Daniel Reina Ortega

CEO

Interview

Daniel Reina (Dani) is the CEO of Techsoulogy. The person who started the whole project in 2013 together with our current CTO Tony Hervás, as a little free ad exchange community for indie developers and eventually became an AdTech firm with different especialized companies and a growing team.

In this interview we chat about the origins, the challenges of being a CEO, the goals he is proud of and, most importantly, tips to disconnect from work and enjoy free time.

Question: How did you get into the programmatic industry?

Answer: My first contact with the advertising industry was some years ago when we developed a mobile app and tried to monetize it with ads. It was really complicated, so we decided to create a company to help mobile app developers with that.

Q: What is the best part of being a CEO?

A: I enjoy having conversations about different topics like products, strategies, hiring, issues, organization… So my day use to be quite diversified and the time flies.
Another interesting part as CEO is to identify together with the team opportunities that can help us to bring Tappx to the next level.

Q: Could you list some tips to become a good CEO? What are the essential skills needed in your job apart from a calm and cool head?

A: I have no idea what is a good CEO hehehe. For example, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Amancio Ortega or Jeff Bezos’s personalities are super different, and probably will act differently as CEO as well.

It happens the same with the status of the company. The kind of CEO for a small startup is different than for a large company. For me right now it is important to build a great team, with more knowledge than me in each part of the business in order to continue improving.

Q: Tell us about a recent success story or goal you’re proud of.

A: I’m especially proud of the change that we did in 2019 with “Quality First Framework” when we decided to stop traffic from aggregators and we had a drop in revenues of around 50%.
It was a complicated decision, but after a few years, we recovered previous revenues and have a more stable company ready to continue scaling and doing great things. It is the result of all the hard work done by our amazing team.

Q: How do you organize your day? What tools do you use and which of them are your favorite ones?

A: I use more or less the same tools as others. Slack, Gmail, and Calendar by laptop or smartphone to be available as much as possible.

Q: What do you expect from the future of the industry? What needs to be improved and what challenges you want your company to lead?

A: Some stability will be appreciated because during the last years we had relevant changes almost every year (GDPR, ccpa, ads.txt, app-ads.txt, non IDFA…)
Regarding things to be improved, would be great that the industry trusts more in KPIs and technology than in traditional commercial agreements, rebates, and similar things, but not sure if it’s something that will change in the future or not.

Q: Do you have any idea how many emails you send per day? And phone calls?

A: E-mails received and sent probably hundreds every day. Phone calls are super few (several days I don’t have phone calls). If we talk about online meetings, maybe between 5 and 10 every day.

Q: What app do you use the most in your daily life?

A: Slack and Gmail at a similar level.

Q: What is the first thing you do when you get home and disconnect (is it possible?) from work?

A: Ask my kids what they did during the day.

Q: What would you do if you won the lottery? Or do you prefer a superpower like stopping time?

A: Superpowers are cooler, so I prefer superpowers to money, but not sure which one because watching “The boys” you can find a lot of crazy superpowers 😊.

Daniel Reina Ortega

Question: How did you get into the programmatic industry?

Q: What is the best part of being a CEO?

Q: Could you list some tips to become a good CEO? What are the essential skills needed in your job apart from a calm and cool head?

Q: Tell us about a recent success story or goal you’re proud of.

Q: How do you organize your day? What tools do you use and which of them are your favorite ones?

Q: What do you expect from the future of the industry? What needs to be improved and what challenges you want your company to lead?

Q: Do you have any idea how many emails you send per day? And phone calls?

Q: What app do you use the most in your daily life?

Q: What is the first thing you do when you get home and disconnect (is it possible?) from work?

Q: What would you do if you won the lottery? Or do you prefer a superpower like stopping time?

Q: Tell us something fun about yourself.