Solar stocks surge after Treasury tightens clean energy tax credit rules
On Tuesday, 12 August 2025, Taboola (NASDAQ:TBLA) presented its strategic vision at the Oppenheimer 28th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference. The company highlighted its ambitious growth targets and strategic pivots, while also addressing challenges in the evolving advertising landscape. CEO Adam Singolda emphasized the importance of performance marketing and leveraging first-party data, alongside a strong commitment to shareholder returns.
Key Takeaways
- Taboola aims for $2 billion in revenue by 2025, targeting over $200 million in adjusted EBITDA.
- The company is pivoting to performance marketing with its "Realize" initiative to drive growth.
- A strong focus on share buybacks, with 12% already repurchased in the first half of 2023.
- Exploration of Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance productivity and innovation.
- Challenges include competition in performance advertising and changes in search traffic dynamics.
Financial Results
- Taboola is targeting $2 billion in revenue by 2025, with a total addressable market of $55 billion.
- The company expects over $200 million in adjusted EBITDA, with margins exceeding 30%.
- 70% of EBITDA is projected to convert to free cash flow, supporting aggressive share buybacks.
- Revenue ex-tech is forecasted to grow by 3-4% in the short term, with margins stable at 30%.
Operational Updates
- The "Realize" initiative is central to Taboola’s strategy, with 650 advertisers currently testing the platform.
- The company is prioritizing demand growth and advertiser spend over expanding its publisher network.
- Taboola News is performing well, contributing positively to the company’s supply strategy.
- Challenges include the need for accelerated growth in the native advertising space to achieve long-term goals.
Future Outlook
- Taboola aims to return to double-digit growth through "Realize" and other initiatives like Bullet News and Commerce.
- The company is exploring LLMs across departments to improve productivity and unlock new opportunities.
- Key challenges include reliance on "Realize" for growth, potential impacts from cookie deprecation, and competition in performance advertising.
Q&A Highlights
- The main hurdles for "Realize" include rapid learning, achieving KPIs, and increasing advertiser spend.
- LLMs are being integrated to improve productivity and create new value, empowering employees.
- Despite a strong buyback program, Taboola is committed to maintaining a net cash neutral position.
Readers interested in further details can refer to the full transcript below.
Full transcript - Oppenheimer 28th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference:
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for a fireside chat with Tabula. I’m Jason Halstein, head of, Internet research at Oppenheimer. I’m very excited to have CEO Adam Singoldo with me here today. The format is a fireside chat. If you do wanna participate and have some questions, you can use the link just down below the webcast, or you can email me at jason.helfstein@opco.com, and I will try to ask your question.
So, Adam, thank you for joining. So, just well, let’s just start off. For those not familiar with the company, describe what Taboola does and what’s unique about the company’s offering.
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: Sure. Thanks for having, Evan, me, Jason, and and, Oppenheimer. So with Tibula is the the leading performance advertising platform in the open web. If you think about the advertiser experience, they always buy a search in social if they wanna drive leads and growth for their business. And then Tibula is the the third, a lot of times, company they go to for the same value just outside of search and social.
We reach about 600,000,000 people every single day across incredible partners such as Yahoo and Apple News and Disney and NBC and USA Today and many others. Our advantage in this market and the reason we’re doing a good job for advertisers is because of that distribution I mentioned as well as we have a huge amount of first party data, which helps us to know that Jason might be in market to buy a drone and Adam might be in market to go to the next game. And those signals that come from things people read across the open web help us kind of show ads that we think you might like and participate in. The market is big. It’s a $55,000,000,000 market opportunity that we’re going after.
Our 2025, roughly, our goals are $2,000,000,000 of revenue from that $55,700,000,000 of x tech, which is what we keep after we share with publishers. That’s the main metric our management kind of is tracking that we’re trying to grow every year. Of that, we generate over $200,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA, which is 30 plus percent margin. And we have a strong free cash flow of 70% of EBITDA, which we’re using aggressively to buy our shares as we think that’s a good investment. We bought 12% of the company just in the first half of the year, and we intend to continue to aggressively buy shares.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: So within advertising technology, you have players who focus on the demand side, represent the buyers. You have folks who focus on the supply side. They represent the publishers. You have a a two sided marketplace. You have, in many cases, exclusive long term relationship with publishers.
