Great. Okay. So we're going to get started. I'm Laura Martin. I'm the senior media and internet analyst at Needham & Company, and I'm here with Adam Singolda, so let me just introduce him. He's our next speaker. Adam is the founder and CEO of Tabula, where he has built a global platform that serves billions of content recommendations daily across the open web. Prior to launching Tabula in 2007, he honed his deep technical and leadership skills over seven years as an officer in the elite mathematical and computational science unit of the Israeli National Security Agency. We're going to start with a question about leadership. So generative AI is a transformational technology. I think that's a consensus view. And what kind of pressures does that put on you as a leader?
What changes when you have transformational disruption underlying the tech stack of your business? uh good to be here thank you for having me always and i look forward to dinner tonight i think uh you know we've been in a state of mind of change for quite some time now i mean if you think about you know from the pandemic and recession and tariffs and wars it it wasn't really we haven't had a boring day in a long time you know and uh and i think it it already in many ways kind of like pushed you know companies and leaderships to change and evolve so that they can deal with all this madness that's happening around the world globally. And, you know, I think we talked about that last time about, you know, transparency and how do you speak to people and what they expect of you during these days. So I think there's, to some extent, we've been in this war mode for a long time now. One. Two, I think this is so big, you know, the change of AI, that you have to almost re-imagine who you would be if you were born now, and then ask yourself what are the gaps between that version of yourself to how you look right now and build bridges towards that new future. So you have to imagine if you started Taboola now and we'd be a $2 billion revenue business, open web, all the things that make Taboola special, and today, native AI, native AI company, What would we look like? And that's the exercise that we're going through with the team. We're constantly asking ourselves, what do we need to do? Not to be a better version of ourselves, but almost to reimagine a new tabula, and then have the courage to speak about it, to build processes, to get there. We just had a board meeting, and our COO and president, who owns that project, this internal AI rebirth, presented to the board, all the things we're doing internally. And this is not product. I'm just talking about identity, culture. How do you look like? What organizations go away and change? What do you don't have? How do you communicate with each other? What type of information people have access to? It's amazing. I mean, we now have over 80% of our code has something drafted by AI in it. We have now hundreds of apps. There's a marketplace of apps People build using Claude internally so they can do things way better. So I can now build an app that can query different things in the database and present it to professional services. And now I just saved so much time and we are all better. And hundreds of apps, employers are so curious. So I think to me, it's mainly about, as always, about people and culture.
You know, especially when you go through massive transformations like we do with AI, you have to be even more transparent even more honest with yourself about what works and what's not and have the courage to reimagine yourself and build a plan to become that company so one of the most interesting things that's going on in the workforce organization is there's this work being done and it's theoretical because for an academic to study it somebody has to have done it and then they look at the data so it hasn't happened yet but the idea is that maybe functions are degrading, that you can't have separate sales from product, from engineering, from marketing, the way almost all companies are set up, that instead we're going to have these SWAT teams of like five people with one product guy, one engineer, one marketing person, one salesperson, and they're going to have a team, and there'll be a deliverable for that five-person group, or maybe 50-person group. But the point is, in six months, you need to have this product up and running. And these teams work together with the liberals, and they rise and fall together. Like, if they don't hit the deliverable, they're all out of a job.
And if they do hit the deliverable, they get the next project and so functions need to break down in a way like not think of themselves as sales versus marketing where somebody says that's not my job because these jobs become redefined by ai do you have a point of view on that i don't know if it's going to be just that i think it's a lot of that so i think it's so liberating to be a salesperson or an account manager and have so much power in your hands to do something you used to do uh you know manually that used to take you hours and not even wait for someone to do it for you, just do it yourself. You know, when I wanted to check Deeper Dive, one of our AI, you know, product for publishers, I wanted to see how often does it happen that we ask a question, the answer is not to my liking, and how many times certain things happen. I didn't email anyone. I just asked Claude to take authorization over my browser. And I said, here's what you said today. By the time I wake up, I'd like you to test it 10,000 times, and here's what I want to know. And we had a daily meeting about the product. When I came into that meeting, I was a super version of myself. No one knew more than me. I knew the most. I had 10,000 people. Claude had taught you? Yeah, me and Claude. You know, it's like the Avengers. You know, we were just like Marvel through and through. Yes, maybe. It ended bad for him. But the point is, it's so liberating. If you have the curiosity and courage to lean in, I cannot imagine not spending two or three hours a day coding, you know?
