How Ross Shanken Used His Love For Problem Solving To Start a Data-As-A-Service Company that has Grown to Include A Shopping and Comparison Network of Over 35,000

Welcome to another episode of Action & Ambition with your host, Andrew Medal. Today’s guest is Ross Shanken. Ross Shanken is the founder and CEO of Jornaya. He is a thought leader and business builder within Information Services, interactive markets, and display advertising. Ross has broad knowledge and experience in leading sales, marketing, business development, and launching new businesses.  You’re going to love this episode. Let’s get to it! How did Ross know he wanted to solve complex problems when he was young? (0:40) Ross always loved brain teasers as a kid. He would spend hours as a kid just sitting and solving complex and advanced puzzles.  When he was around ten years old, somebody released the Rubik’s cube, and Ross thought it was the most relaxed, most challenging thing in the world.  Ross had solved it by the time he was 11 after spending many hours on it. Puzzles were something that Ross couldn’t do.  That’s where his love for problem-solving started, and as he got older, it began to expand into the business world and other things that were hard to solve.  He even did some computer coding and used it to program basic applications. Ross states that it was just how he was made.  What was Ross’s entrepreneurial journey, and how did it lead him to where he is now? (4:09) Looking back now, Ross says he’s always been entrepreneurial and had a burning desire to start companies.  He started that passion off in a small scale manner when he was a teenager. All his friends were getting jobs at ice cream shops or restaurants as waiters.  Ross was instead of putting fliers in people’s mailboxes that he would do odd jobs for people in their gardens and build an excellent little business doing that. Going into college, he came into contact with an import/export guy from Pakistan who brought these sweaters and boots and other items into the country, and then Ross sold those products.  However, there was another side of Ross, which was that he hadn’t been exposed to any other entrepreneurs.  Reading about people like Steve Jobs and Bill gates fascinated him and planted the idea that he wanted to follow a path similar to them.  Wanting to follow the path, Ross did not know how to start, and he knew that he was slightly more risk-averse than other entrepreneurs. His first job out of college was at Haverford College Alumni. Haverford wanted to start a fax-on-demand business, which back then was the fastest way to get information around. To find information like stock quotes or earnings estimates, you had to go to the library and hope they had the information, or you had to subscribe to mail order services.  So Haverford and Ross digitized that information and put it online in the form of fax and eventually pushed it onto the internet as that became more prevalent.  It was the thing that Ross had always loved, but he didn’t have the guts to go out and do himself because he had grown up with little money and was relatively risk-averse.  He worked two more jobs after that, each 3 and 4 years long, respectively, which led to the longest stint he had before founding Jornaya.  For thirteen years, he worked for a data intelligence company called Targets Info. Ross was the seventh employee in the company, and they rapidly grew to a few hundred people. They sold targets Info to a public company, and it was an excellent outcome for everybody.  But again, that was not Ross starting his own company but instead helping to develop it.  By then, however, Ross had made enough money and gained enough experience to feel comfortable starting his own company by himself. It’s ten years later now, and the company has grown extraordinarily.  Does Ross have any tips on how to create effective use of proceeds early on in a business? (41:48) Ross says it was never a case of he had it all figured out, and it all went smoothly from the beginning. He felt like he wasn’t very good at certain things. He was good at the things he knew about certain things that were important to him. But other things were rather daunting to Ross.  Ross never wanted to raise money, but he asked himself the question if he did raise money right now, how much faster and bigger could his company get?  Ross was not young when he finally started his own business, and he had a great mentor for the last three-four years before starting his company, which is now working in Jornaya as a partner. Who helped Ross immensely.  Ross feels he had to learn the importance of setting out and just doing it, really pursuing what he wanted to accomplish.  Being too risk-averse at the start, Ross had to come to realize that there are always risks, and you are still wrong. He learned the famous quote from Eisenhower, who said, “Plans are useless or worthless, but planning is indispensable.” It’s just about going through the planning process and adapting as things go wrong that is the most important.  Ross raised money without really good plans, but he had the right direction and a sound rationale at that point.  However, starting a business is always stressful, and Ross states he’s sure that there’s still that pressure that many entrepreneurs feel but don’t talk about.  When a Venture capital comes in, they don’t want the money to sit in your bank account. They want you to spend their money, and this is for the following reason;  Theoretically, it would make you grow bigger and faster.  However, this is not the case, and without a good plan, and if there is a conflict of interest, it can become tough to align incentives between a VC and Business owner.  Ross did not become great at that until he had, had a couple of runs at this. His advice is to learn as many hard lessons as you can, as fast as you can, because you know excellent lessons in the process too.  Jornaya Jornaya is a data-as-a-service company that uses a network of 35,000+ comparison shopping and lead generation to helps marketers detect consumer purchasing intent and ensure compliance with data privacy laws. Resources Connect with Ross: LinkedIn Jornaya: Website Connect with Andrew: LinkedIn