You then go out and you have Salesforce, you market directly to advertisers to agencies. Just talk about the, you know, the uniqueness of being a two sided marketplace and the advantages that gives you.
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: Yeah. So outside of the financial advantage, which is we do have 35 to 40% margin, ex tech margin, which is which is a healthy margin in in in general if you think about the advertising space. Putting that aside, it gives us an advantage in that Tabula, while we’re a b to b company, we don’t have a consumer business. In many ways, we’re like a consumer business because we have 11,000 publishers who work with us exclusively for a long time. Three, five, ten, Yahoo is thirty years, which means that inventory, that access to consumer is a highly predictable inventory.
It means if we see me on ESPN today and I go tomorrow, Tabula knows I just was here yesterday. So that gives us this predictable kind of supply access, which allows us to also innovate on the user experience and trying to try new things, which is a lot of time the strength of consumer businesses versus ethic, which a lot of time is a bit more volatile. You may win some auction today, you may not win some auction tomorrow. We don’t have those dynamics in our business. The vast majority of our publishers just have code on page.
It’s us, gives us very strong signals. And then on the advertising side here as well. Well, a lot of times you’ll hear companies speak about programmatic revenue and pipes and things. With us much like Meta, 90% of the revenue of the 2,000,000,000 I mentioned, that’s driven by our clients. They buy from realize from our technology using our AI, our first party data.
So we we’re in a place where our our publishers and advertisers are both direct, which allows us to invest in technology and keep improving our performance to both publishers and advertisers. So think especially in a world like today when performance advertising is so important and clients want to see outcomes and measurement to be able to be so close to the publisher and so close to the advertiser gives us an advantage.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: And and and the fact that, you know, we’ll we’ll get to that. We’ll get one of the points, but I wanna I wanna segue to realize. So you made a decision, I don’t know, maybe it’s probably, what, eighteen months or so ago to pivot more to direction of performance marketing, through your product branded Realize. So talk about why you made that decision and kind of, like, where are we in the deployment of that product?
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: I mean, look, we were always kind of mostly performance advertising. The what’s unique with Realize, which was officially this year, but, obviously, we’re always working on on these things as we as we go. The the biggest difference is that for the last decade plus, we’ve grown what’s referred to as the native advertising part of performance advertising in the open web. If you think about the open web, the types of ads you can show on on a website, it can be at the bottom of the article, which is what we did, and that’s referred to as native advertising. And then actually most of it, the rest of it is display advertising.
And that is something that we never did up until now. We’ve realized what happened was we noticed that the native advertising space is not as big as we want it to be. And two, many of our advertisers and advertisers we met told us they wanna get performance, but they’re not gonna get educated on native advertising bottom of article and said, look. We already work with Google. We have display ads.
We work with Meta. We have social creatives. Can you take it and use it anywhere you want and show us that you can be good at driving performance? And that is what Realize made. It was a it was a shift from native advertising to all of performance advertising market, making it easier for advertisers to work with us with using whichever creative they have, whichever goal they have.
And on our side, we now have access to all of the supply on the publisher side. So we can place an ad on the homepage, in the middle of the page, on the right side, at the bottom of the article, wherever we think value will be created for to the advertiser, we can now have access to that. So that was a big shift, and we’re exclusively laser focused on growing demand and spend. We think that our path from 2,000,000,000 to 4,000,000,000 revenue is primarily driven by getting more demand, getting more spend from advertising, getting more scaled advertisers to work with the company.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Okay. And did you have to redo your publisher deals to get inventory higher up on the page given your original deals were structured as kind of a native deals?
