Spotlight: Nate Peterson – CEO of Tagboard
Give us the story of Nate and what brought you to Tagboard?
I’ve always been a serial builder, from Legos to businesses. I never fit into the conventional box or took the obvious paths in life, and over time discovered my calling as that of a creative dreamer, a challenger to norms, and a passionate storyteller. You can see this in action with each company I’ve been fortunate to build over the course of my career.
Born and raised by a single mom in the greater Seattle area, we never had much, but we always had enough. My mom instilled in me the value of hard work from an early age, leading by example to make sure we always had. My dad left the picture when I was 7, and from what I know found success in his career as an engineer, building some of the earliest modems for one of the largest companies in our lifetime. Ultimately the money and success led him down the wrong path and he lost his life to a violent drug crime when I was 11. The drastically different paths of my parents shaped my perspective on life and has helped keep me grounded in good times and bad.
The early part of my career was spent being an “intrapreneur” of sorts at Microsoft and then T-Mobile, building the earliest social media strategies, which led to increasingly larger teams and budgets as social made the shift from organic to paid media.
In the “first” risky move of my career, I left the relative safety of corporate life to work for former Silicon Valley Bank COO Brendan Kennedy, who was quietly building out his vision for the Proctor & Gamble of cannabis brands at Privateer Holdings. I had little to no affinity with cannabis, but I was intrigued by the opportunity to build brands that would shape the future of this exciting emerging industry. Together, we built the beginnings of Tilray, Leafly, and Marley Natural during my tenure, two of which would later IPO on the NASDAQ.
Ultimately, I wasn’t passionate enough about cannabis to sustain the energy it required to continue building. So in late 2016, when I was coming off a few projects (working with 12 different CEO’s across various industries), I met Tagboard’s founding team.
I originally took on a consulting role for then COO, Jenni Hogan, and quickly came on board full-time to help Tagboard’s Founder, Josh Decker, right size and revamp the business. We bootstrapped the turnaround and grew the business from a few million to $6M ARR and in 2021 where Josh asked me to take over the business. I took the company out to raise our Series A at that time and we took in $14.2M to continue to solve issues in enterprise live content production, as a challenger to the old archaic hardware companies.
What was the original goal or real-world problem that Tagboard looked to solve and how has that evolved since you took over?
When I walked into Tagboard, we were one of four companies on the market that aggregated social media content for public display purposes (think selfies on a jumbotron at a Seahawks or Mariners game). One of the big problems we encountered in the early part of the turnaround, was that the other three companies each got acquired by large businesses such as Adobe and Spriklr, giving them more cash and support, and allowing them to push further into the social media management ecosystem that we hoped to dominate. We needed to find a new path forward and discovered that our power users were actually content producers who wanted to use social content to tell stories with speed and context. Breaking news was just starting to shift to the speed of social media. So we capitalized on the timing and doubled down on the production market.
“Tagboard Producer” launched in 2018 which condensed the workflow for delivering social content to just a few clicks. We knew we were on to something when one of our major partners was willing to use our alpha version live and product March Madness with it. Needless to say, those were some sleepless nights in Seattle.
This early success continued to build on itself since our system was so easy and inexpensive to use. As we started to work with more major media brands, we learned that groups such as NFL and FOX Sports had been hacking legacy systems together in order to put 3rd party graphics on air. This led us to build a new adjacent product in 2019 that we called Tagboard Cloud Graphics. No one could have predicted the global pandemic in 2020 that forced early market fit for our product to help media companies arm producers, from their couches, to make content that had the same quality as the hardware systems. It was Tagboard to the rescue for these and other groups.
Our growing brand recognition in the cloud-based media workflow space attracted the attention of an incredible group of investors to back our plans to build the next generation of Tagboard products. Led by Grayhawk, Next Frontier Capital, and WestRiver Group we raised $14M for our Series A including some of the most exciting companies in the media and sports industries such as the NBA, Sinclair Broadcast, three NFL Ownership Groups, MLB, the Greg Norman Group and others.