I was just with a CEO, and I gave him that line. I said, I have CEOs that are spending four hours a day on Claude. He goes, I would love to do that. I have to manage people. And I'm like, well, a lot of these CEOs are really software guys.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a very scary answer if I were him. I don't know who has the courage to say that. I'm not naming names. I don't know who that is. But that person may not have a job in the future. How could you even... I won't let him know. No, no, don't. Yeah, so we... No one... This is just between you and me. Nobody needs to know. Nobody has to know. But even if that's what you think, don't say it loud. Just, you know, lie about it. Just, you know, make, make, like, something up.
Mr. Honesty during disruption. Yeah, like, what are you doing?
What are you doing, you know, saying that, you know, your old self is better than your new machine-fused version? You have to do it. Because if you... I'll tell you why. If you don't build things yourself, not your team's telling you how it works, then you don't...
You know, it's capabilities or it's limits.
You don't have a gut feeling. And you know so much about leadership is about developing, you know, arts and science. And you want to have data-driven, you know, kind of making decisions that matter. But you also want to have a gut. You know, something needs to feel right or something needs to feel wrong. And you can't have that if you haven't, you know, got dirty with it yourself.
Yeah, no, that's fair. Okay, so I saw you two weeks ago at the Impossible Conference in Miami. And let's begin where we left off. And so can you talk about the Realize Plus platform and what does it do for Taboola, you know, sort of in 2026? But as you look forward to the next maybe 24 months, how does Realize Plus accelerate your growth rate?
Yeah, so Realize Plus is our version of Google Performance Max or our version of Meta Adventures Plus, which is essentially a way, it's an agentic AI bridge for advertisers who want to have less control and more just outcomes, you know, driven kind of system. I'll give you an example. If you are a subscription service that's only relevant for New York, you want clients in New York City, and you know exactly who they are, and you know that you want them when they use their iPhone and when they read about certain things and you have a very specific opinion about what audience you're trying to get, you should use Realize. Because you know what you want. Open five campaigns. Open a mobile New York campaign. Open a strategy for if they read about this. Show them the ad. Whatever you want. You know what you want. Go realize your potential. But if you don't have that level of, you know, kind of definitions of what you want to get and your bidding strategy is not so defined in your head. You just want to know, I want to sell this table. And I know that so long that it's $50 or less, I'll buy as many ads as possible from Taboola. And then you can go to Realize Plus, give us that goal, and Realize Plus will essentially open and shut down campaigns on your behalf, in real time, 24-7, and we'll report to you what works and what's not. And so this is really exciting because a lot of clients wanted us to give them like a PMAX option. You know, they wanted us to say, it's nice we're spending with you maybe $100,000, but just so you know, if you had a PMAX, we would have another budget with you that goes on top of what we already do. And to me, the exciting piece about it is that I look at it as a whole net new budget opportunity with advertisers. it's a way to get money we never got from people who just want results and they don't want that level of control so that's, you know, it's new and as always I will measure that like I measure all products in terms of will it reduce churn rates, will it increase spend and will it result in more scaled advertisers working with us which should impact our financials you know, we've seen an accelerated growth so far this year, and the more we get budgets from advertisers, the more we can continue our pathway to double-digit growth rates.
And why is it we only track scaled advertisers? Why wouldn't you care? Why do we care about whether more scaled advertisers work with you versus just more advertisers?
Well, scaled advertiser, which is basically anyone spending more than 100 grand, just means that that advertiser found market fit with us. they spend enough so the likelihood they'll churn is lower significantly and the likelihood they'll increase spend is also higher so for us and also by the way it's the vast majority of our revenue so for us we look at that number and the more it goes up the more it's a good proxy that our revenue is stable can continue to go up so we do and we share it with investors because we know they want to look at the same thing as well yeah and lower churn is definitely a big deal okay Okay.
