Podcast: Nick White, Osano, Part 1

This Part 1 of my interview with Nick White, head of marketing for Osano, the leading website privacy management platform. Today’s episode explores Nick’s career and how he got his first head of marketing role at Wealthsimple.

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Transcript:

Edward Nevraumont: Welcome to Marketing BS. My guest today is Nick White. Today's episode dives into his career, University of Washington, Pacific Continental Bank, Ignition Partners, A Place for Mom, Wealthsimple. He's now Head of Marketing at Osano, the leading privacy management platform.

Nick, Osano was the first time you oversaw all of marketing, but you had everything except for brand at Wealthsimple, is that correct?

Nick White: That's right.

EN: You were hired there as a director of marketing and you worked your way into the head of growth. How did you make that happen?

NW: I’ve been working at startups for a while and the nice thing about startups is that there's opportunity all over the place. There are way more things to do than there are hands to do it, and so you can just grab stuff. Over time, my interest and my desire to be opportunistic and add value to the company just led me to gradually expand my breadth of responsibilities, as I was also of diving into specific areas of marketing.

It really just happened organically. Over time as I built up a reputation at Wealthsimple and as the company continued to grow and we needed more people, it was a pretty easy conversation for me to say, “Hey, we should hire this person and they should report to me.”

EN: Did you take on more responsibility formally, or did you do the job before you had the job?

NW: Usually did the job before I had the job. There wasn't a ton of formality in the initial stages when something needed to be done and that formality tended to come later.

EN: Then who was doing it before you were doing it? Or just it wasn't getting done at all?

NW: It wasn't getting done at all, or somebody was doing it as an afterthought. Most frequently, it just wasn't getting done at all. We realized that we need to do something. I was somebody who would very frequently put their hands up and say, “Yes, I’ll do that thing.”

EN: What were those things? How did your job change from being head of growth to being director of marketing?

NW: I think the most straightforward way to think about it was on the basis of channels. We just started with pretty basic digital marketing. Over time, we expanded to doing a ton of e-mailing, to doing a lot of partnership marketing, to doing a lot of offline media marketing and a ton of data science and attribution work. With all of these different things, we didn't have domain experts in those areas. I knew some things about each of those areas. I knew that I could learn really quickly and that's just how it happened.

EN: How did you learn that stuff? There was no one at the company to teach you, no mentorship. Where did you learn the skills you needed to do the job?

NW: I think with most things in marketing, the basics are really basic. On day one at Wealthsimple, we set up paid search campaigns for the first time. Well, I never bought paid search before. It turns out, logging into google ads and setting up your first campaign is pretty darn easy. They put a lot of work into making sure that it's easy. Paid search can be really hard, really sophisticated, but not when it starts and not on day one.

As the company grew, as we had to scale operations, as we got more sophisticated about our targeting and our bidding, my knowledge could grow with it. Nice thing about learning about marketing, rather than any other discipline, marketers like to talk about themselves online. They like to share how smart they are. There's a lot of crap out there, but if you look hard you can find the really smart people who are talking about this in a way that's really digestible, but substantive.

EN: How are you able to find the good stuff and differentiate that from the crap?

NW: I think to start with, it's reading a bunch of crap and understanding what that looks like. Over time, you realize that smart people tend to like to be around other smart people. Just finding the right areas, finding one or two people that tends to snowball, because the smart people will reference other smart people. The BS people will tend to reference other BS people.

EN: That's helpful. What did you learn in that role that set you up for success at Osano?

NW: Well, some of it is things that we've already talked about; the breadth of channels, the depth of knowledge required to scale at any given channel. All of these things are different. The way that you measure different channels are always different, at least slightly. Understanding things like that. Understanding operations was really valuable. A lot of the things that I learned that are most transferable are softer. Every business is different. To some extent, I’m learning a brand-new job.

However, a lot of the softer stuff is quite transferable, so hiring, building a team and building a culture. Something that I really admire about Wealthsimple is that the founders were very thoughtful about creating a culture. They did a really good job of soliciting input, but not doing that too much and also, taking the reins and saying, “Hey, this is where the company and the culture is going.” That's not an obvious thing. Way too many businesses don't do that and especially early, that makes them bad places to be. That makes them difficult places to work and places that don't bring out the best in people. That's probably the most important thing that I’ve taken from Wealthsimple and then now applying at Osano.

EN: I want to go back to the path that got you there. I have a theory that the things people do when they're in junior high school affect them their entire lives. Maybe even in grade nine. What did you spend your time doing when you were 12 to 14-years-old? What were you passionate about then?

NW: I was into a lot of normal stuff. I grew up in North Dakota. Spent a lot of time riding my bike around with my friends, climbing trees and scraping knees. Did a lot of sports. I was very into geography and memorizing all of the capitals and all the lakes all over the world. There were a couple of non-standard things that I was pretty into. I happened to live right behind a golf course. If you cut through my backyard and a couple acres of woods and hopped a fence, you were on the third fairway of a public golf course in Bismarck, North Dakota.