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: It’s it’s it’s not an agreement change. It’s more of a process of asking publishers to be connected to their the entire inventory they have, which is which is a process, but it’s not it’s not a difficult process because they’re motivated to have to go and try to provide more demand into that auction. So this is they’re motivated to do it with us and so but we do have to ask them to integrate us into that inventory that lives outside of bottom of Oracle, which we’re now still doing across our 11,000 publishers. But, yeah, there’s there’s a process of asking, integrating, launching.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Right. And so so the inventory on the bottom of the native, that’s still exclusive, but then the other inventory might be nonexclusive.
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: It’s it is not exclusive, and that’s actually, you know, the advantage we have in that market, which is again big. We estimate just to give you some context, we estimate that there’s about $10,000,000,000 of display ads on our publishers generated by smaller ad tech companies in a fairly fragmented space. So we do think that at least from the $10,000,000,000 of display spend, we should be able to take 30% of some good market share from that from that part of the market. So but when we bid on that those display spots on our publishers, and we only do it on our publishers, we use our first part of data advantage from the bottom of article, which is which is interesting to see how that asset fuels kind of our next wave of growth as we’re bidding on supply that we know Adam read this, clicked on that ad. We maybe even bought something, and now I have first party data advantage.
You have to understand that these spots on the publisher side that have DSPs and CSPs trying to currently monetize it are all third party. None of them. Not even one to my knowledge. It’s not maybe Google, which owns the browser as well. But but none of them has first party cookie, which means they’re always seeing it for the first time.
So we’re very unique. Thanks to the bottom of article assets we’ve built over the last decade to go in and and and win some of that auction.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Got it. And so to the extent that if there was cookie deprecation, which nobody knows where we are now and who knows what Google will be doing with a third party, you know, business in the future, any changes to that would be to the benefit of Tbula.
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: Well, historically, was. Historically, when Apple deprecated third party cookies on Safari, it made it harder for other companies to drive a similar outcome to the to the advertisers, which meant made advertisers try new channels including Tabula. So historically, it was a source of growth for us, and who knows what’s gonna happen. But, even today without third party cookies going away, that is that is still very valuable to know, that you’re you’re here again and again.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: So you you kind of lose the fact that the goal is to double kind of gross revenue over a period of time. Yet, we’ve entered a period where I think you’re forecasting kind of, you know, revenue ex tech growth at about three to 4% and kind of intimated in the short term that’s probably the growth for the, you know, near term next few quarters. Like, what do you need to do to kinda reaccelerate that to, you know, obviously get back to some kind of double digit growth if you’re gonna double the gross revenue over extended period of time?
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: Yeah. You know, as we enter this year and we start feeling last year that the native advertising space would not be big enough, not grow big enough to kind of justify the double digit growth we’ve always had. And, you know, you can you can see we’re growing kinda, like, with the market. This last quarter, we grew faster at 15%. And in general, the guidance we’ve given this year represents kinda, like, growing with the native advertising space, which we estimate is a single digit growth rate.
We wanted to give the engineers and the sales team and the marketing team an opportunity to really go out, learn from the market, see what advertisers need, and give our give the team a chance to really, you know, do the work as we as we, you know, go back to double digit. So we believe that Realize is the main way to go to double digit. There are many good things about the company, you know, that’s going on. The bullet news is doing well. Commerce is doing well.
Social commerce is doing well. But there’s lot of good things, but Realize is the main highway to capture, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of net new kind of growth spend every year and and go back to double digits. And the the main metric I encourage you guys to, you know, investors to track is scaled advertisers that that represents kind of a good proxy for stable revenue. We we want to you know, if we double that number, which I hope to do, that means at least doubling the revenue of the business of Taboola. So that is that is one metric that we were sharing with investors because we think that represents stable revenue of performance advertisers that believe Tabula is a sustainable channel.
And we’re seeing good early signs from realized. I mentioned on on earnings, and just you and I talked about it last week. We have 650 advertisers kind of already trying it trying the the product, and we’re seeing good good early signs of success. Usually, we either wanna see new advertiser that did not work with us before but now can or existing advertisers spending more because now they can start a new campaign like a display campaign on top of their native campaign and just see if it can be driving incremental conversions. So we’re seeing, you know, early signs that represent those two.
