IAM1706 – CEO Builds Amazing Tech Apps that Makes Huge Impact to People’s Lives

Zach Roseman Teaser 00:00

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

Intro 00:18

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.

Gresham Harkless 00:45

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I am CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we are repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics or as I like to call them, business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners, and what I like to call the CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month we are focused on technology. We're a technology company that does dot, dot, dot. Technology is no longer an afterthought or something that you might do and is actually a core part of your business. If you are a real estate investor, you're using it. If you're a financial firm, if you're a cleaning company, an author, or a speaker, you are using technology. If you are in any business, you are using technology, and if you're not, then you're probably going to be disrupted by an organization that is.

So this month we are going to look into purposing episodes that are around technology, whether that be firms or organizations that are actually using and investing in technology as a core part of their products and services, or potentially those individuals that are using and leveraging CEO hacks and CEO nuggets that center around technology and sharing ways that we can leverage it as well. Remember that you are a technology company that does dot, dot, dot. Sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I am CEO Podcast.

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I am CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Zach Roseman of Mosaic Group and IAC Company. Zach, super excited to have you on the show.

Zach Roseman 02:17

Great to be here. Thanks for having me on Gresham. 

Gresham Harkless 02:19

Yes, definitely. Super excited about all the awesome things that you're doing. And before we jumped into that, I wanted to read a little bit more about Zach so I can hear about some of those awesome things. 

Zach is CEO of Mosaic Group, IAC's Global Mobile App Studio, which builds and operates hit products like Robokiller, iTranslate, Blossom, Typeright, and more. Prior to becoming CEO, Zach led Mosaics 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 in a deeper and more focused investment in its product portfolio.

Zach joined Mosaic Group from the IAC's M&A team, where he worked on numerous acquisitions, investments in sales during his tenure, and he started his career working in investment banking as an analyst for RBC Capital Markets and also in the Israel Defense Forces.   He received a BA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and currently resides in a New York City. 

Zack, super excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I am CEO community? 

Zach Roseman 03:20

Yeah, let's do it.

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Gresham Harkless 03:21

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

Zach Roseman 03:28

Sure. So I started my career. I graduated college and I was doing an economics degree and a lot of my friends were going into finance, and I had an offer to go into finance, but I really wanted to do something that was 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 got back and said, I need to start working. I was lucky enough to join RBC Investment banking, their capital markets group doing media, and entertainment banking. And then after about a year I was convinced that I wanted to be a VC.

So I started looking, okay, I've gotten 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 IAC, which stands for Inter Active Corp. I 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 IAC on its mergers and acquisitions team, so looking for new companies for IAC to acquire. Just as a quick aside, IAC is a prolific consumer internet investor, started by Barry Diller in the early nineties. IAC has bought and then spun off or sold companies like Ticketmaster, TripAdvisor, and lending Tree, Match group, Tinder, a whole bunch of others. So it's a 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-million dollar acquisitions to, multi-billion dollar acquisitions.

If you're familiar with the M&A world, most acquisitions don't work out. Some do, but you learn a lot either way. And then I got to a point at four years in where I said, you know what? I thought I wanted to be a VC in investing in companies, but I had worked with so many of the IAC subsidiary company CEOs on potential deals that they wanted to do, that  I said, maybe I should, my hand actually being in the operations of a business. So one company Apalon was an IAC subsidiary and the CEO called me and said, Hey, come work for me. It was 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. Then, five days into it, the general manager of the business quit.

Gresham Harkless 05:31

Oh, wow.

Zach Roseman 05:31

And so yeah, I became the CEO, I became his right-hand guy. We instituted a huge change in the business where we went from being a one-time paid purchase and advertising support, to 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. Then I worked my way up. I became VP of operations and then general manager of Apalon, and then ultimately my CEO when IAC bought care.com, he became the CEO of care.com and I assumed the CEO role of Mosaic. That's in a nutshell. Hopefully, that helps.

Gresham Harkless 06:02

Nice. I wanted to drill down a little bit more, hear a little bit more about Mosaic Group and IAC Company and could you take us through how you're serving your clients in some of the different ways that you're making an impact there?

Zach Roseman 06:11

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, we take care of everything, we block all spam calls, or sorry, 99% of spam calls. We've tested that and our lawyers say we can stand behind that claim. And, we get rid of that spam surge, which for some people is just annoying, right? I don't wanna have 10 calls a day that I don't know. But for other people, it's a source of really like scams, right? They get scammed out of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Especially these scammers like to prey on the elderly or people who are less informed 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. So, Google translates number one at least in the Western world. But we've built this really fantastic translation product where we've built our own machine learning engine, that we do our own translations, which, is very rare in this world. Most people use a feed from Google or Microsoft if they're doing a translation product. And then on top of that, we built our next product, which is, the world's first machine learning-only grammar corrector and writing assistant. So if you're familiar with Grammarly, we built this product called Typeright where it's really only AI machine learning based.  I'm probably tipping off a little more than I should now, but we're gonna be the first to do grammar correction, and predictive typing in non-English languages and multiple non-English languages.