So what have you learned? So Realize was a year ago possible. You just launched Realize, right? This year was Realize Plus. So what have you learned in the year about Realize? I know that we were trying to open up the display market and get a bigger share of wallet. What have you learned in the 12 months since launching the original Realize that you didn't know? Like last time we were on this stage a year ago.
Well, I think it's working. It's progressing. You know, there's a lot of work ahead of us, but it's progressing in the right direction. And there are many things on the Realize kind of strategy that needed to happen. One of them was Taboola to become a performance advertising platform, like Apploving for apps, Taboola for the open web, outside of search and social. So that was a brand progress. And I think we're progressing. You know, we're going to the right places. We're talking to the right people. Then there was sales kind of restructuring to make sure that we're going after segments of the market where we know the chances for success are higher. We call that ICP. And we've hired Krishan from Amazon to kind of lead our revenue initiatives globally as part of that kind of motion. We, as you said, we made it much easier to give us any format you may have. And this was a supply and demand kind of effort. On the supply side, it meant going to publishers and say, give us that display inventory too, or give us on your apps basically give us all the inventory that you have and let us participate in all of that and on the demand side it meant that no longer did we force you to change for us if you have display you can give us display if you have native give us native if you have social give us social if you have vertical give us whatever you have we'll take it and the last one was a new feature that was part of realize called predictive audiences which essentially said if you spent some money with us and you've got some conversions we can predict how much money do you have to spend further to get more conversions which advertisers love I guess much like investors advertisers like predictability and growth so when you tell an advertiser you're spending $50,000 with us if you give us $10,000 more here's how much it's going to cost you per conversion before you spend the money they like it and that became a very well adopted new kind of capability for us so I would say overall we're seeing progress across utilization of the features sales restructuring market brand and perception kind of improvement and with Realize Plus it's another step forward making it even easier and I know we're going to talk about Claude at some point during this fireside chat about our work with Claude. But I will say, in general, overall, all we're trying to do is make it really, really easy for advertisers to succeed, much like it is on Meta and Google.
Good. So let's go to Claude now. So I know you said it possible that you've created agentic tie-ins, and I think there's definitely a difference of opinion among CEOs and ad about whether we're going to be on new rails for agentic or on the old programmatic rails. So why don't you tell people what you've been doing with Claude and agents, and also, I think, explain your thesis about programmatic rails are going to be different and replaced by agentic rails.
Let me just say, I think I'm right on this one. I'm going to tell my opinion, but I just want to, full disclosure, this is one of those obviously moments. You ready for this? I'm about to say, like the program, what's going to happen? I'm going to give a prediction. here at Nidham. A year from now, we're going to look back and say, we're going to replay just this part of our conversation. So here's what I think is happening. And it will happen really fast. So with Claude now, essentially anyone, advertisers, or even more importantly, holding companies, agencies, can basically build buying agents that can interact with search Google directly via an MCP. Google just released one. Or with Meta to buy social. Tell them what an MCP is. So MCP is a protocol that allows agents to talk to each other. So basically Google says if you want to buy from us, you can open PMAX and buy your campaigns. Or we now have a way for your agent to talk to us. Here's a protocol available for you. As of now, you can talk to us through this protocol. So you never have to come here. Your agent can talk to my agent. And so Google just made one available. Taboola made one available. And you can go even a step further and say, actually, if you're using Claude, I'm going to build a skill for you that if you turn it on, you can talk to Claude in your own language. And Claude will understand how to do it. We're going to make Claude really smart, as it relates to buying from us. So Google did it, we did it. And at that point, Claude essentially can buy search directly. Social directly. Taboola directly. And when it buys it, it's not buying it programmatically. CPMs, splash, you know, spray and pray, hope for the best. It's buying the specific platform in an intimate way. Claude says to Taboola, I want to sell tables. Talk to me. And Taboola will say, well, do you have a goal in mind? And Claude will say, $50. And Taboola will say, do you need it in any specific way, or should I just go and do the best I can? And Claude will say, no, no, it has to be desktop users. I want this demographics. It has to be East Coast. And that's what I want. And by the way, they have to have read something about this topic over the last 30 days. Taboola MCP will say to Claude, great, you need to realize, I recommend you spend $10,000 test campaign. Cloud will negotiate. They negotiate, they negotiate, they negotiate. The campaign is live, and we're on. There's another alternative.