I would say we’re seeing more of the latter one. Some more existing advertisers just spending a bit more. And as we see more traction of advertisers trying it and growing, that will help us get the conviction that we can go back to double digit growth.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: So, basically, the process is, you know, your existing Salesforce, perhaps you are more Salesforce, and then basically getting clients to either do a b testing or onboarding new advertisers and have them testing the new product.
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: Yeah. The the way they don’t do a b testing because they’re they’re happy with it. So let’s say I spent a $100,000 in native now. I’m not I don’t I actually don’t want this to go away. I rely on that spend for my for the growth of my business.
If I’m selling products and I and I have sustainable spend with Tabula at a scale of a $100,000 a year, let’s say, that spend is very important to me. I don’t want it to go away. What I usually do is I will start a new campaign in in using social and display created and say, well, can I now grow my spend at a similar cost per acquisition? If I can do that, that is incremental to them, which is good for us and them. So it’s less about the AB test.
They don’t need to test the existing spend. They just wanna see they test if they can grow that spend at the same cost per client. That’s what they want. And then net news I mean, new advertisers are obviously incremental because they’re new.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: And then how does Tabula News play into the strategy?
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: Tabula News and if you if you recall when we talked at Nasdaq earlier this year, said realize has the supply strategy of Realize is looking for places where we have very good data or consumers really convert well for advertisers. We want we wanna work with partners that advertisers drool just imagining their ads being on that place. Tibulla News is one of those type of partners. It’s a it’s a significant business growing faster than the rest. It’s where for those who may not know, the Golden News is where we aggregate content, and we we integrate that on device like Samsung in in Europe, in some markets, Xiaomi, and others.
And we are the news feed for them. So the the OEM can send notification, the piece of content, or they can swipe right and see the news. We monetize that with Realize, and it and it tends to be a very good conversion area to advertisers much like Yahoo is amazing, much like Apple News is great. I mean, those great partners, a lot of times, are just great for advertisers. So typically, it just plays into that supply strategy.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: So one of the things that it’s notable that you do not talk much about CTV or video, yet if I looked at, you know, the most conference calls. Right? Like, the amount of keywords you you’d say. So, you know, you I think you’ve you’ve actively chosen, you know, like, not not to do that. So maybe talk about why you think why you’ve you’ve chosen not to kinda focus on those areas.
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: One of things you used the word focus. I think the word focus for any company other big or small is the hardest thing to do and the most important thing to do. It’s it’s only when you start to believe or tell yourself you can do a lot of a bit of a bit of everything is when I think you start risking the company. And so focus and focus on the right strategy is is the most important thing for companies and management teams and and everyone. As I look as I look at the market broadly, first of all, I think performance advertising is big now and becoming bigger.
So search and Meta and and and Google are primarily performance advertising, and they’re the best companies in the space. We is performance advertising in games. They’re amazing. And and you’re seeing more and you’re seeing agencies, you know, like, and you’re just seeing everyone talking about outcome and management. So first of all, I’m I think we’re on the right side of the industry, which that’s about strategy.
So I think it’s the right strategy. I would not wanna be in the top of the funnel branding space today when the first thing a CMO stops, when the economy is unclear, is you. You’re the first call, and it’s the wrong call you wanna get. And to the extent even CTV which is historically a branding play, now has companies like Amazon saying no, not good enough. Even TV should be performance and they’re coming in hot saying those dollars should come to us because we can show you outcomes and measurement connecting TV to Amazon.
So I think for us, you know, we wanna be in performance. And I think CTV is a fairly, you know, concentrated competitive space that still most of it is branding, and the part that’s not branding is Amazon, and I’m happy to be in a different place. So for those reasons, that’s not that’s not an area of focus for us. If we ever go into CTV, I can tell you it’s gonna be finding ways to help advertisers get performance. So if we ever go there, that will be our step in.
By no means do I care about running a TV video ad with the hope at measuring things like viewability or completion rate. Could not care less.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: And so to be clear, like, where you’re at right now, you have enough publishers. Correct? Like, adding publisher partners is not a focus of the business anymore.
