Jared Siegal and the business of letting go

Jared Siegal once wanted to become an architect because he liked George Costanza. This is an alarming way to choose a profession. Costanza, after all, mostly liked telling people he was an architect. Siegal went to business school instead, found his way into online advertising, and eventually built a company around a problem considerably less glamorous than designing buildings: helping publishers get their advertising technology to behave.

There is an architectural instinct in that work. A website can have an audience, advertisers and a busy editorial operation, yet still lose money in the spaces between its systems. Someone changes the page. Someone else manages the ads. A third person studies the numbers. Each can do a perfectly reasonable job while making life harder for the others. Siegal became interested in those awkward joins.

Today he is the founder and CEO of Aditude, based in Houston. The company supplies advertising infrastructure for web and app publishers. Its story includes a $15 million investment, acquisitions and the familiar complications of growing a business. But the revealing part is how often Siegal has had to revise his own job description. First he was the person publishers called to fix things. Then he built software. Eventually he had to let other people fix things without him.

A decimal point with expensive tastes

Siegal studied at Washington University in St. Louis, graduating from its Olin Business School in 2013. He joined Answers.com early in his career and later worked at Playbuzz, now EX.CO. His route through the industry took him into revenue operations, video and publisher relationships. These were places where the consequences of a technical decision could appear rather quickly in the accounts.

One early lesson arrived in 2013. He entered an advertising purchase at $20 per thousand impressions instead of $0.20. In his telling, the mistake produced $80,000 in spending in twenty minutes. Two decimal places had acquired a rather extravagant social life. He carried the lesson forward into checking details and reviewing changes after code deployments. Advertising software can make a clerical mistake remarkably efficient.

Answers.com also gave him room to learn beyond the boundaries of his title. He began tackling bug tickets and teaching himself to code. During one weekend, with colleagues away, he worked alongside a developer on a substantial website overhaul. The work improved revenue and helped settle his interest in the connection between software and the business it supports.

That connection would become central to Aditude. Publishers need their pages to work as reading experiences and as businesses. A decision about loading speed, layout or how an advertisement appears belongs to both worlds. Siegal had seen enough of the machinery to suspect that treating those concerns separately was making the machinery worse.

The consultant who kept meeting the same problem

Aditude began as a consulting business in 2019. Siegal worked directly with publishers, helping them negotiate the everyday tangle of developers, advertising vendors and operational decisions. He billed for his time. The arrangement brought him close to the customer and close to the places where the customer was stuck.

By October 2023, he could describe the realization plainly: he had been occupying the middle ground between publishers and a collection of outside providers. Solving the same coordination problem repeatedly suggested a different business. He wanted to build technology that handled more of the process together, leaving publishers more time for the material their readers actually came to see.

In November 2021, Aditude launched its Cloud Wrapper and Cloud Layout products. A wrapper coordinates advertising bids; the layout tools address how the page and its advertising are put together. Those names will never compete with a theme park attraction. Their appeal lies in what a publishing team can do with them on an ordinary working Tuesday.

Siegal's operational argument has remained fairly practical. Better advertiser relationships matter, but they cannot solve every problem caused by a slow or poorly assembled website. Improving the experience can help readers stay, creating further opportunities for the publisher to earn. The technology underneath the page deserves attention alongside the advertising sold on top of it.

“Running a lean business is nothing to overlook.”

Jared Siegal · 2023

Before the cheque, a working business

In August 2023, Aditude announced a $15 million Series A from Volition Capital. Siegal had funded the company himself up to that point. The financing marked a change in what the business could attempt: more development, more distribution and the possibility of buying companies with useful capabilities.

The numbers behind the investment were substantial. Aditude reported revenue growth of 478 percent in 2021 and 650 percent in 2022. Percentages alone cannot explain a founder, and the years should stay attached to them. They do help explain why a small operation had reached the point of deciding whether outside capital would make it more useful to its customers.

Siegal described deciding to raise as one of the harder parts of the process. A profitable business has a choice to make before it has a pitch to give. More money brings resources, and also a new set of expectations. His advice to companies without a recent investment was to watch profitability and hire when the finances justified it. It is the sort of advice that makes a smaller splash than a funding announcement and has to survive much longer.

In March 2024, Aditude acquired CPMStar, bringing it further into gaming advertising and publisher monetization. Hashtag Labs followed that year, adding another part of the company's broader platform. Siegal was now running a business whose expansion included integrating other businesses. The person who once answered the customer's question himself had more people, products and priorities to connect.

The meeting has moved to Disney World

There is a less conventional part of Siegal's commercial education. He likes Disney World. He likes golf. Rather than keep these interests in a compartment marked time off, he has brought publishers and partners into them. The Aditude Open puts professional relationships into a setting with considerably more potential for a park visit than the average conference room.

The event continued in 2026, with publishers and partners arriving at Disney World and a welcome dinner at Disney Springs. Its sponsors included businesses from Aditude's surrounding industry. The photographs show people around restaurant tables, with plates, glasses and small event signs doing the work usually assigned to a stage backdrop. It looks like dinner, which is a useful quality for dinner to possess.

His approach to online communities is similarly personal. In conversations about building Aditude, he has described spending time answering publishers' detailed questions in industry Slack groups, including answers that might let someone solve a problem without becoming a customer. That is a patient way to become familiar. It gives a prospective client something more concrete than a promise about future helpfulness.

The common element is proximity. A publisher can see how Siegal thinks before signing a contract, and a client can spend time with the people who work on the business. There is room here for both commercial calculation and ordinary enjoyment. A founder who likes hosting has found an industry in which being a host can be part of the job.

A founder takes a week off

For Siegal, growth also required an uncomfortable experiment. He has described hiring senior colleagues and then struggling to give them enough meaningful responsibility. On a vacation in 2024, he finally stepped back, asking for daily email updates. He returned to a business whose revenue had grown. His presence had proved less essential than his habits suggested.

It is a pleasing reversal of his early education. A period when colleagues were away had once pushed him to learn more of the work. Years later, his own absence showed that other people could carry it. Both experiences taught him something useful about responsibility, although only the second offered the possibility of enjoying a holiday.

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His private preferences remain unusually orderly: a regular morning routine, a walk with his dog, the same coffee stop. The detail fits someone who has spent so much professional time examining how systems behave. A predictable morning leaves fewer small decisions competing with the larger ones. Golf provides another setting with its own rules, a long walk and room to concentrate on something immediately in front of him.

Giving the publisher the controls

In his own writing in March 2025, Siegal argued for publishers to have more control over their advertising systems, data and revenue. He called Aditude's approach an open garden. The promise is that publishing businesses should have access to the tools and information needed to make decisions themselves, rather than depend on arrangements they cannot properly inspect.

It is a position that asks something of his company too. Selling control means building technology that customers can understand and operate. Help has to remain available without becoming a permanent bottleneck. Aditude's current work spans web, app, video and analytics, extending the original problem of getting separate systems to cooperate.

In September 2026, Washington University's Skandalaris Center hosted a conversation with its alumnus about turning overlooked opportunities into a business. By then, Siegal had plenty to discuss: the customer work, the product decisions, the financing and the revisions to his own role. The former would-be architect had ended up building something with a different kind of occupancy problem. A company needs enough room for its founder's ideas, and eventually enough room for everyone else's work.