With digital video recorders making it easy to skip through television commercials, satellite radio offering commercial-free stations, and newspapers struggling for readers, retailers are looking for new ways to get their advertising in front of consumers. Monte Zweben, whose background is in artificial intelligence, has a captive-audience alternative.
Monte Zweben is in the middle of something that requires his nonstop concentration. He and the 15 employees of his year-old media company, SeeSaw Networks, are hurrying to launch their biggest, most tangible product: SeeSawAds.com. It is the online destination that advertisers will use to plan ad campaigns on SeeSaw's network of 14,000 digital advertising screens in venues like health clubs, airports, gas stations, and grocery stores. So some nights Zweben is up at 2 a.m. coding with his software developers. HTML. Java. JavaScript. Then he's in New York, then Philadelphia, meeting with media buyers, luxury retailers, and financial services providers. He's doing market research, refining the product, listening to people, creating buzz. He's working the floor of the big American Association of Advertising Agencies Tradeshow in Las Vegas, pulling people into the SeeSaw booth, and demonstrating the product. With a few clicks of a mouse, an advertising buyer can identify and purchase digital screen ads for any size target audience in practically any locale.
"Not only will we make sure your audience sees your ad," he tells them, unwrapping the riddle of the company's name, "But we'll even tell you who saw it in terms of impressions and demographics."
He's generating new leads. He's wooing advertisers, talking to The Wall Street Journal. He is at headquarters in San Francisco. He's laying out the SeeSaw vision to three partners from Sutter Hill Ventures, the firm that invested $10 million to start SeeSaw and capture the red-hot digital advertising market. He's putting the finishing touches on a white paper about how advertisers can achieve "ubiquity" in their digital ad campaigns.
Since its whirlwind creation last year, SeeSaw Networks has gone from an idea, to getting incorporated, to getting funded, to getting "market validated," to hiring employees, to getting people to use it. Already, 140 media planners and buyers are planning ad campaigns through SeeSawAds.com. Zweben, 43, is its busy chair and cofounder.
It's been like this ever since he graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in computer science and industrial management–adrenaline-drenched projects and multi-million-dollar tech companies; the thrill of being at the top of the dot-com industry; the despair when the dot-com bubble burst; having a job at age 24 in which 20 PhDs reported to him; saving government agencies millions of dollars through computer science breakthroughs; unprecedented awards; coauthorship of a landmark artificial intelligence book.
It's grandiose, visionary stuff. These are the kinds of things that happen, say those who know Zweben best, when you're a gifted technologist with uncanny communication skills, loads of business acumen, and an inner drive that few others possess.
His victories in starting million-dollar companies have been so huge that it's easy to forget that he was an artificial intelligence pioneer first and a next-generation marketer second. Artificial intelligence has permeated his career. It has driven him to solve real-world problems by programming software to make computers "reason" like humans through heuristic search algorithms and the recognition of data patterns.
Today, banks use artificial intelligence software to catch fraudulent transactions. Cell phone companies use it for voice recognition. Internet search engines use it to scour the Web and organize data. Zweben has made his own contributions to the field by developing intelligent software programs, applying them to real business problems, maturing them, commercializing them, selling them, and implementing them where they deliver value to American industry.
He still gets back to Carnegie Mellon, too. Zweben has served six years on two School of Computer Science advisory boards: the Dean's Advisory Board and the Alumni Advisory Board. In addition to maintaining his allegiance to his alma mater, it keeps him connected with the research community, where he can see emerging technologies and bounce business plans off professors.
He also brings a piece of Carnegie Mellon to his neighborhood. Many of the 4,800 alumni of the School of Computer Science work in Silicon Valley like Zweben does. So, two years ago, the Alumni Advisory Board started a "Tour de Silicon Valley," which sends several dozen Carnegie Mellon students to meet with executives from Salesforce.com, Facebook, Become.com, Tellme Networks, Mozilla, and other West Coast companies. The students learn about the respective companies and possible job and internship opportunities. Zweben uses his contacts to help make the connections happen.