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: Oh, we I mean, don’t get me wrong. I mean, I’d love to get as many publishers as we can. If they’re good for advertisers, I want them all. Do I have enough supply and publishers to double the business by just getting more demand? Yes.
So do we need more publishers to double the company? We don’t. Do we still work very hard to get more OEMs, great platforms like the ones we have, more publishers that are incredible that I always wanted to work with? Yes. All day long, all the time, globally.
But but we would do it only if it was financially beneficial to everyone, and we would do it primarily if it was beneficial to advertisers.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: And how often do you call publishers? Like, remove publishers that either you know, like, maybe that, for whatever reason, it’s not a right fit or you can’t send them, like, enough traffic because there’s kinda more efficient publishers to use.
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: You’re saying, what’s question? How often do
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: they How often do you call publishers? Do you say, you know what? We don’t wanna work with you anymore. Oh, that As in reason.
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: As in part ways with publishers? Yes. Oh, that happens all the time. I mean, if we work with publishers, generally, you know, smaller ones we don’t have long tail, but, I mean, it can happen from time to time that that someone doesn’t convert for adverts. So we have this index that shows how is your audience converting for advertisers, performance advertising.
Again, we’re very data driven. We know what works. We know what’s not. And if your traffic on your site for some reason is below the index to a certain degree, then we ask you to try to fix it. And if you can’t fix it, then it’s not good for any one of us because advertisers don’t wanna be on your site, and you don’t wanna work with us if we can’t monetize your traffic.
So we so, you know, we kindly part ways, and that that happens.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: So maybe it’s that way. Search represents something between 30 to 40% of traffic for most large publishers as we’re kinda moving into this kind of agentic search, you know, world where, you know, you can get the answer without leaving the search engine. You know, how did that kind of second order effect impact Abulo?
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: To to date, it was, you know, we have not seen any material impact. We we did share a number of that as a company, when you look at The US, traffic, The US business, which is about half, Roughly 5% of traffic is driven by search. When you look at and but the reason is it’s a fairly small number is because we have big partners such as Yao and Microsoft and Apple and others that just have either no search traffic or a little bit of search traffic. So they’re completely immune from from all of this. And then you have then the rest of our bit our publisher base is mainly driven by big names that we all know and love forever.
And those tend to have lower search traffic percentage. They’re more direct direct traffic. So because of that, the blend is small. And when we look at the impact of that search traffic, which is the only traffic that is at risk. So I don’t think there’s a risk of someone stop loving a publisher they go to every day.
That I don’t think that’s changing, but search traffic is at risk. So it’s 5% of our business now, and we’ve seen a single digit change to that to that 5%. So the impact to date has not been big big, and I’m fairly excited about actually the opportunity it creates for publishers because when Google and Gemini figures out how to monetize an LLM conversation. And when I think about the publisher’s value, which is primarily around decisions that that matter. When when you buy something or when you travel somewhere or when you have a concern about a health care, you GPT is never enough.
You will never ever no one on this call or that will listen to this afterwards has never been on a CHED GPT for thirty seconds asking a question about a travel for their fam with their family and then clicking and booking that trip. That has never happened and will never happen because you will always need before you take your kids and you schlep everyone for the vacation, you’re always gonna spend time watching videos, getting reviews, want some trusted raw data about that trip. And how many times did we it looked nice at the beginning and then we didn’t do it because the reviews were horrible or the or the experience for some people were was not good. And that’s where the open web wins big time. And I think if we can have those L and M conversations on the open web and we’ve launched a product called deeper dive early stage that is trying to go after that, I think there’s a huge opportunity for the open web to grow revenue in ways we have not seen before.
And look, I mean, look at companies like Perplexity, which we just joked that, you know, they wanna buy Chrome It’s probably worth 10 x stats, so that was a good PR stunt. But nevertheless, you know, Perplexity is one and a half million people a day using their service. That’s it. It’s a small it’s a small company.
And if you look at the open web, billions of people are traveling the open web looking for information that matters. The opportunity for the investment community and for technology and publishers for that piece, I think, is significant. So I’m excited about it. Early days, we’ll see what happens. But I think Gemini and Google have a huge upside because of that, less search traffic, much more monetization.
