AdTech Executive Search

RAPTIVE

INVESTORS | ZMC · Abry Partners · Lionfish Capital · Himalaya Capital · Lighthouse Capital Partners · Perseus · Draper Fisher · Jurvetson Management

A creator with an audience is a business. Most of them are not run like one.

Raptive turns independent content creators into commercial media companies, handling ad management, audience strategy, technology, and business consulting so that creators can operate at the scale of a publisher without becoming one. Formerly CafeMedia, the company represents thousands of creator sites and is a Top 10 Global Media Company per Comscore.

the engagement

Raptive came to 33eleven Partners in 2019 for a CTO search. Over the next four years we ran eight, covering technology, data, marketing, customer, creator strategy, and engineering.

Eight searches for one client, across almost every function on the leadership team.

8

Searches completed

8

CANDIDATES PLACED

138

avg. days to close

PLACEMENTS

The first search, and the one that opened the relationship. Raptive needed a technology leader who could support a platform serving thousands of creator sites at scale.
The longest search we ran here and the most consequential. Raptive was repositioning from an ad network into a creator company, which is a brand problem before it is a marketing problem.
Raptive's value to creators rests on knowing more about audience behaviour than a creator could learn alone. This role owned that.
Growing audience across thousands of independent sites, each with its own voice and its own readers.
Creators are customers, partners, and the product all at once. This role existed to make that relationship work at scale.
Marketing to creators rather than to advertisers, a discipline that barely existed as a job description at the time.
Ownership of the creator relationship end to end as Raptive's roster grew.
Engineering leadership for the platform underneath everything.

PARTNERSHIP INSIGHTS

Eight searches for one client, and not one of them started from scratch.

Raptive spent four years becoming a different company. It began as an ad network and ended as the business creators build careers on, and the leadership team had to change with it.

The CTO search in 2019 defined what the data leader needed to be in 2020. The CMO who repositioned the brand shaped what creator marketing had to become in 2021. The customer and creator roles that followed only made sense once the brand did. We were in the room for all of it, which meant each search opened with four years of accumulated context rather than a fresh brief.