IAM1256 – CEO Builds Amazing Tech Apps that makes Huge Impact to People’s Lives

Zach Roseman is CEO of Mosaic Group, IAC’s global mobile app studio, which builds and operates hit products like Robokiller, iTranslate, Blossom, Clime, and more. Before becoming CEO, Zach led Mosaic Group’s acquisition efforts, which included the acquisitions of iTranslate, Teltech, and Productive, while also serving as General Manager of Apalon, where he drove the company’s shift to subscriptions and a deeper and more focused investment in its product portfolio. Zach joined Mosaic Group from IAC’s M&A team, where he worked on numerous acquisitions, investments, and sales during his tenure. He started his career working in investment banking as an analyst for RBC Capital Markets and also served in the Israel Defense Forces. He received a BA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and currently resides in New York City.

• CEO Story: After college, Zach started serving in the Israel Defence Forces, then went to work in investment banking, then to an acquisition company, and went on to be the CEO of Mosaic Group.
• Business Service: Build and operate applications that make a huge impact on people’s lives. From robotics to translation, to plants and climate detection, and even personalized apps.
• Secret Sauce: Building an amazing product as a source of inspiration: 1. Focus on the Customer – how to make the customer experience better and create a long relationship with them: 2. Good at finding customers – they built a technology and marketing platform where they can find their customers.
• CEO Hack: Personal plans – like not responding to emails late at night unless it’s urgent. Observing Sabbath Day, Offline from work taking time for family.
• CEO Nugget: 1. Find a champion. Find someone (in your company) a mentor to make sure you grow. 2. Don’t forget to cold call people/customers – a lot may say no, but having an answer gets something to start a conversation. 3. Have the hard conversations – for you to grow, room for improvement.
• CEO Defined: It means responsibility. The ability to make a positive impact on your customers.

Website: www.mosaic.co

LinkedIn: zacharyroseman

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Transcription

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00:20 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:47 – Gresham Harkless

Joined Mosaic Group from the IAC's m and a team where he worked on numerous acquisitions, investments, and sales during his tenure. He started his career working in investment banking as an analyst for RBC's capital markets and also served in the Israel defense forces. He received a BA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and currently resides in New York City. Zach, super excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?

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01:12 – Zach Roseman

Yeah, let's do it.

01:13 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit here, a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:21 – Zach Roseman

Sure. So I started my career. I left. I graduated college, and I was doing an economics degree. And a lot of my friends were going into finance. I had an offer to go into finance, but I wanted to do something important to me personally. So I went and served in the Israel Defense Forces. Did that for a little bit less than a year and a half. Had a great experience. And then I got back, I said, you know, I need to start working.

Was lucky enough to join RBC Investment Banking, their capital markets group, doing media entertainment banking. And then after about a year, I was convinced that I wanted to be a VC. So I started looking. Okay, I got sort of the financial hard skills and now really want to go and invest in companies. And I did some interviews with some VCs and then randomly, funny enough, on LinkedIn, I saw an ad for this company called IEC, which stands for Interactive Corp.

Had no idea what it was. Looked at it a little bit, and said, that seems interesting. And one thing led to another. I ended up joining IEC on their mergers and acquisitions team. So looking for new companies for IC to acquire just as a quick aside, IAC is a prolific consumer Internet investor started by Barry Diller in the early nineties. I see it's bought and then spun off or sold companies like Ticketmaster, TripAdvisor, Lendingtree, Match Group, Tinder, whole bunch of others.

So it's a pretty, pretty big investor in the consumer Internet space. So I joined, worked on acquisitions for about four years, and saw a ton of companies and everything from million-dollar acquisitions or half-a-million-dollar acquisitions to multibillion-dollar acquisitions. If you're familiar with the m and a world, most acquisitions don't work out. Some do, but you learn a lot either way. And then I got to a .4 years in where I said, you know what, I want to.