That was a really fun playground for me. I spent a ton of time in there with my friends building forts and golfing and also fishing golf balls out of the water traps at Riverwood. Around that same time, I got really into eBay. This would have been 1998. I would have been 13 and eBay was about 2. It was very small. The Internet was new and I was really into a couple of websites and eBay was one of them. The problem with that was I didn't have anything to sell and I didn't have any money.

Going back to that golf course, my friends and I, we would go to the water traps at dusk when people weren't around and we'd collect a 100 or 200 golf balls. Then we'd fill up our golf bags. Really quickly, our golf bags got full. Then we'd go to used sporting goods stores around town and sell them. Well, pretty soon, their bins got full and then we had eBay. I started making money when I was 13. This was my real first job, by selling golf balls on eBay.

I did that for a little while. As soon as I got enough money, I bought a trampoline. I happened to be very into trampolines at this time. I was an active kid. I bought one trampoline, kept selling golf balls, bought another trampoline. Then I started buying and selling trampolines on eBay. In hindsight, this is a very impractical item on eBay, given the shipping cost relative to the buying and selling price, but I was into it and it was a non-obvious place on eBay to be buying and selling stuff. It wasn't beanie babies or things like that.

Pretty quickly, I cornered the market for trampolines on eBay. I knew exactly what price things would go for, and so I’d buy low and have them shipped to North Dakota and then I’d sell them for the market price. That was great, just because eBay was such an immature marketplace, there were arbitrage opportunities all over the place. That lasted for a little while and then that market was tapped out and the margins went away and then I got into golf clubs and things like that. Eventually, I got a real job, but that was a lot of fun for a couple of years.

EN: Did you know the word arbitrage back then?

NW: Definitely not. I just understood the concept of making money between a selling price and a buying price. I just intuited it.

EN: Do you think that those experiences stayed with you in some way?

NW: Yeah, I think so. I think as a kid, I was pretty restless, particularly in school. I wanted to move really quickly. I wasn't great at sitting still. I wasn't patient. Releasing those, or channeling those impulses into entrepreneurship and into having a side hustle certainly took me a long way, especially as a kid and into my career. I think those same things apply. If I didn't have that same level of hustle back then, I questioned whether or not I’d be – I would have been putting my hand up at Wealthsimple saying, “Hey. Oh, you need that thing done? I’m going to do it.” Not asking permission and just going at it.

EN: Did you maintain side hustles through your career?

NW: To some extent. I did until I didn't have the best experience. In 2011, I was living in Hong Kong. I was studying abroad for business school. I was feeling really restless there. School was really, really easy, and so I decided to start a business and I started a picture framing business, like buying and selling picture frames and professional printing. I set up a website. The reason why I chose that is I just knew that I could buy picture frames for really cheap, just over the border from where I was.

I was going to go back to Seattle within a couple of months and I could create some relationships with picture frame manufacturers in Southern China and then have them ship first couple thousand picture frames while I set up a website, since when I got back I’d be in business. I started doing that. That was my first real foray into online marketing. Grew the business and it was going well. It was fine when I was in business school. Then I graduated business school and I joined A Place for Mom. I met you and started working in this very serious job.

The problem was the company started doing really well. It just turned into this monster. Picture printing and framing is an offline business, their operations. I just been band-aiding everything. I had my roommates printing and framing these things and spraying down to ship them off. Then that didn't scale and then I brought in people on Craigslist. Then I would be leaving for work and letting people into my house. Then the wheels just really fell off. People started stealing from me and things were just constantly breaking. It was really awful.

Meanwhile, I was trying to focus on this very demanding job, but I’d have to leave at lunch and not eat lunch, because I had to go fix a printer at home. It was insanely stressful. At that point I said, “Screw it. That's it. I’m done.” I sold the website and I haven't had a sidekick since. I’ve been really thankful. To some extent, I thought I just burnt out on it. But no. I think I’m better off just having side gigs within any given company. It's a lot easier to manage yourself that way.

EN: You went to university at the University of Puget Sound. How did you come out different than when you went in?

NW: I think that you're doing it right if when you look back on yourself a couple years before, you think that that person was stupid and naïve. I don't mean that to disparage myself, but I do find that I feel that way about myself over time. I think that's good. That's a good signal. That means that I’m growing and I’m getting smarter and better. That was certainly true from the first day to the last day at school. I think that I came to school with a very narrow view of people.

I come from North Dakota and people are very similar there. There isn't much diversity. Most people are white. Most people are Christian and Republican. Most people like football and hunting and fishing. I’d done a lot of traveling as a kid, but I hadn't done a lot of really getting to deeply know diverse people and understanding that and appreciating diversity and understanding the importance of diversity was something that took me until I was 18-years-old to really get my head around. That was a tremendously valuable thing that stuck with me.

EN: Say you'd gone to Minot State University, instead of the University of Puget Sound, how do you think your life and career would be different?