Who made the ad? What ad are they using?
Tableau will ask Cloud, do you have creatives, or do you want to make one for you? And Cloud will say, my client doesn't care. Do it for me. Or my client has very specific needs. Here's the creative. And all of this will happen from a Cloud software. The client or the agency have never left. At that point, you can build an agent that just bought Google, just bought Meta, and just bought Taboola Open Web. And in fact, you know, Paramount has API self-service. You can even buy TV. At that point, your agent, which costs you $200 subscription a month, can buy Search, Social, Open Web, and TV, bypassing the entire thing. And I'm not even talking about saving cost. I'm talking about the fact that when you use the platform native APIs and conversation versus programmatic, you're using all the goodies that the platform has to offer you. And let's simplify this further. If you buy from Taboola programmatically, Taboola, which is live on ESPN, Fox Sports, CBS Sports, Yahoo Sports, we know sports. If you like the Knicks, which I am, Taboola knows about it. You've read someplace about the Knicks. Taboola knows it. DSPs don't know it. When they buy from us programmatically, programmatic doesn't know what I know. So they're just saying, give me something at that price. They can match cookies maybe, but they don't know what I know. When you buy from me directly, you can say, if someone read about the Knicks, offer them NBA subscription. Because I know it. Only I know it. When you buy from Claude, the agent is not just doing it perhaps more affordably. than a very expensive programmatic buying. We're talking billions of dollars of saving. Billions, maybe tens of billions. It also buys it much more intimately. It asks Tabula, do you know someone who read about the Knicks on a sports site today? If so, I want them to see the ad. Only Claude can do it. Programmatic...
Why couldn't open a ChatGPT in Gemini?
They can also do it. Any one of those agents can do it. Programmatic cannot do it. It's just not... It's a dumb pipe. It's a very efficient pipe. It did a lot for our industry. It made a lot of good things happen, but it reached the end of that journey because it's not smart enough, and it's uniquely expensive. To my team, I refer to programmatic as an old knee that needs to be replaced with something that will allow me to run a marathon. And that is kind of... Now, when you look at those things, which is the only thing that moves industries since the beginning of time has always been greed and fear. Otherwise, I'm not changing. If you're an agency and you just gave this ethic industry $5 billion, that's greed. And if you think someone else is building an agent, getting better results for the client because you're using agent versus programmatic, that's fear. So now you're looking at $100 billion a year. agency business just in the US with a lot of greed and a lot of fear they are really but greed and fear accelerate change so billions is a great number so I just think we may see really fast change so that's in any case I think that's where I think it's happening how fast we'll see I think agent to agent I want to be I want to own a big part of that market You know, that's, to me, the open web needs a seat at the table, a good seat.
Well, and I think you have unique supply, which is what you need in that world, right? Because Claude isn't coming to you unless it can get something from you it can't get anywhere else.
It is so simple and so true. Unless you have supply, no one else has. And unless you, I'm talking exclusive rights, not bidding on that supply. Because Claude can bid too. I'm talking it's mine. and unless you have data that Claude cannot get Claude is getting it, Claude is bypassing you it has to, it will and I'm so you know, looking backwards I guess we never knew of LLM you know, revolution, but I mean now I'm looking at Tabula with 11,000 publishers 30 year Yahoo decades of relationships with 600 million people every day reading about stuff on the web it's a very unique sense, you know intent data and it's a very unique supply relationship. And then Realize is a very good engine. So when you match the best LLM models in the world and the best performance engine on unique supply and data in the world, I think there's really something beautiful that can happen here.
But you represent publishers. Why can't Claude just buy from the publisher? Why does he need the taboola as an intermediary at all in the new Rails?