I thought I wanted to be a VC and invest in companies, but I had worked with so many of the IEC subsidiary companies CEO's on potential deals that they wanted to do that. I said, maybe I should prime a hand at actually being in the operations of a business. So one company, Apollon, was an IAC subsidiary. And the CEO called me and said, hey, come work for me. It was sort of fortuitous timing. So I went down to work for him with the understanding that I would focus most of my efforts on acquisitions and a little bit on operations. And then five days into my, since the general manager of the business quit.

03:38 – Gresham Harkless

Oh, wow.

03:38 – Zach Roseman

And so, yeah, I became the CEO. I became sort of his right-hand guy. We instituted a huge change in the business where we went from being sort of a one-time paid purchase and advertising support revenue supported business to a subscription revenue supported business. And I drove that change. And it was wrenching for the company, but ultimately very successful.

And then I sort of worked my way up. I became VP of operations and then general manager of Appalon and then ultimately my CEO. When Iac bought Care.com comma, he became the CEO of Care.com, and I assumed the CEO role of Mosaic. That's in a nutshell. Hopefully that helps.

04:12 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. No, I appreciate you sharing that story. And, you know, the word that I was writing down and thinking of when you were talking, you know, through your stories, that intentionality and sometimes how powerful it is to have that intention and sometimes a voice, that intention, how sometimes it may not go in the way we think it's gonna go, but it ends up going to sometimes where we've kind of said it with our words and our tongue.

I wanted to drill down a little bit more and hear a little bit more about mosaic groups and IC companies. And could you take us through, like how you're serving your clients and some of the different ways that you're making an impact there?

04:41 – Zach Roseman

Yeah, sure. So Mosaic Group is one of the world's largest mobile app studios. And so what we do is we build, buy, and operate mobile apps. And so they range from the number one spam blocking, spam call blocking app in the US called Robo Killer, where you sign up, and we take care of everything. We block all spam calls or, sorry, 99% of spam calls. We've tested that and sort of our lawyers say we can stand behind that claim and we get rid of that spam surge, which for some people is just annoying.

I don't want to have ten calls a day that I don't know. But for other people, it's a source of really scams. They get scammed out of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Especially these scammers like to prey on the elderly or less informed people. And so we were proud of the product we've built there. So that's one of them. We have the second-largest translation app on the App Store called iTranslate. Google Translate is number one, at least in the Western world.

But we've built this fantastic translation product where we built our machine learning engine that we do our translations, which is very rare in this world. Most people use a feed from Google or Microsoft if they're doing a translation product. Then on top of that, we built our next product, which is the world's first machine learning-only grammar corrector and writing assistance, if you're familiar with Grammarly. We built this product called Typewrite, where it's only AI machine learning-based.

And I'm probably tipping off a little more than I should now, but we're going to be the first to do grammar correction, and predictive typing in non-English languages, in multiple non-English languages. So we're starting with German, spend a week or two, we're rolling that out. And then there's a host of other languages, which I won't spoil, but we're going to roll them out in the first half of next year. So we're excited about that product. And then we have a whole, we have a whole portfolio of products.

We have an app called Blossom, which is a gardening product. So if you have plants around the house, as many people do, it's one of, I think, the third most popular hobby in the US will help, you know, sort of where to place them in terms of sunlight or shade when to water them every two days, every week, what, what's right for them, for the climate zone that you're in, sort of what plants you should buy and you shouldn't buy, what diseases your plants might have if they're not growing and they look a little sickly. So all that kind of stuff.

06:52 – Gresham Harkless

Nice.

06:52 – Zach Roseman

We have people saying, you know, literally I have schizophrenia. And this is the only way I keep my life on track. I have ADHD. I've never, never been able to, like, focus before. And I put everything in productive and that, that helps me keep things on track. And it's, it's rewarding to read those. And it's a sort of inspiration for us to keep building better products.