NW: I’m not sure. I suspect – if I could answer that question by analogy, looking at my peers that went to college in North Dakota, I’d probably still be there. I probably would have gotten married in my early 20s, rather than my early 30s. I probably would have not moved to a different state. I probably may have moved to Minnesota, but that would have been as far as I would have gone. I’d probably still be there.

EN: Some of that though is that those people that chose to stay are different people than you. Do you think you would have got the urge to leave later?

NW: Maybe. A lot of my friends there have had the urge to leave and haven't left. It's really easy to rag on places like North Dakota, when we drive through it and see that it's just a wasteland. I am a defender of my home states and I do think it's a great place. I could have been entirely happy there. It's just a question of being a big fish in a little pond, versus a little fish in a big pond.

EN: You started your career in finance. Even post-MBA, you were still in finance. How did you switch into marketing? How did you make that happen and why?

NW: Really, I was just following finance. It was interesting to me. I did finance out of school. Really liked it. I did commercial banking through the 2008 recession, which was hard, but a very good learning experience. Then I did venture capital. Then I joined A Place for Mom doing corporate finance.

It just so happened that that team, A Place for Mom, happened to do a lot of operational analytics, in addition to financial analytics. We were looking at numbers, but not all of the numbers had dollar signs in front of them, like at a lot of finance organizations. A Place for Mom had three big areas of the business. There was our call centers, our sales teams and marketing. We would disperse into these different areas. Over time, we formed a dedicated business intelligence team that I worked on, that was a little bit separate from finance. Was working on that and I was leading that.

I was always the marketing guy. It wasn't from happenstance. I really was interested in it. I was interested in the people and I was interested in the problems. I was interested in one area of marketing in particular, which was TV and offline media. We’re used to being very accurate and precise with our measurement of online media and the challenge of bringing that same rigor to offline media was really cool to me. I spent a lot of time doing that, working really closely with the person who ran that channel. Then one day, that person left. I walked in the CMO's office and I said, “Hey, I want that job.” I built up a reputation of being a smart person, that could learn quickly. They said, “Sure.”

EN: Nick, what were the biggest failure points in your career? Where did things not go as expected?

NW: I think the biggest failure point for me was probably right out of the gate. Not eBay, but when I graduated from college. I graduated in 2007 and the economy wasn't that hot, but a lot of my peers got good jobs and I didn't. I think a lot of the reason why that happened is me. I didn't take finding a job very seriously. It was winter and then spring of our senior year and I wasn't being very aggressive, or dedicating very much time to finding my next thing after school.

My first job out of school was being a secretary at a law firm. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. That job was useful in that I learned that I didn't want to be a lawyer. Just talking to the attorneys in that law firm, they were telling me, “No. Don't do this. If you can do anything else, don't do this.” Aside from that, it was really, really not fun. I spent my days learning Spanish and reading The Economist. My job was just way too easy and it wasn't stimulating and it wasn't allowing me to grow.

I moved out of that just about as quickly as possible. In hindsight, it was a massive mistake. It was a really inauspicious way to start my career. Eventually, I got into banking, which there was a lot more upward mobility in, but that first step right out of the gate was pretty sub-optimal.

EN: Now, it sounds like you learned something there. What would have happened if you hadn't had that experience? Would it have mattered?

NW: I don't know. I emphasized one key thing that I learned, but I could have learned that probably by just getting coffee with five lawyers and not wasted six or eight months of my life doing a job that wasn't right for me. I’ve always valued learning and I was learning there, but it wasn't the things that I wanted to – it wasn't the knowledge that I wanted to gain. It wasn't the skills that I wanted to acquire. I learned some stuff, but I don't think it was the right stuff.

EN: I want to end with one of your productivity secrets. Would you recommend that others get up regularly at 2 or 3 a.m.?

NW: Maybe. I was a night owl my entire life. Then four or five years ago, something changed and I became a morning person. I really became a morning person, to the point where I wake up embarrassingly early. A lot of times, it's 2 or 3 a.m. I don't do this deliberately, so I wouldn't recommend that people set alarms to do that. I’m a huge fan of sleeping as much as you need. It just so happens that I can naturally wake up very, very early. It's been really great for me. I used to live in New York and the work culture in New York City is coming to work late, but stay really late. You work hard, but a lot of times people's days start at 10:30, 11 a.m. Really, really late.

My co-workers would traipse in at that time and meanwhile, I’ve been working for eight hours. My level of preparation and the amount of throughput that I could have, just they couldn't compete, because I could be so far ahead. I basically had a free extra day of work relative to them. For me, it was great. This has just been a weird thing about my body's chemistry that's been really nice. I don't set an alarm. It just happens. If it just happens for you – 3 a.m. is a great time to work. There aren't any distractions, because there can't be distractions. Even if you go to Twitter, there's nothing happening. In that sense, it's really nice.

EN: Thank you, Nick. We'll continue this interview tomorrow with a dive into how Nick is growing Osano.