So Claude is going to try to make the client happy. The client wants performance and outcomes. So for performance and outcomes, we're just the best. You know, you can't call any one company and say, no one has enough scale to offer what the client wants. If I'm a retailer, I want to spend a lot of money getting a lot of outcomes. So I'm going to need someone that has a lot of reach, a lot of scale. When it comes to outcome, if it's a branding campaign, maybe I want a specific thing like to be on the homepage of someone. But if you want to get a million clients to buy something, you come to Google, Facebook, and you come to us because we're very good at it. Or you come to Apploving in apps. They're also very good at it. So I think it depends on what you're trying to do. If your cloud agent is in charge of outcome and performance, you're calling someone with a lot of unique supply, a lot of unique data, and an engine that can do the job. Someone has, where do you show the ad? Who do you show the ad to? So I think this is how I think it's going to unveil.
Okay, yeah. No, very interesting.
Did you like it?
It's definitely a very revolutionary, disruptive model for ad tech.
We're going to do a demo, you and I. It's going to be the best one. It's going to be a video of me doing the whole thing live.
With Claude. My best friend.
My wife is really concerned, by the way.
I think Claude is your bromance. You're having a bromance with Claude?
She's like, tell me who you're really going to. What are you doing in the office? Who are you really talking to?
For four hours with Claude.
I can't stop. I wake up early. I have to see the prompt.
Yeah. 10,000. You walk into a meeting, people are scared to death about what you were having Claude do overnight, that you're testing your systems for 10,000 queries.
It's so good.
Everybody's shaking. Okay, great. So one of the things that I came away from possible that was sort of concerning was that there seems to be a difference between value creation and value capture using AI, meaning a lot of people are putting AI tools into their underlying infrastructure, but they're not charging more. Which means AI just becomes table stakes and you basically have to give it to the customer to keep your market share, which is almost a form of price discount in a sense, instead of being able to upcharge. Do you see that happening where it's just hard to upcharge for these AI tools?
I mean, I'll give you an example. For us, AI is completely correlated to value. So as an example on Deeper Dive, which is our publisher answer engine, you can go to USA Today and ask a question and it uses AI. We host it. It uses AI to get an answer and things to read, and we show ads. We make money on that thing, so we give it for free. The publisher doesn't have to pay OpenAI APIs, which are very expensive. We host, we train, we build a rag, we do the whole thing. We give it to you for free. We drive engagement through it, and we even pay you for it because we put ads on it, like Gemini and Google. So in this case to me, yeah, I give it to you for free. It costs me money, but I'm making more than I spend. In fact, I'm sharing that upside with you and everybody gets excited. It's a differentiator in the marketplace. Same for Realize and Realize Plus. I'm using a lot of AI. I'm not charging directly for that, but if I do a good job, prices go up. You pay me more because I'm able to get you affordable conversions. So you want to spend more with me and increase your price because you really like it. So on the advertising side, it's all directed to value. I do a good job, you give me more money. I don't do a good job, you leave.
All right, so you're going to get it through the take rate. Yeah, you're trying to get it higher, either through the take rate or just more spending with the same take rate.
Well, the advertiser has no rate. It's about CPC and spend. Do they increase the price because they love what they get or no? And do they spend more money with me or do they churn so i i look at a client and i'm saying over time it's very simple are they staying and are they spending more yeah that's it and if the answer is they're not staying bad and if they're not increasing budget they're not happier yeah you know and that's all i want to see okay all right um fair enough so so but the bottom line is you're not up charging for the ai you're just trying to get people to churn less or spend more money right i just i want to grow my business at the same EBITDA margin, which we're able to do, and we're using AI to get more value for the client. And it's either a publisher through Deeper Dive or the client through Realize and Realize Plus.
Okay. So ad buyers are demanding more transparency and large publishers are gaining negotiating leverage. Does this mean there's going to be take rate pressure on your business, do you think, over time or not?