Today Tagboard helps democratize media production by taking a no code, drag and drop, approach to delivering real time data and graphics into live TV environments. This goes far beyond real-time social, as Tagboard now delivers efficient, contextual, creative and revenue-generating graphics for our clients. WTF does that mean you ask?! Well, imagine LeBron James breaks another record, and within a second, Tagboard serves the producer/content creator immediately with multiple graphics to aid in the story while the passion is at an all-time high for the viewer; a stat, a social reaction, a bet to place, a jersey to buy, a collectible to own. You name it, Tagboard delivers it.
Today we serve our product to the tune of 500+ media brands, hundreds of thousands of shows, 10 out of 15 of the productions supporting some of the most watched TV shows in the world, and hundreds of billions of impressions reached globally every year. From the World Cup to the Super Bowl, Oscars, even the Puppy Bowl; and in the process garnered 5 out of the last 6 Emmys for Digital Interactivity. Pretty fucking cool.
Tell us about Tagboard’s culture and why people are so committed to its vision?
While pivoting our business model in 2017, we had an uphill battle to build and re-establish our culture. Everyone was unhappy, and all prior attempts to rally around a common set of values fell on def ears. If I’m being honest, we didn’t solve culture first. We solved our core issues and from that emerged the culture that we all embrace and enjoy today.
The team couldn’t have achieved this without our Head of People, Stephane Smith. Stephanie had recently graduated from Gonzaga with her MBA focusing on company culture building and HR. She was tasked to define, lead and beat the drum on a consistent company vision, mission, and values system. Steph’s deep knowledge, empathy, and relentless drive matched my creative energy, and together we devised a system to curate the first bottoms-up values system for Tagboard.
We had the good fortune on a recent all-hands session to ask Seahawks Super Bowl Champion, Doug Baldwin, if he thought it was harder to build or sustain culture to which he thoughtfully responded “it’s way easier to build than it is to sustain a culture”. He’s not wrong, and the reason we are now 3x Best Place to Work and 3x Best Employer in Sports (FOS), is because we don’t view values as a top-down set it and forget it dictation, rather, we view them as a bottom up, living set of actionable and measurable statements. Every year we audit our values with the current team to assure as the company’s base of team members evolves, so will our values. The one value that has sustained every audit? Just give a shit.
This isn’t your first startup rodeo, so how does leading Tagboard compare to your other companies?
If it wasn’t obvious from what I shared earlier about culture, I fundamentally believe in the power of people to build. Past and present, I’ve met and worked with a world-class group of people in this company. From our team, to clients, to investors and advisors - I am one lucky guy! My role as a leader has been shaped and evolved by the people I’ve worked with, but I’ve never been as proud of an effort as I am every day of Tagboard. I dare my team to try and out-hustle me, but always caveat it with the importance to not focus on the hours, but rather the impact of that grind. Every element of this company gives me the energy every morning to bounce up, solve problems, and build. Tagboard has many extremely talented people who match or even exceed my energy, with ideas and execution that makes me so lucky to be a leader standing beside them.
What keeps you up at night?
Three boys under the age of 7. A team of 40 amazing humans who I feel responsible for. Navigating a rapidly evolving media industry, in a less-than-ideal economy, to deliver a return for my stakeholders. But mostly, three boys under the age of 7…
What has it been like working with WestRiver Group?
I knew when I met you (Anthony) that we had to work together. The energy match was great and the depth of knowledge in our space was clear. WRG has stepped up to help us in ups and downs, providing hands-on resources where needed, sage advice, thoughtful questions, and connections into important influencers in our industry. I am proud to have WRG in our corner and thankful that we are on this journey together.
What does the future hold for Nate and the Tagboard team?
I can almost guarantee that you’ve already seen Tagboard live and just didn’t know it. If you watch any live TV (news, sports, entertainment), or have been to any sporting event in the US you have seen us. It may not be obvious but that is also our trojan horse to everything we created to change the way this industry produces content. The media produced with Tagboard generates hundreds of billions of impressions every year, with a gross media value that exceeds most Fortune 500 media budgets. As we evolve our products to take advantage of that value, more of what you see on TV will be produced through Tagboard. I look forward to sharing this story again in ten years and when asked how it all began, to simply smile and say “It all started with a few selfies on a big screen”.
