Mark Rosner taught Vivas that every contract detail matters

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:00:53

   Where do you get this like attention to detail that you have from? Did like, is that innate? Did somebody in like mentor you inside of Apple Oven? Yeah, so there's this guy called Mark Rosner and he's my mentor. And before we had a lawyer, he was our in-house counsel. What was his position in Apple Oven? So he was our CRO. And how we got a hold of Mark was he ran, he was the CEO of this company called Zedge, which did ringtones and wallpapers.

2. 1:01:19

   and he like broke off on his own and he had this blog called Applied Revenue. It was just talking about like ways to make more revenue on apps and just within the mobile app ecosystem. And I told Adam, hey, like we want to work with Zedge and like this guy seems pretty intelligent. You should reach out to him. What turned into like potentially was going to be a consultant. We decided he would come in as a CRO.

3. 1:01:40

   What was hilarious that when Mark first met Adam and they were doing like the sit down, Adam put an NDA in front of him. And, you know, most people just signed the NDA. And Mark says, hey, can I get like 15 minutes? Adam steps out of the room. And like Adam comes back to the room and Adam calls me in with him. And like the whole thing is like marked up. And he's like, I can't agree to this. I can't agree to that.

4. 1:02:04

   I can't agree here. And immediately I was like, you know, pull Adam to the side, right? Whisperer to me, I was like, we can't trust this guy. Like there's no way we can work with this guy. Like what type of fucking human being is going to like redline an NDA, like for a company they're interviewing for. Like what are they going to do? Share trade secrets. Adam had a different perspective. He goes, this guy, if he was this diligent to take the time to redline the agreement and go over detail, this is somebody that we want to work with.

5. 1:02:28

   Mark came on board. We ended up hiring. And initially, we did not get along well at all, actually. So he was managing the supply side. I was focused on the demand side. I brought in a center of demand. He was working on publishers. And what ended up happening was over time, I ended up working on his team. I'd say team because there was only one person. So I ended up working under him. And initially, you know, it wasn't a great relationship to turn into a great mentorship.

6. 1:02:53

   because what Mark saw was this raw kid who had a ton of energy, who had a ton of skill, but it wasn't honed in. He always pushed me to like really dig into the details. Like when we do contracts, make sure that we're very specific about what we do. And going back to like I told you, like we didn't have an in-house counsel, like Mark probably did over 200 agreements himself and we only got screwed on one of them.

7. 1:03:22

   Like, his hit record is incredible. When we hired our first lawyer and he started redlining agreements, he would redline our lawyer's agreement. Like, also, the best Mark Rosner story, and by the way, he's going to hate that I'm bringing him up. Mark doesn't hate anybody besides the one guy that he lent 20 bucks to when he was in fifth grade. He still sees a temple today. So, like, you're talking about a guy that, like, every detail matters to him.

8. 1:03:46

   And actually, to kind of, like, go, like, further into the story. So, at one point, you know, my grandmother, she had breast cancer. I had to go to the hospital and there was this deal that we were working on that took months. It was a company actually out of a little outside of LA. And we were so happy we got the deal done and like, you know, I was working on the agreement while in the hospital and I sent it out and they signed it and I signed it. And Mark calls me and, you know, I was expecting him to be like, oh, how's your grandmother doing? He's like, Raph, you screwed up big time on this deal.

9. 1:04:18

   there's like this, you know, one, one point that you're off effectively was off by like 1% or 2%. And I was like, Mark, like, are you kidding me? We spent months. I can't go back to the client. I can't have this conversation with them. And he was just like, do you want to be Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods? And just hung up the phone. And we're following up with me, following up with the client, renegotiating the deal. As you can imagine, the client's very irate.

10. 1:04:45

    And, you know, we got the deal done and then he called me back and he was like, good job. You know, like that was the type of guy who mentored me. And so that's why I cared so much about every single detail because for him, it wasn't good enough unless it was perfect. Yeah.