So we're starting with German, actually, a week or two are rolling that out. And then there's a host of our languages, which I won't spoil, but we're gonna roll them out in the first half of next year. So we're really excited about that product. And then we have a whole portfolio of product. 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. We'll help, with where to place them in terms of sunlight or shade when to water them every two days, every week, what is right for the climate zone that you're in, what plants you should buy, and what 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.

Gresham Harkless 08:07

Nice.

Zach Roseman 08:07

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

Gresham Harkless 08:24

Yeah, absolutely. And that might lead to, what I was actually gonna drill down a little bit more about and ask you for what I like to call your secret sauce. That could be for yourself individually, the business or 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? Do you think that's your secret sauce?

Zach Roseman 08:39

Yeah, I think, it's part of it. I think there's a lot the App Store has. There's been a proliferation of apps in the last few years. I think over 4 or 5 million apps in the app stores today. So there's a lot of, for lack of a better word slot, some trash, garbage.

Gresham Harkless 08:03

Filler.

Zach Roseman 08:51

And yeah, stuff that people are just in it to make a few bucks. I think our secret sauce is two things. One is that we're really intensely focused on the customer, what's gonna make the customer experience better? How are we gonna create a longer-term relationship with them? And the second thing, our secret sauce is we're very good at finding customers and so we've built this, 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 and, we do that a lot better than a lot of other people.

So what that allows us to do is once we get to scale, we can then invest even more in our teams to make the products even better. And because we have this platform that underlies all of our apps, then we don't have to build everything from scratch every time we build a new app, right? We say to the product teams, product and technology teams, go build a great product. And then the other teams will worry about how to get that to consumers and in front of the right audiences. And so the product teams can really 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 the phase the cost of it.

Gresham Harkless 09:53

Nice. I absolutely 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, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Zach Roseman 10:05

I'll say two things. One, I'm really dedicated to having personal time in my life and I'm ensuring my teams have their personal time. So after about 7:30 at night, I really try not to respond to emails or slacks or anything. One reason is when people get an email or slacks from the CEO 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 for tomorrow, at the top, but that only did so much. So I really try not to disturb people's time unless it's something super critical and urgent, which, thankfully doesn't happen that much.

Then the second thing is on the same boat, 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 totally offline. No computer, no phone. I'm not going out to restaurants. I'm not going to the movies. It's really 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 this sort of, I think this term like Digital Sabbath is now in the cultural zeitgeist. People are recognizing even the religious aspect of it. Taking time off from being always on is really critically important. So I think that really helped me.

Gresham Harkless 11:11

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 were to hop into a time machine that you might tell your younger business self.

Zach Roseman 11:23

Yeah, let me say two or three things here depending on time. One is when you're making a decision about your next career move, and where you want to go next, especially if you're past your first job. Maybe you're in your first job, you've had a couple of years experience, maybe you've done two or three jobs, and you're thinking, well, I really want to figure out how or 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 you like and is gonna be the person that's gonna take you under their wings and mentor you grow, be responsible for your growth within the company and also aside from the company. Find someone who's gonna make it their business to make sure, that you grow.

I had that with my former CEO and even my boss on the M&A team at IAC and I try to do that with others, right?  I think that's really critically important. Often people are faced with the question, do I go for the brand name or do I go with a a smaller company, but I really mesh with the person I interviewed 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 in your 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, It sounds bad but cold call or cold email people or cold to reach out to people. I did a summer internship in RBC once and their part of the job was doing like 20 calls a week, to find companies, call them up and see if they'll talk to you to see if they're good candidates for investments. And they just threw us into the fire. They were like, here are like a few precepts. Here are ways to talk to these entrepreneurs. But here's like 10 of them and go, and I learned that people are surprised if you frame your message, especially in an email very succinctly, and here's what is what I'm looking for? Here's what about me, here's why I wanna talk to you. People will respond even if the response is no, that's at least the response.

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 don't use like-form emails if you can avoid it. Right? If you can personalize it a little bit, keep it short and sweet, it goes a long way.

Gresham Harkless 13:23

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I wanted 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 and quote CEOs on the show.

So Zach, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Zach Roseman 13:33

It's a great question. It's a hard question. What does being a CEO mean to me? It means responsibility, right? I have 500 people that 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. So that's one thing.

I think another thing is the ability to make an impact on our customer's lives, a positive impact, hopefully. Which I'm here because I believe in the products we build and I believe that they can really have a positive effect of impact on people's lives. I think it's not about the money necessarily. That's 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 I wanna be part of building something meaningful and having that positive impact.

Gresham Harkless 14:24

Nice. Well, awesome. Zach, truly appreciate that definition and 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 about all those awesome things you and your team are working on.

Zach Roseman 14:39

If anyone wants to reach out to me to get in touch, they could find me on LinkedIn, Zachary Roseman, I work at Mosaic Group. Or they can email me@zachmosaic.co. I'm always up for a conversation and yeah, hopefully, your listeners and readers enjoyed this.

Gresham Harkless 14:51

Yeah, absolutely. And what we'll do is we'll have the links and information and the 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 doing 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.

Zach Roseman 15:13

Thanks, Gresham. Have a good one.

Outro 15:15

Thank you for listening to the I am CEO podcast, powered by CB Nation and 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 Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Podcast. And everywhere you listen to podcasts. Subscribe and leave us a five-star rating. This has been the I am CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr.

Thank you for listening.

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