Michael Katz and the Art of Starting Again

Michael Katz has a photograph in which he is plainly losing the contest for attention. He occupies the left edge of the frame. His dog, Coop, occupies most of the rest, including a nose with an excellent understanding of camera placement. For a founder whose working life has involved getting companies noticed, it is a pleasing reversal.

The picture accompanied a 2014 conversation about his second company, mParticle. By then, Katz had already taken an advertising business public and sold it to Yahoo. He was building again, with investors who included the rapper Nas. Yet ask him about dogs and the language became considerably less corporate: “Love the dogs, man!” Animal rescue, he explained, gave him perspective beyond technology and business.

That range is part of the interest of Katz. His career runs through advertising, customer data and, most recently, trading cards. The businesses change. Certain companions and questions recur: his brother Andrew, the difficulty of understanding what customers want, and the awkward business of following a successful first act with something worth doing next.

Two brothers, different equipment

Katz was born in Boston. As a boy, he rounded up neighborhood children for football and baseball. Andrew, two years older, spent time teaching himself to code. The distinction sounds almost suspiciously convenient for a future founding team: one brother gathering people, the other working out what to build. In their case, those complementary interests became a working partnership.

At Syracuse University, Michael studied economics and finance. He has said the economics proved especially useful in his entrepreneurial career. Before starting companies, he worked at Accenture, where he learned habits around the quality of work and saw how a large organization operated. He wanted to become an entrepreneur, but first found value in watching an established business function.

Working with a sibling brought its own management requirements. The brothers have credited their father with teaching them to resolve disagreements respectfully. Michael also described the importance of building a business that could scale and hiring strong department leaders who could help settle differences. Family affection, in other words, still benefited from an organizational chart.

The exit that became an entrance

Interclick began in the mid-2000s. Katz has described starting the company in his Boston apartment; it developed technology for using data to help advertisers reach audiences. In 2009, it went public. In November 2011, Yahoo announced a deal to buy it for approximately $270 million. The acquisition closed that December.

For an entrepreneur, the sequence has an agreeable rhythm: apartment, stock market, acquisition. Katz then experienced the less tidy passage from running a company to working inside the company that bought it. He spent about a year at Yahoo, serving as vice president of optimization and analytics, and departed in December 2012.

His next move was already taking shape around a problem he had encountered there. Even within a large internet business, getting useful answers from customer data could be surprisingly difficult. The information existed, but assembling it into something people could use was another matter. A company could possess plenty of data and still struggle to understand its own customers.

That experience helped produce mParticle, co-founded in 2013 by Michael Katz, Andrew Katz and Jason Lynn. The early team included familiar colleagues from Interclick. Katz was starting another business with people whose work he knew, while moving from advertising technology into the machinery that consumer brands used to manage customer information.

A second company is still a first attempt

The initial mParticle problem was close to the experience of anyone building a mobile app. Every additional service could mean another software development kit, another integration and another demand on engineers. Katz wanted app owners to retain control of their data while connecting to the outside tools they needed. The company began with mobile and developed into a customer data platform serving brands across channels.

Previous success helped assemble a team and attract attention. It did considerably less to abolish the waiting. In 2020, Katz said mParticle had spent its first few years building and had been in market since 2015. There was a substantial interval between identifying the problem and having a business ready to sell its answer.

He later acknowledged that the team had initially been overconfident. Commercial progress took longer than expected. That admission makes the second act more useful to understand than a frictionless account of lessons transferred from one company to the next. Experience could improve decisions; it could also encourage a founder to expect the calendar to cooperate.

His account of leadership became correspondingly concerned with people. In 2021, he put it this way: “you have to look at things through the lens of empathy”. He paired that idea with accountability. Employees would arrive with different backgrounds and circumstances. Leading them required understanding those differences while maintaining expectations about the work.