07:10 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And that might lead to, you know, what I was going to drill down a little bit more about and ask you for what I like to call your secret sauce. And that could be for yourself individually, the business combination of both. But do you feel like it's that mission of being able to create amazing products that provide that value as you speak? And do you think that's your secret sauce?

07:27 – Zach Roseman

Yeah, I think. I think it's part of it. I think there's a lot of, you know, the app store has, there's been a proliferation of apps in the last few years. There's, you know, I think over four or 5 million apps in the app store today. So there's a lot of, you know, for lack of a better word, flotsam, trash, garbage filler and. Yeah, stuff that, you know, people don't. They're just in it to get it. Make a few bucks, I think. I think so either. Our, our secret sauce is two things.

One is that we're intensely focused on the customer, what's going to make the customer, what's going to make the customer experience better, and how we're going to create a longer-term relationship with them. And the second thing is our secret sauce is we're very good at finding customers. And so we've built this, you know, enormous platform. It's a technology and marketing platform where we're able to find customers who would love our products but don't yet know about them.

So we find them on Facebook, on Google, on Snapchat, on Pinterest, on Twitter, all over the place. And we do that a lot better than a lot of other people. So what that allows us to do is once we get the scale, we can then invest even more in our teams to make the product even better because we have this platform that underlies all of our apps, and then we have this.

We don't have to build everything from scratch. Every time we build a new app, we say to the product teams, product and technology teams to build a great product, and then the other teams will worry about how to get that to consumers in front of the right audiences. And so the product teams can focus on building the best product, and then we can split the investment that we make in this platform team across all of the different products, which sort of defrays the cost of it.

08:50 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I love that. And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have. What's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

09:02 – Zach Roseman

I'll say two things. One, I'm, I'm dedicated to having personal time in my life, and I'm ensuring my teams have their time. So after about 730 at night, I try not to respond to emails or slacks or anything. One reason is when people get an email or Slack from the CFO late at night, CEO. Sorry, late at night, they feel the need to respond. And I tried to counter that by every time I would write one, I would say, not for today or tomorrow, you know, parentheses at the top.

But that only did so much. So I try not to disturb people's time unless it's something super critical and urgent, which, you know, thankfully doesn't happen that much. And then the second thing is on the same boat. But, you know, I'm Jewish and I'm religiously observant, so I observe the Sabbath. So Friday night at sundown to Saturday night at sundown. I'm offline. No computer, no phone. I'm not going out to restaurants, I'm not going to the movies.

It's time for me and my wife and us and our friends to get together and enjoy each other's company. And I think it's really important to have time to shut off. Whether you're religiously observant or not, you can create. I think the term digital Sabbath is now sort of in the cultural zeitgeist. So people are sort of recognizing even about the religious aspect of it. Taking time off from being always on is critically important. So I think that's helped me.

10:16 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. A lot of times when you take a step away from a problem, that's really when that solution might come forth. So I love both of those hacks. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a little bit more of a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something if you hop into a time machine. You might tell your younger business self.

10:33 – Zach Roseman

Yeah, I would say, let me say two or three things here, depending on time. But one is when you're deciding your next career move, where you want to go next, especially if you're past your first job. Maybe you're in your first job, but a couple of years experience, maybe you've done two or three jobs and you're thinking, well, I want to figure out where to go next. My advice to everyone I meet is to find yourself a champion, right?

Who at the company that you're interviewing at that you like is going to be the person that's going to take you under their wings and mentor you, grow you, be responsible for your growth within the company and also outside the company, find someone who's going to make it their business to make sure that you grow. I had that with my former CEO and even my boss on the M and a team at IEC. And I try to do that with others, and I think that's critically important.

Some people, often people are faced with a question, do I go for the brand name or do I go for, like, the smaller company? But I mesh with the person I interviewed with and they seem like a great leader. To some degree, it depends on where you are in your career, but going with the brand name oftentimes just for the brand doesn't get you what you want and you end up a little bit disappointed. I think earlier career, the brand can be really helpful, but later, I think it depends.

