmk when you’re settled

I am moving back to New York. I spent the last few years in Miami Beach. I moved for family but I broadly felt—if all predictions of AGI came true; if we had agents that could do arbitrary tasks—beach property would be valuable. I’ve been disappointed with how early stage AI has developed. Despite grand narratives > THIS IS AGI investment in kind hasn’t followed. The SF Taste Class dooms aimlessly about what we’ll all do when Claude does most intelligent work. It sounds like a joke but Miami already lives in this future. The city is not pretentious about intelligence—perhaps entirely the opposite—but it’s undeniable that Miami is one of the highest growth and dynamic cities in America. The city is deeply American and lives its true self 24/7—party boats, cars, beautiful people, money, rich immigrant culture. Miami dominates @alexolegimas Relational Sector—human intensive, provenance rich service where human-aspect of services lead. New York probably too. SF—not so much. Plainly I don’t think people are thinking clearly about economics in this new era; acting as if AGI invalidates underlying economic principles. I’ve heard rumors some at Anthropic want Anthropic branded everything, all run and organized by a Constitutional Claude Commune. I don’t want to live in this future. Beyond SF’s incredible natural beauty, its cultural and political aesthetics are dismal. The AI narrative is now just Permanent Underclass For All but labs Who Will Charge 90% Margins. I reject this. I reject these aesthetics. I reject cosplay. If we really are ushering in a magic machine god made of sand we must take everything seriously across all domains of life. When the cycle started we were Accelerating. We were on our way to Abundance. Now we twist narratives to accumulate LP dollars to rent seek compute replacement for human labor. How profoundly depressing and unimaginative. Also—deservedly—not durable. So I’m headed to New York to build Technologies Of Abundance. See you downtown. JPMorgan Finishers better up the pace on the Central Park hill.

@Seth_Ulinski Great call

@ericfranchi Criteo ✅

I downgraded my ChatGPT to free a few weeks ago as an experiment, and look what I just got

@thejongardner Let them cook!

@ericfranchi I’m on free and got my first news push notification (topics in which I have no interest) yesterday

@bwagy My bad. I was prepping for the pod and came across this for the news segment (we'll cover it).

@ericfranchi Ah, I was meaning the $100m deals! But I just read the piece, bold headline!

Why we continue to see startup formation and m&a in media and ad measurement.

@bwagy Viant/TVision inspired

@ericfranchi What might those be?

@johnhoctor from Newton Research walks us through a step-by-step guide to using AI agents in media analytics.

Turned the tables on @joe_zappa for once this week on the pod and put him in the interviewee seat. Really good conversation about his journey w/ Sharp Pen, the state of adtech marketing, and more. Link below.

MiQ is getting active. Two acquisitions in as many weeks: Rocket Lab (mobile app growth) following Adsmovil (LatAm programmatic). Makes total sense: mobile app is incremental and a huge market; lots of IDs and signals to feed their Sigma OS, and they are now the largest independent player in LatAm (huge mobile market).

@EricTilbury_RTB Protect ya neck!

@ericfranchi The Ezekiel choke 100% will drain all adtech knowledge if not tapped immediately hahah!

There are few things more humbling than getting choked out in Jiu-Jitsu.