Digital & Dirt
00:00:04 · Ian Dallimore, Lucy Markowitz
[00:00:04] S0: I'm Ian Dallimore, and this is Digital and Dirt. Alright. Welcome back, guys. My next guest, this is a little bit different. We normally kick off the season with a Lamar executive, but this woman is a great friend of mine and a family of Lamar. She hates mayonnaise and loves hot sauce. It's a good makeup there. She was... Is a certified scuba diver. She rode horses her whole entire life, and she's had a handful of crazy animals, which we're gonna ask her about. SVP, GM of US Marketplace for Vistar Media, Lucy Markowitz. Good to see you my friend. [00:00:45] S1: Hello. Thank you for having me and down here in Baton Rouge. Yeah. It's kind of crazy that this is my first time being here. [00:00:51] S0: I know. I love this. So you and I've been friends, we've worked together for over twelve years now. And this morning you're like a lot of our guests, you're staying right across the street, but it's the middle of the summer in Louisiana and any New Yorker that would take a cab from the Marriott over here would basically get laughed at or the Uber driver would probably say, Hey, get out. [00:01:11] S1: Well, at least thank you for saving my hair. It would curl up in about three seconds being out there. So thank you for the pickup. [00:01:17] S0: Yeah, without a doubt. Well, look, we're so happy to have you here. Like you said, it's crazy that you've never been here before and we've kind of worked so closely together, which we'll dive deeper into, but most importantly, tell us about these crazy animals and their names.
00:01:17 · Ian Dallimore, Lucy Markowitz
[00:01:17] S0: Yeah, without a doubt. Well, look, we're so happy to have you here. Like you said, it's crazy that you've never been here before and we've kind of worked so closely together, which we'll dive deeper into, but most importantly, tell us about these crazy animals and their names. [00:01:30] S1: Oh yeah. So, well, there's been a lot of different ones. So obviously road horses. So we have the conventional, the horses, cats, dogs. I will go the furthest end of the other spectrum, which is that I also might think my first chosen pet was a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach that I picked out from the pet store. [00:01:51] S0: So what kind of pet store do you go to that has a hissing cockroach? [00:01:54] S1: A lot of them actually. You'd be very surprised. I'm surprised that none of your kids have brought one of these home. I'll have to have a chat with them later today. [00:02:01] S0: Well, I'll tell you this. We have five chickens. One was attacked by a hawk, so that guy's gone. [00:02:08] S1: RIP. [00:02:09] S0: Chick is gone, RIP to that one. We brought home this, Bearded Dragon as a, you know, you bring your gerbil home, you bring the, and then a week later, next thing you go, we have an entire bearded dragon set up. We have that cat that's so infamous. So yeah, we're right there with you. So maybe one day my daughter will be on a podcast talking about Epstein. [00:02:28] S1: Yeah, we'll talk. [00:02:29] S0: Yeah, I love it. So let's dive into your journey. It's a unique journey, but you started off your career. Well, you went to the U. [00:02:39] S1: Yes, did.
00:02:39 · Lucy Markowitz, Ian Dallimore
[00:02:39] S1: Yes, did. [00:02:40] S0: Yeah. So great choice in college, but then right out of college, give our listeners a little bit more about the journey and how you started and where you are.
00:02:48 · Lucy Markowitz
[00:02:48] S1: Yeah. So actually when I was still in college, we, as everyone know, we hit the financial crisis. So that was 2008. And then in 2009, I got a call in March, before the summer was about to start that I actually was being invited for an internship at Goldman Sachs in New York. So intern there right after the crash and had the opportunity to kick off my career in New York working in the financial industry, which I think was really opportunistic for me. I think at that point, while there was a lot of people that had lost their jobs during this time, which is really unfortunate. I would say being young and cheap and hungry, definitely put me in a good spot to be able to kick off my career. Doing something that had, I would just say like a lot of momentum behind it and gave me a chance to kind of get a real world view of what the working world was like in a very high stress, but also high impact environment. So I worked for Goldman for about two and a half years and then left for an opportunity to go to a startup called DataMiner. At the time I was hired as their first salesperson in New York and DataMiner was a company that was really predicated on the Twitter fire hose. So they were one of the earliest partners have access to this real time information and this was 2012. So I think one of the things that sold me on it initially was sitting on the trading floor. I watched all these people scrolling on their phone and looking at Twitter because all of that was blocked in the office. And one of the first things that broke interesting enough was actually the twenty twelve London Olympics. Prior to that, people would watch the Olympics on TV and that's when they would find out what happened. And this was the first time that everything broke on Twitter. NBC really needed to rethink their whole entire process and more and more information was breaking things that were moving the market. And so this was my first time working for a startup. My clients were on the investment bank and hedge fund side. And then I had the opportunity to, you know, was thinking about, I was in a sales role, but wanted to do something a little bit different and started just meeting with everyone.
00:05:10 · Lucy Markowitz
Included in the everyone was I was connected with Michael Provenzano, Sarah And Vistar, we met, I think it was like a total blizzard outside, which made it easy for me to sneak out of the office real quick. People didn't question why I was gone for so long. I think they just thought I got stuck somewhere. And we met up at the, I think it was the Birch Coffee on 29th Street and literally just talked. Brought my resume, printed it out. He didn't, I don't even think he looked at it. And was kinda just talking me about his view of the ability to revolutionize an industry, which even though I didn't know a ton about out of home and didn't know about the marketing world in-depth, I think the idea to be a changemaker was really interesting to me. And I thought, why don't I go work for this guy? He's had success in a past company that he started. Maybe I'll work there for one year and see what happens. Maybe I'll hit it big. And almost twelve years later, I'm still standing.
00:06:14 · Ian Dallimore, Lucy Markowitz
[00:06:14] S0: Yeah. We always say that. And that's a great podcast listen. We've actually had Michael on twice, but his journey and he touched on it on the last podcast about that, right? This past season was kickoff and it was all about the people for him. So what was it about him? You know, here you are. If I'm thinking about, I'm thinking as like your parents and you're like, my daughter, she went to the U, she graduated, she works for this, you know, Goldman Sachs, beautiful job, company's never going anywhere. And then you jump to a data company that's basically a startup, and then you leave that to go off on a blizzard to meet this this guy. What was it about Michael that you... Because it's a trust thing at this point, because you're you're taking a gamble on how old is Vistar at this moment? [00:07:00] S1: So it was about a year and a half, two years old from like inception. [00:07:06] S0: Correct. Which is still super, super. So what was it about Michael that sold through the idea or was it just the journey and the dream?