So that's one. The second thing is don't be afraid to just like, sounds bad, but, like cold call or cold email people or cold reach out to people, you know, I did a summer internship in BC once, and they're, part of the job was, you know, doing like 20 calls a week, you know, to find the find companies, call them up and, you know, see if they'll talk to you to see if they're good candidates for investment. And they just threw us into the fire. They're like, here are like a few precepts.

Here are ways to talk to these entrepreneurs, but here are like ten of them. And go. And I learned that people are, if you frame your message, especially in an email, like, very succinctly, and here's what I'm looking for. Here's a little about me. Here's why I want to talk to you. People will respond, even if the response is no. That's at least a response. And so I would say whether you're looking for a job or you're looking to do a sale or something like that, don't be afraid to call and email people. But I would caution you not to use, like, form emails if you can avoid it.

12:47 – Gresham Harkless

Right.

12:47 – Zach Roseman

If you can personalize it a little bit, and keep it short and sweet, it goes a long way.

12:51 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. No, I love both of those nuggets, you know, making a decision and trying to make sure that you find a champion, but at the same time realizing that you know, a lot of things come from just being able to kind of reach out and have those conversations. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEO's on the show. So, Zach, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:14 – Zach Roseman

Great question. It's a hard question. What does a CEO do? What does being a CEO mean to me? It means responsibility. Right. I have 500 people who report to me in one way or another, and they're putting their trust in me that the strategy I'm pursuing is the right one for the company and then, by extension, for them, because they want to grow in their careers, they want to earn a good living, they want to do exciting things. So I think it's a huge sense of responsibility to them. That's one thing. I think another thing is the ability to make an impact on our customers, on our customers lives.

A positive impact, hopefully. Right. Which is, I'm here because I believe in the products we build, and I believe that they can have a positive impact on people's lives. And I think it's not about the money, necessarily. Certainly a component. It's not just about the money. It's not just about any media attention or anything like that. It's really about, do I want to be part of building something meaningful, um, and having that positive impact.

14:15 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Well, awesome. Well, Zach, truly appreciate that definition. I, of course, appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do now was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, and, of course, how best people can get hold of you and find out about all those. Make sure you and Jam are working on it.

14:30 – Zach Roseman

Anyone who wants to reach out to me, get in touch, uh, they can find me on LinkedIn. Zachary Roseman works at Mosaic Group. Um, or they can email me at Zackosaic Co. Achievement. You know, always up for a conversation. And, yeah, hopefully, your listeners enjoyed this.

14:46 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And what we'll do is we'll have the links and information that show notes as well, too, so that everybody can follow up with you. But I truly appreciate you for, of course, creating value in so many different ways within the organization and the company, but also reminding us of how important that is, not just to do something for the sake of doing it, but to see how we can make an impact, how we can make a change, and how we can make that impact. So thank you so much for reminding us of that as well. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:09 – Zach Roseman

Thanks, Gretchen. Have a good one.

15:10 – Gresham Harkless

Just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best people can get hold of you and find out about all those. Make sure you and Jam are working on it.

15:17 – Zach Roseman

If anyone wants to reach out to me and get in touch, they can find me on LinkedIn. Zachary Roseman works at Mosaic Group, or they can email me at Zach Mosaic Co. That's Zacchoseich Co. You know, always up for a conversation. And, yeah, hopefully, your listeners enjoyed this.

15:33 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And what we'll do is we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well, too, so that everybody can follow up with you. But I truly appreciate you, of course, creating value in so many different ways within the organization and the company, but also reminding us of how important that is. Not just do something for the sake of doing it, but seeing how we can make an impact, how we can make a change, and how we can make that impact. So thank you so much for reminding us of that as well. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:56 – Zach Roseman

Thanks, Chris. Have a good one.

15:58 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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