I mean, to me, it's the opposite. So the more we do a good job for advertisers, so let's look at, Tabula is a two-sided marketplace. We're very unique in that place. We're like a walled garden outside of the walls because we have supply and demand like Google and Meta. And because most companies in ethics space are either supply-focused or demand-focused. We're both. So for us, if I look at the demand side, the only thing my clients care about is, was it And is it stable and scalable? Can I do more of it so I spend more money with you? So I have to provide value, and so long that I do it, I get more budgets. And if you look at our financials, you're seeing more scaled advertisers, average spend goes up, and our financials are improving. So that's the only thing we focus as a team, and the clients just want to know. They know what they're trying to get because they compare us to Meta and Google. So it doesn't matter. They don't care about our publisher ref share. They're just like, at the end of the day, how much did it cost me to get a client? Is it good or bad? And based on that, they make decisions. And then we have a publisher ref share, which I think is fair. I don't expect it to change in a material way over time. I think we want to be a significant revenue to publishers. We're proud of that. We're not looking for ways to get another kind of upper game there. In fact, we want to be a bigger share of wallets, pay publishers even more over time. So I think, you know, when I look at the business, if we do a good job in implementing technology, we gain growth rates and hopefully even leverage on our margins over time. So it's the opposite in my mind. And a lot of it is thanks to being a performance advertising platform. It's not a wine and dine business. It's not a please like me, try me. I hope they like us, but at the end of the day, They only stick around if it works.
So usually that's the metric for small and medium businesses. Do you find, I know you launched a platform I think a year and a half ago that was really targeted to small and medium businesses. How has that adoption gone, Abby?
It's still, I mean, it's our self-service, which Abby is mostly relevant. It's still small. It's growing. I love that business. But I will tell you, even bigger advertisers, look, they need to trust you. They need to know, you know, a lot of times there's a management kind of like interaction. They want to, you know, I can tell you now advertisers, big ones and agencies, they really like our agent vision. They like how disruptive this can be to their existing way of doing business and they want to get close to us. And that's great to see because it means they give us a shot. However, that shot is all it is at that stage. From that point on, it has to be good for them. And that's what I like about Tabula, where we have to be good. We have to deliver real value to advertisers and publishers so they want to stick around and grow with us. But I do think that bigger advertisers, to your point, at times they do want to connect to the company vision and disruption and being on the right side of growth. But eventually it has to work.
Walled gardens benefit... So when you think about the Gen.AI disruption, the walled gardens have been really fast adopters of sort of these LLM tools to lower their costs and to accelerate sort of their revenue growth by faster time-to-market for products. Do you think that Gen.AI benefits the open web, or do you think that the walled gardens are the big beneficiary of Gen.AI tools?
I think it depends. So Gen.AI can benefit everyone if, depends where you sit on the spectrum so if you're in the open web a bigger brand a known brand you have low search exposure and you're now at the beginning of AI adoption which means you can make a lot more money and you can engage consumers a lot more you're going to benefit from AI if you're a small publisher with a high search exposure you probably carry more risk if you're an advertiser or an agency See, if you think it's not important to develop agents yourself and if you don't try to disrupt yourself by leaning into LLM and this agent economy, then you better be right because your competitors will definitely try something else. So I think it's a cultural question. I think everyone has something to gain so long that they have ideally unique data, distribution access, and the right culture to fail fast and be okay changing.
Well, I have companies that are doing these integrations, these AI integrations, trying to bring these companies up to – because I don't think that senior management has any kind of technological expertise, so they have to hire companies to bring them in to make agents.
I mean, I think you should do whatever you need to do. I mean, if that's something, you know, some people are closer to the tech side and they donate it and they need sales help because it's going to impact everything. And so long that you're just not waiting to see what happens. I think you're probably doing the right thing. But I do think you have to lean in to get really, to dream big as relates to who would you be if you were born now.
Yeah, and then build the bridge to that. You have to. You know, start up. Well, because you know what? There's guys dropping out of Harvard that are making something from scratch with five guys. You know, and letting agents do all the work.
I had a meeting with my team before this, and we talked about the future job of QA, quality assurance, someone who's testing a product. In the past, which is such an important job, someone has to test a product before it goes to the client. In the past, that person did a lot of things. But with Claude, if that person does anything more than once, Claude should do it. Because it's repetitive. It's deterministic. We know what we expect. And the future job of a QA is almost like an artist. It's someone that needs to have a vibe and emotions about your product and give you how does it feel to use your product. But as it relates to testing things and seeing what happens in a repetitive way, Claude should do it. So everything is changing. If you start your company now, what I just said would be obvious to you. Why would I have a QA person checking the product works? that's a claw job but claw can only predict the past it can predict things that have happened it cannot predict the future because it never happened but a human can if it feels clunky or if it feels too many steps this is it so this is where humans shine it's the feeling, it's the gut it's the emotion, it's the art and I think if you understand that you become I told my team the threshold for a human is really high. Otherwise, if Claude can do it, Claude should. And that's, but it's very obvious to you, native.