The roots of his innovative thinking can be traced back to his hometown of Forest Hills, N.Y., an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Queens. At age 13, he spent hours in the computer lab at Halsey Junior High School with one of his favorite teachers, Howard Weinman, the kind of mentor who would shoot hoops with his students after teaching them how to program a computer. With his interest piqued, Zweben continued his study of programming languages like BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL at the well-known Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. Although typical summer jobs for teenagers might be stocking grocery shelves, Zweben spent his high school summers operating and programming computers on Wall Street for the Muller Data Corporation. That gave him enough money for a 1971 Pontiac Firebird and a start in saving for college, where he planned to study artificial intelligence.
"I just always wanted to break new ground with computers, and it was clear that meant making them think more like humans," Zweben recalls. "It seemed so obvious that artificial intelligence was the next major breakthrough to make these computers really useful."
Zweben chose Carnegie Mellon University because the literature he received convinced him that computer science was a major focus at the university. He wound up choosing a university where the roots of artificial intelligence run deep. In 1956, Herbert Simon, associate dean of what was then the Carnegie Institute of Technology's business school, established the study of artificial intelligence with his student and associate Allen Newell (IA'57), along with their colleague J.C. Shaw of the RAND Corporation. While Zweben was in junior high school, Simon and Newell were winning the 1975 A.M. Turing Award, the most prestigious technical award from the Association for Computing Machinery. In 1978, Simon won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theory of bounded rationality, a theory of human decision making. Fittingly, many computer science courses at Carnegie Mellon are taught in Newell-Simon Hall, named after the late pioneers.
The summer before Zweben arrived at Carnegie Mellon, he learned the Pascal computer language on his own so he could skip freshman computer science and move ahead to sophomore courses. He helped pay for his college education by writing expert systems for Westinghouse, leaving campus three times a week to work in the company's quality and productivity center. The job didn't hurt his schoolwork. By his senior year, he was taking PhD-level artificial intelligence courses.
His first position out of college was at a quasi-governmental lab called MITRE, a sister company of RAND. At MITRE, he began researching artificial intelligence subfields of natural language and planning and scheduling. Within six months, he was promoted to a senior position, allowing him to work on MITRE projects with the Air Force, Army, and NASA.
He became intrigued with the new artificial intelligence branch at NASA Ames Research Center that opened near San Jose. He called Peter Friedland, from Stanford University, who started the lab, and offered his services as deputy chief. Friedland liked the bright 24-year-old and hired him. They worked together for the next seven years.
Their crowning achievement was Zweben's research project that revolutionized the way NASA space shuttles are repaired and maintained. Each year, NASA launched eight to ten space shuttles, and each of them needed a lot of refurbishing after the rough atmospheric re-entry to Earth. It took an average of 60 workdays and 40,000 hours of technician labor to refurbish a space shuttle for its next mission.
When Zweben arrived at NASA, he formed a close relationship with the maintenance managers in charge of the shuttles Columbia (Wayne Bingham) and Endeavour (Eric Clanton). The flow managers scheduled their technicians' jobs entirely by hand on long strips of paper–high-tech "to-do lists" cut out and rearranged with X-ACTO knives on a conference room wall. (NASA had an annual budget of $12,000 just for reams of paper and X-ACTO knives, Friedland says.) With that system, technicians often were double booked or underused while their managers struggled to schedule 10,000 separate maintenance tasks, only half of them predictable. There was a lot of overtime added to daily processing costs, which exceeded $1 million per day, Friedland says.
First, Zweben gave the flow managers a computer terminal to get rid of all that paper. Then, during the next three years, he worked with them to create a computerized scheduler that would "understand" the physical state of the shuttle and give managers a real-time glimpse into progress toward the 10,000 separately scheduled tasks that needed to be done.
"We thought Zweben was nuts when we first talked about the size of the challenge," says Clanton. "He wanted to climb the Mt. Everest of scheduling mountains."
Clanton and Zweben began to model all of the tests and inspections typically performed in shuttle maintenance. Their collaborative innovation–the Ground Processing Scheduling System–greatly enhanced shuttle maintenance, says Clanton. Zweben's software gave the flow managers customized reports on their computers and a true window into their operations. This helped them better determine which technicians should do what tasks, when, and with what resources. Schedule conflicts were foreseen and avoided, Clanton says, dramatically reducing overtime. This saved NASA $4 million a year in shuttle maintenance, acknowledged in NASA's book Atmosphere of Freedom: Sixty Years at the NASA Ames Research Center. The book notes that Zweben shared in the largest NASA Space Act Award to date for saving the government money. A version of his scheduler is still being used today at NASA.