And the same will travel into the publishers on their own sites. So I’m I’m very long on publishers and join LLM as well as Gemini, And and we’ll see we’ll see how that evolves.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: So if we think about the revenue ex tech margins have been it was 30% last year. I think we’re estimating, like, 30% this year. If you broke it down, you’d say, well, sell, like, a 20% DSP fee, a 10% SSB. That’s a healthy rate if you were kinda comparing to, like, independent companies. You know, are are like, are you charging too much?
If you charge less, could you grow faster?
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: I mean, we for the we we optimize for growth. So we we always wanna grow x tech the fastest while being profitable. So for us, the our margin philosophy is we wanna add about 35, 40%. We think that’s a good place from an x tech margin. We wanna grow that as much as we can dollar amount.
So the dollar amount, wanna grow as much as we can. Our EBITDA margin, we want to be 30 plus percent. So we’re not we’re not optimizing for, you know we’re optimizing for x type of growth rates first, and we wanna do it in a profitable and responsible way. I feel very fortunate that in times like this, not only are we able to invest in Realize, launch deeper dive on user to data independent, have an ecommerce business that’s growing, to build a news business that’s growing while buying 12% of the company in h one. So I think these are times to not only grow fast, but also grow fast responsibly and give yourself option optionality with free cash flow you generate.
So if we can grow faster, we’ll look for ways to grow it, but not at the expense of doing bad business.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Yes. So to that point, as you think about, like, looking out, how should we think about, you know, kinda like overall, I guess you could break it down, overall operating expenses. So you have, like, growth spend and non growth spend. So if you’re to put it into two buckets, how would you think about, you know, kinda like and then you give you wanna talk about headcount as well.
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: I mean, most of our engineering resources are working on Realize, and Realize is our biggest growth engine. So if you if you look at Cadillac and we look at r and d as as an investment. We would think of engineers as our best investment we can make because that will drive the growth and profitable growth we aspire to have. So and I look at the, you know, the allocation of of those engineers, it’s mostly going to realize, which is our biggest bet on double you know, doubling the company in years to come and growing going back to double digit. So, that’s I think we’re we’re investing in the place we think can grow the company the fastest.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: So, I mean, to that point, right, when you did the deal with Yahoo, you ramped up expenses to do the integration. Those expenses were were expected to come out. They didn’t really come out because you then reallocate them to realize. So there’s already been, a step function. So the point is from here, there really shouldn’t be meaningful growth in the underlying expense base unless you’re spending on set like, sales on
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: Right. Yeah. We we don’t expect any significant change in our cost structure. We know we think we we have what we need for the most part. If at any point we see, you know, an opportunity to grow even faster when investing in marketing and sales, we might consider that.
But as of now, we think we have what we need to to get to that moment of going back to double digit. And again, with our numbers, I think I think that can be very exciting.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: So there’s a question online. What are the main hurdles for realized adoption?
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: One, look, it’s it’s early stages still. I mean so we we wanna learn fast, fail fast, and primarily getting what I said earlier, like, the three things we’re looking for are, I wanna see more new advertisers that did not work with us before. We tried and they just didn’t do it. I wanna see existing advertisers grow their spend tens of percent or more. And I wanna see more utilization of our real life platform in general.
We have a lot of features that help advertisers be successful such as predictive audiences as an example, which is like a lookalike for conversions. You sold 30 pizza ovens with us, and now we’re predicting that if you give us $20,000, we can get you 30 more, and you say do it, and that grows the spend. So we have a lot of new capabilities as part of our ad platform realized that are that are helping us be successful beyond just the formats and tapping into display and social. But it’s it’s fail fast, learn fast, get more new clients, existing clients until we get to the point that we think this is it.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: So how are you using I mean, like, you’ve always used machine learning algorithms. It’s always been part of the business. But, I mean, with now the adoption of these, like, LLMs and and, like, how much the cost has come down, how how are we using LLMs in in the business either, you know, from a, you know, a growth standpoint or a cost efficiency standpoint?