By October 2021, mParticle had raised a $150 million Series E led by Permira's growth fund. The announcement described connections to more than 300 analytics and marketing APIs. Customers included businesses such as NBCUniversal and Airbnb. The early integration problem had grown into a piece of infrastructure used across substantial consumer operations.

What a rapper can teach a software founder

Nas was an unusual name on mParticle's investor list, but Katz found a connection beyond the novelty. The introduction led to Nas and his business partner Anthony Saleh investing. Katz was interested in the challenge of sustaining a career after an early success, something Nas had experienced following his debut album, Illmatic.

For Katz, Interclick had created a similar question about the next act. He wanted to grow as an entrepreneur, and mobile technology was changing the market around him. The point of another company was to attempt a different problem. A familiar result would have been welcome; an identical assignment held less appeal.

His advice to his younger self, posted on his public founder profile, gives that ambition a practical timetable:

“Think in decades. Plan in years. Execute in quarters.”

Michael Katz

It is a useful piece of advice from someone whose second company required years of construction and adjustment. The quarter supplies a deadline. The decade leaves room for the deadline to prove optimistic.

Giving the tools away

In June 2020, Katz approached Braze with an idea: donate technology to Black founders. The resulting initiative, Tech for Black Founders, launched with Amplitude, Branch, Braze, mParticle and Radar. Eligible businesses could apply for software that would otherwise add to the cost of getting a young company established.

The proposal drew on something the participating companies already knew how to provide. They sold tools for understanding customers and building products. Offering those tools to eligible founders made their existing capabilities available to businesses facing barriers to funding and growth. It was a specific use of a founder's network, with an application process attached.

Katz's public working life also includes angel investing, mentoring at Techstars and board roles at Adaptly and BrightLine. These connections sit alongside his operating career. He has repeatedly worked with other founders as an investor, colleague or adviser while continuing to build companies himself.

Putting the data to work

By 2023, Katz was arguing about what customer data platforms ought to become. mParticle had acquired customer journey analytics company Indicative and machine-learning company Vidora in 2022. These additions extended the company's work from collecting and connecting information toward helping customers analyze it and make predictions.

He was also willing to challenge fashionable claims about data architecture. His argument centered on whether a proposed approach delivered useful results for the customer. Promises about avoiding copies of data, for example, needed to be examined alongside computing costs and the work required to make the system useful. The argument was technical; the test he proposed was practical.

On January 16, 2025, Rokt announced a $300 million investment in mParticle as part of their merger. At the announcement, Michael would continue as mParticle CEO, Andrew would become Rokt's chief technology officer, and Lynn would remain mParticle's chief product officer. All three would join Rokt's executive team.

The arrangement joined mParticle's customer data platform with Rokt's ecommerce business. It also retained a commitment central to Katz's original proposition: brands would keep ownership and control of their first-party data. The commercial setting had expanded from mobile apps to ecommerce transactions, but that concern remained recognizable.

Then he opened another pack

Katz's next company moved him much closer to the customer. Trove, founded in 2025, launched its digital trading-card platform in April 2026. Collectors could open digital packs containing real authenticated cards, keep cards in a vault, trade them or request delivery. The objects were physical. The collecting experience could happen on a phone.

By May 2026, Katz was talking publicly about making the move from enterprise software to a consumer business. He described wanting a new challenge and the opportunity to build something enjoyable. His interest in sport, present in those childhood neighborhood games, now had a direct place in the product.

In September, Trove introduced Collection Dividends, a loyalty feature offering at least 2% annually on collection value, calculated and paid monthly in Trove Cash. The stated ambition was to give collectors reasons to value keeping a collection on the platform as well as opening the next pack. In October, Katz was discussing pack battles, which added direct competition between collectors.

There is a long distance between advertising data and a graded sports card. Katz has now worked on both sides of the screen: selling infrastructure to businesses that want to understand customers, then building an experience for customers himself. His latest assignment gives him a new set of answers to wait for. Somewhere in the photographic record, Coop still has the better close-up.