Zweben left NASA in 1994, shaving his beard, trimming his hair. He would wear a suit and tie to work instead of his usual blue jeans. He had decided to go corporate, leaving NASA to fulfill his long-held dream to start a company.
He formed Red Pepper Software, where he used the same planning and scheduling technology he honed at NASA and applied it to solve problems in manufacturing and distribution for companies like Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and 3Com. Red Pepper Software helped businesses automatically adjust their manufacturing and distribution plans to react to changes in orders, inventories, and materials.
Zweben also found time to coedit Intelligent Scheduling, a 1994 anthology of technical papers and case studies about planning and scheduling breakthroughs.
"In the relatively snooty academic world, Monte didn't have a PhD because he was busy doing other things," Friedland says. But, he adds, Intelligent Scheduling gave Zweben unparalleled credibility. "It certainly is an important reference work for modern AI-based scheduling."
The planning and scheduling technology at Red Pepper became the heart of the manufacturing product at PeopleSoft, which eventually bought Red Pepper for about $250 million in 1996. "I was finally able to buy a home," Zweben says modestly. He was put in charge of a sales group for all manufacturing clients in the United States.
After being a "big company" executive at PeopleSoft for a couple of years, he again got the itch to do something entrepreneurial. He started Blue Martini Software in 1998 as a software solution for companies selling directly to consumers over the Internet. The software helped companies to understand who is buying, who is not, and why. Blue Martini's software often sold for more than $1 million, the Cadillac of e-commerce applications.
Credit Zweben's wife, Louise, for the company's uncommon name. Zweben wanted to continue the edgy branding he used at Red Pepper by adding a color to an object. The inspiration came to Louise when she, Zweben, and the director of product management went to a bar in San Francisco's Mission district. As they drank Cosmopolitans, Louise asked, "Why don't you just call it Blue Martini?" They finished their drinks, returned home, and were ecstatic to find that the URL was available.
Levi Strauss & Co. became the company's first customer; dozens of others followed suit. By 2000, Blue Martini had more than 30 customers and held its first public offering of company stock shares. This raised $150 million for Blue Martini and set the stage for company expansion. It swelled to 600 employees, made new versions of its e-commerce software, expanded into Europe and Asia. Customers like Saks Fifth Avenue and the U.S. Olympic Committee signed up, choosing Blue Martini software to create Web storefronts.
Then Blue Martini experienced a serious downturn as a result of the dot-com bubble burst. "What was a mad dash to get on the 'Net turned into a group of major companies saying, 'Why are we spending so much money on the 'Net?'" Zweben says. Blue Martini, like so many other tech companies, had to slash expenses. Layoffs reduced the company to 150 employees. "The most difficult period in my career was trying to turn that ship around and survive," Zweben says.
Zweben took Blue Martini private and merged it in 2005 with a number of companies. It exists today in a different form under the brand of Escalate Retail, a software provider focusing on merchandising, commerce, and customer relationships. Zweben is a minority shareholder of Escalate Retail.
After Blue Martini's merger, he and some former Blue Martini colleagues got together and decided to conquer another market: out-of-home digital media (advertising on digital outdoor billboards and in-store or place-based video networks). Some others were brought in, and the result is SeeSaw Networks.
On just another typical day inside his office at 220 Montgomery Street in San Francisco, Zweben is almost ready to finalize a deal with the chief marketing officer from a $2 billion retail clothing chain. The company wants to advertise its newest store opening on the West Coast and hopes to reach the on-the-go 18- to 34-year-old audience with the message.
"That's a mobile group that doesn't respond as much to print advertising," Zweben tells his potential client. "They record their TV programming, skip commercials, use the Web to get news, and listen to satellite radio. But if they see ads when they're out and about, they can't turn that off. Let us give you a campaign that finds all of the possible digital advertising venues within a certain radius of your new store that matches that audience."
The chief marketing officer is intrigued. Zweben keeps selling. He shows her SeeSawAds.com on his computer. After downloading a map of all of the places the ad would run–along with traffic numbers and demographic profiles, available for every last digital sign–the marketing officer decides to book a SeeSaw campaign to broadcast the digital ads in bars and restaurants, supermarkets, gas stations, and music stores that are near the new location. Another sale is made.
Jonathan Szish is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer.
