Ophir Tanz and the value hiding in plain sight

The sale price was private. The Porsche was harder to conceal. In 2009, Ophir Tanz was explaining how he and his school friend Ari Mir had sold their mobile media company, Mojungle, within a year of starting it. Neither would disclose the proceeds. Tanz supplied a more entertaining accounting: “But Ari bought a Porsche.”

They put money into another business together. This one, GumGum, would require considerably more patience. At one point they scrapped its technology and started again. By April 2009 it employed seven people. The enterprise that would become associated with teaching computers to interpret pictures was still trying to work out its own picture.

That beginning is useful to remember when reading Tanz’s later résumé. It contains computer vision, international expansion, venture capital and a second turn as an AI chief executive at Pearl. The early version contains a friend, a sale, a restart and the willingness to put the proceeds back to work. The car gets the laugh. The reinvestment carries the story.

A teenager with an exit already behind him

Tanz had been rehearsing for this life before most people have a first job. At 15 he started Fluidesign, an interactive branding agency, and sold it before college. By 13, he had already decided that working for somebody else would be difficult. Adolescence sometimes produces sweeping career declarations. His came with a business attached.

Carnegie Mellon supplied a more formal education. He completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in four years, graduating in 2004. Later, returning to campus as a speaker, he would describe the value of studying among people from different disciplines. Programming mattered; so did exposure to the practical realities of entrepreneurship. Building something and building a company could occupy the same education.

He did briefly try employment. At Bridgewater Associates in Connecticut, he worked as a programmer on trading systems. His accounts of its exact duration vary, but the broad sequence is consistent: university, a short spell at the hedge fund, then another company. A good salary had failed to settle the argument he had been having with conventional employment since childhood.

Mir, whom he knew from the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, had attended USC. The two reunited in Los Angeles and started Mojungle in 2006. Its sale to ShoZu followed in 2007. They had discovered that they could build and sell a product together. Keeping a much larger organization working would ask different questions.

The picture was also a place to do business

GumGum’s early proposition concerned the photographs that made the web worth looking at. Publishers had images, photographers needed revenue, and advertisers wanted attention. The company initially worked on image licensing and advertising packaged with photographs. It eventually became known for placing relevant advertisements within images, using software to understand what those images contained.

By 2012, Tanz was describing a service that publishers could install with a small piece of code. GumGum handled the interpretation, ad matching, serving and selling. The publisher acquired another potential revenue stream without having to create another editorial product. For a business built around sophisticated image analysis, making the customer’s part straightforward was a substantial part of the proposition.

Tanz also made a distinction between an advertisement that builds awareness and one intended to produce an immediate purchase. He favored brand campaigns while acknowledging a place for direct response. Context gave the placement an argument a buyer could inspect: here is the content, here is the advertisement, here is why they belong together. An algorithm still needed a sales explanation.

He developed that argument in his own writing. In a 2016 essay, he compared the crowded web with Times Square: a spectacle for visitors that becomes background noise to people who live with it. More exposure does not automatically buy more attention. Relevance matters because people learn to ignore the things that interrupt them without giving them anything useful.

There is a pleasing tension in that position. An advertising entrepreneur was asking advertisers to exercise restraint. It was also practical. A publisher, an advertiser and a reader all occupied the same screen. A business serving the first two could still exhaust the patience of the third. Tanz’s case for context depended on keeping that relationship workable.

A baseball game with a second scorecard

The question of what else the technology could do kept returning. In another 2016 essay, Tanz defended advertising as a way to fund wider technical development. A company might become known for the activity that paid its bills while developing capabilities useful elsewhere. That was an argument about business structure as much as a defense of his industry.

GumGum Sports made the idea concrete. Launched in December 2016, it identified logos and signage in sports broadcasts and social media, then helped assign value to the exposure. Prominence and time on screen mattered. A sponsor buying visibility wanted a better account of what had actually been visible.

For Tanz, the potential extended beyond a billboard at the edge of a field. A tablet on a broadcaster’s desk or a branded cup on a television set could also be recognized. The commercial question followed the visual one. First establish what appeared; then help someone decide what that appearance was worth.

During Advertising Week in New York in 2017, Tanz rented a Citi Field suite for himself and about a dozen employees. The outing offered a convenient demonstration of the sports business. A logo could miss the television broadcast and still travel widely in photographs shared online. The game had one score; the sponsorship had another, distributed across screens.

The expansion had taken time. Tanz said GumGum needed a viable model before exploring other opportunities, and the company had waited years to add another division. That detail gives his ambition some texture. He wanted the technology to travel, but first it needed a business that could finance the journey.

The colleague who liked the other half of the job

Software was only part of the machinery. Tanz came to believe that a founder needed a colleague whose interests complemented his own. His early partnership had broken down. Reflecting on it later, he described the problem of two people wanting the same enjoyable work while neither wanted enough of the operational responsibilities.

Phil Schraeder, who joined GumGum in 2011, offered another arrangement. He took on the operational work that allowed Tanz to concentrate on engineering and marketing. Their preferences differed, while their approach to developing employees and giving people autonomy overlapped. Friendship and shared enthusiasm could start a company; an allocation of responsibility had to keep it running.

In 2016, Schraeder became president and chief operating officer, with responsibility that included sales and relationships with brands and publishers. The promotion made the partnership visible in the organization chart. It also laid some of the groundwork for the succession that followed three years later. Someone was already doing the work of making a growing business function.

“Phil is the guy I would have loved to have started the company with.”

Ophir Tanz, 2018

The physical workplace showed another side of Tanz’s attention. In 2018, his office included furniture and artwork by childhood friend Carly Jo Morgan, a guitar for late evenings and a vintage gumball machine. He collected woodworking tools, including an 1867 hand plane bought in England. His dog Pip had a place in the pet-friendly office, too.

These details give the technology executive a recognizable setting. The old hand tool sits comfortably beside the interest in new software: both concern making something work. His preference for a comfortable, carefully designed office also came with a business rationale. People spent long hours there. He thought the environment deserved some of the same consideration as the product.

Leaving the chair, keeping the question

In April 2019, GumGum announced that Tanz would leave the CEO role to lead an independent venture. Schraeder would become chief executive of the advertising and sports businesses. GumGum would retain an ownership stake in the new company, while Tanz would remain a strategic adviser. The separation gave each business its own team and focus.

Pearl launched publicly the following month with an $11 million Series A led by Craft Ventures. By July 2024, it had announced a $58 million Series B led by Left Lane Capital. Those are company financing rounds, milestones in the new business rather than measures of Tanz’s personal wealth.

One returning connection was particularly revealing. Neotribe’s Kittu Kolluri had previously invested in GumGum and served on its board. In the 2024 financing, he joined Pearl’s board. For all the attention paid to a founder’s new idea, an entrepreneurial career also accumulates people who have watched that founder work before.

Tanz remains Pearl’s founder and CEO. His career has moved through agencies, mobile media, advertising and another independent company, while his interest in visual computing has persisted. The questions have become more specific with each business: what can the software recognize, who needs that information, and how should a company organize itself to deliver it?

The Mojungle sale could have been an ending. So could a profitable GumGum. Tanz kept finding another application, another organization to build, another reason to begin. The Porsche remains an excellent detail. His own subsequent purchases, measured in years committed to new companies, have been rather less easy to park.