But I wonder if what you're saying, though, is you're going to employ less STEM people and more liberal arts people. If we're moving towards art and motion, it feels like we're moving out of computer science and data analytics skills, because Claude's going to do those, and we're moving into things like, I don't like this pink. It makes me feel stressed. or I don't like this combination of...
I think there's a lot of value in people that are architects of things because they can have more critical, even what to tell a Claude to do and negotiate with Claude about, yeah. So there's value in that as well, but the composition is changing. We're having people that we didn't have before, and I think this is exactly... Look, I came from Israel. English to me is a second language, you know? I will never say are in a perfect way. You can tell I'm not from here. And that is basically all companies. We all are second, you know, we're all expats.
To Gen AI.
We're all not from this country. None of us speaks English the right way.
Now the question is. The Gen AI English.
And now the question is, who's practicing their English? You know, I went to Starbucks to buy coffee 10 hours a day so I can feel comfortable talking English when I move to this country. You know? So who is doing those things so that AI can be somewhat native to them because you're not from this country? And we all know you're an expat. So this is the reality.
Yeah, that's what's very funny. Well, I think it's really interesting how this gen AI affects labor forces, labor force organization, labor force demands on what is required out of the ecosystem. system, but the more Claude can do in a STEM world, the more you're going to rely on liberal arts majors, which was not foreseeable three years ago, you know? So I think that's really interesting, and maybe more engineers, which are problem-solving kinds of mindsets.
Look, there's growth. I think there's growth in jobs and hiring, because you're going to want, if the same person can create much more value to the client, then there's more growth rates, and there's more EBITDA, and there's more cash flow. And at the end of the day, we're all here to build companies that gain market share, growing faster, and generate profit. So I think if your employee base is evolving into this native AI, better R speakers, then they're all awesome. And you can get more of them. And those who don't, like, again, don't tell me, working for Tabula, you're not building agents. Lie to me. Don't tell me this through my face.
My favorite line from Possible was your line where I said, when are you cutting people? Why don't I see your EFTEs going down? You said, Laura, when people come to Tabula, they don't come for three months. They come for 10 years. I'm going to find stuff for them to do.
There's a lot of work to do.
There's a lot of work to do.
And we're actively going through, like, Taboola is a very hyper-transparent company. We speak about all of these uncomfortable topics all the time at all levels. I have an offset with my team in June. I'm telling 2,000 employees what's my agenda. I'm not, I'm like, then tell me.
Like today. Tell me what I'm missing.
Tell me what am I not doing. And I think this is a great time to celebrate culture and people.
Any questions from the audience?
I hope you're building Claude agents.
Don't tell him you're not spending four hours on Claude. Lie to him, please. Lie to me. Okay. Any questions for... Okay. So, what's the... My last question there, and since we have two minutes, what is the thing that you think Wall Street or investors are missing about the Taboola story that we should be focusing them on as you walk out the door?
I honestly think they want us to grow faster and we're working hard on it. I don't think they're... Some people like us more. some people like us less. There's a lot of growth in advertising. It's a growing market. It's an exciting market. Everyone is getting into it. OpenAI is getting into it. Netflix got in. Everybody wants an advertising business. And everybody needs a friend. And Tabula is a better friend than Google. Because we're always going to be on your side. We only grow if you grow. Google is like, you know, they grow if they grow. So I think we have a great, you know, we sit in a good place. However, we're currently, you know, our guidance now is 8%. and that's not why I'm here and that's not why they want to buy the stock tell Quad I'm mad at him, he needs to grow faster I know, I am so I think as we get to 9 and 10 and 11 and 12 and 15 and 20 consistently organically at our EBITDA margin technically it's a very exciting upside if you believe and so I think Wall Street mainly wanna, you know, those who are early, you know, have higher risk profile getting now and going the way up and those who are less they talk to us they track us and but I think what they want is faster growth rates and that's what I want to okay I will call it there
thank you very much