David Kashak and the Useful Pivot

The question that started Connatix was not grand. It was the sort of question that arrives in a sales meeting wearing a spreadsheet: what is the CPM? In 2013, David Kashak heard versions of it all day. He was doing business development for Conduit, the internet-monetization company where he was the first employee in New York. Mobile publishers had traffic, but their little banner ads earned little and annoyed plenty. Kashak wondered whether native advertising could give them a better answer without turning the page into a fairground.

This was a business opportunity disguised as a customer complaint, and Kashak had spent a career learning how to listen across technical and commercial borders. Born and raised in Israel, he studied engineering at Tel Aviv University and began as a programmer in cybersecurity. In 2001, his employer offered him a move to New York. He accepted because he wanted more exposure to business, progressed from product management to leading the American business unit, then left that world of governments and law enforcement for something more creative.

At Conduit, he met Oren Stern. Their first attempted deal went nowhere, which is the sort of result usually deleted from a founder biography. It deserves to stay. The failed transaction got them talking about publishers, their thin mobile economics and the compromises required to pay for journalism. From that useful failure came the outline of Connatix.

Begin where “yes” is inexpensive

Kashak used some of his own money and called a Romanian developer he trusted from an earlier outsourcing project. The developer had built his own shop, and friendship made an unusual arrangement possible: a little cash, some equity and a request to build a simple prototype together. The first product let publishers create native units for mobile sites. It was deliberately basic. A complicated promise would have been rather wasted on a company that did not yet have an office.

The product launched in March 2014. Kashak did not court the largest publishers, even though he knew people at them. Big organizations had reputations to protect and inventory they could not casually hand to an untested vendor. He chose sites with roughly 10,000 to 100,000 visitors, where a new monetization tool could be tried without summoning six committees and a minor constitutional convention.

“I basically started with the people who didn’t have anything to lose.”David Kashak, on Connatix’s first customers

By early summer, 40 to 50 websites were participating, together supplying a couple of million impressions. The advertiser side was scarcely imperial: about three core customers running various direct-response offers. Monthly revenue was a few thousand dollars. Three months after launch, the company could pay Kashak a small salary. By year’s end, it had made almost $100,000.

Then came a perfect scrap of startup comedy. Wanting to grow, Kashak recruited an intern from France through Internships.com. Only after making the hire did he confront a logistical flaw: Connatix still ran from his living room, and bringing the intern home would hardly do. So he rented a small office. Many companies acquire premises to impress investors. Connatix acquired one because a student needed a desk.

When the format became the strategy

Native advertising was the opening, not the destination. Late in 2015, the team began putting autoplay video into its native units. Video was technically fussier: file sizes, playback and page performance made an article unit look almost polite. Yet the economics were hard to overlook. Advertisers would pay more for video, and publishers needed an easier way to create, host and monetize it.

Connatix refined the product and introduced it publicly at a publisher conference in Colorado in March 2016. The setting mattered. Sponsors could hold one-to-one meetings with publishers, so the team could show the unit working and hear objections without delay. Meredith and Tribune came aboard; CBS Local had launched shortly before the event, and Daily Mail became a customer. The company was no longer merely placing a new kind of advertisement. It was assembling a player, content-management tools and monetization into one publisher system.

Kashak said Connatix expected to close 2016 at roughly $15 million in revenue with 31 people across New York, Romania and Israel. The contrast with its first-year revenue was remarkable, but the mechanics were unromantic. A higher-value format met an existing network. Relationships brought publishers into the room; software made their inventory useful; advertiser demand paid for the loop. The pivot worked because it changed the product while preserving the original problem.

There was also an editorial argument under the machinery. People often told Kashak that they hated advertising. His reply, in substance, was that the sites they read still had to pay the people behind them. The promise of native formats was not to make advertising lovable. It was to make it less intrusive and more compatible with the page. “Without compromise” became Connatix’s recurring language, half product requirement and half truce.

Capital after evidence

Connatix bootstrapped through its formative years and remained profitable. In October 2017, it raised $15 million in growth equity led by Volition Capital. The timing is instructive. Outside money arrived after customers, revenue and the video thesis. It was intended to accelerate product development, sales and marketing, not to purchase a personality for the company.

A larger investment followed in 2021 from Court Square Capital Partners. By then, Connatix said it worked with more than 3,000 publishers and 1,000 advertisers worldwide. The plans widened to international expansion, acquisitions and contextual video tools. The platform had grown from a way to create a mobile unit into an integrated player, ad server, exchange and content operation.

Kashak’s own routine reflected the company he had built. In a 2021 interview he described breakfast meetings with employees or clients, operational and marketing discussions, Slack integrations and Zoom calls with a global team. He also mentioned travel, Rumble Boxing and preparations for Burning Man. The combination is less contradictory than it appears. A distributed ad-tech company and a temporary city in the desert both reward logistics more than their glamour suggests.

A different chair at the same table

In October 2024, Connatix merged with JW Player. The fit was complementary: JW Player brought streaming, video management and broadcaster relationships; Connatix brought content and advertising technology. The combined company said it served more than 2,000 media companies, reached over one billion unique users and delivered 30 billion video plays and ad impressions each month. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Kashak became chairman while JW Player co-founder Dave Otten initially became chief executive. In March 2025, Kashak welcomed media executive John Nardone into the CEO role and thanked Otten for guiding the merger and handoff. The company later took the shorter name JWX. For a founder, surrendering the daily operating title can be either a loss of gravity or evidence of it. Kashak’s career had already moved from code to product, from product to sales, and from sales to company-building. Chairman was another change in altitude.

The temptation is to retell Connatix as a neat fable about video. Yet its more useful lesson is messier. The first deal with Stern failed. The first publishers were small. The first office was an afterthought. The first product was not the product that ultimately defined the company. None of those facts weakened the business. Each supplied information that made the next decision better.

“If you’re not moving forward, you’re falling behind.”David Kashak, on working in a changing industry

That line could sound like ordinary founder briskness. In Kashak’s story, it has a more exact meaning. Moving forward did not always mean doing more of the same. Sometimes it meant choosing customers who could tolerate an experiment. Sometimes it meant rebuilding around video. Sometimes it meant accepting capital after proving the economics. And sometimes it meant leaving the chief executive’s chair so two companies could become one. The constant was not format or title. It was usefulness, tested in public, preferably before anyone had time to order a grander desk.