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: Across the entire company. Actually, we’re we’re going through this, Greg exercise of each leader at Tibula is presenting already the things they’re working on internally in their kind of universe as well as the road map and ideas they have moving forward. But literally every person in this company either is already using LLM or a bunch of LLM’s tools or is about to as part of the that department kind of road map. But our engineers are using, I mean, significant amount of tools to generate code, to QA things. Just so much is going on.
We’re on on a on a you know, Steve, our CFO, is taking advantage of LLM, you know, for FP and A purposes and other things. We’re just trying to ask ourselves, it’s less about it’s just about, one, can we be more productive and use our great people to do even more things they don’t get to do right now? And two, can we help us create value in areas that we’re just not getting into? So the we’re just that’s our mindset. You know?
Can we get productivity across the entire company? Literally, every kind of department head is going through this exercise because we think that we have a lot of amazing people who run the company. So if we can get them more productive and give them more time back, they can do with clients, they can be creative, they can help each other, they can have, you know, work on issues we didn’t get to yet, and as well as create values and opportunities we just never got to. So it’s it’s and we’re only getting started, and I think, Tibula, I wanna be open minded to any, you know, any company out there hearing me say that if you could think you can give us ideas, give us ideas. We in general, we’re open minded to trying things.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: So to the point of buybacks you made, you know, you you purchased a $101,000,000 worth in the second quarter. Increased your authorization by 200,000,000, so now there’s 285,000,000 of authorization against a 115,000,000 in cash and 88,000,000 in debt. So, I mean, so, like, you know, I guess, how like, are you willing to you know, if the stock kinda stays at these kind of valuation levels, like, you know, are are you supportive of using leverage to continue the buybacks?
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: No. We we we really would like to stay net cash neutral. You know, it’s important to us. We we every you know, every spare dollar that, you know, we have, we think it’s it’s the best investment we can make. So, you know, we we believe buyback is the best use of free cash flow.
We intend to continue to grow this business on an ex stock basis. And and at our scale, if we can go back to double digit and continue to grow, that’s a lot of cash flow that can be available for us to do that. And I’m very happy as a shareholder to buy 12% of the company in six months, and I intend to continue to do that. I think there’s a lot of value creation because when the company does go to double digit growth at at our volumes and size, the opportunity for for me as a shareholder and investor is just significant. So, you know, none of us at at Ebola is here for a 10% growth company.
So we’re all here because we believe there’s gonna be moments that it’s gonna start to go back to how we always have been. And at that point, we’ll own more of the company, and we’ll have a lot of growth hopefully for the stock and the business. So we do wanna stay net cash neutral, but I’m excited about continue to buy back shares, improving, you know, free cash flow per share, and and until until we get to that moment for investors to see the company kind of, you know, exploding back to double digit.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Got it. So, basically, investors should assume that that further buybacks from here, they’ll use some portion of the cash. And then, otherwise, it’ll largely be out of the free cash flow from the business. Yep. Yeah.
So another question online. I guess, it was around, do you need to make additional investments into Realize, or are all the pieces in place? So I was like, will it is is is is Realize gonna be an incremental margin drag from here?
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: No. I mean, we don’t we don’t think we need we’re going to increase the cost base for Realize if that’s the question from an engineer perspective or something like that. I think there’s a lot for us to continue to learn from advertisers and agencies. Absolutely. If there’s a big opportunity for us to work with an agency and it would require some features and things or pure reprioritization.
Look, we have 500 engineers. So if I need to reprioritize something and things like that, we’d love to learn fast from the market if there’s such an opportunity. But outside of that, of learning fast, failing fast, and keep growing, there is no expected increase in cost base to support the guidance we’ve given. And I remind you that, you know, the upside from realize is not embedded in the guidance. So if this thing starts to, work, there’s there’s an upside here.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Got it. Okay. I think we’re gonna leave it at that, Adam. Thank you very much for your time.
Adam Singolda, CEO, Tabula: Thank you.
Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Thanks everyone for joining us. If you have any more questions for the company, feel free to reach out to me and and we can connect you. Have a great day, everybody.
This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.