Adam Bauer's LinkedIn opens like a trophy case. "Three consecutive venture-backed exits at Shazam, GIPHY, & FaZe Clan respectively." It's a great line. It's the kind of line that gets you hired to build an ad business from scratch at the most beloved chat app on earth, which is exactly what happened in September 2024, when Bauer became Discord's Global Vice President of Advertising.

Here's what the trophy case doesn't mention. Apple bought Shazam. Fine, that one's a real trophy. Facebook bought GIPHY for $315 million, got ordered by the U.K. to sell it, and dumped it on Shutterstock for $53 million. And FaZe Clan went public through a SPAC at $725 million in 2022 and was swallowed by GameSquare in an all-stock deal worth about $17 million the following year.

That's not three exits. That's one exit, one eviction and one estate sale.

To be fair to the man, and we will be, Bauer didn't run any of those companies. He ran sales. Sales people don't pick the buyer, they just get the LinkedIn post. And the guy can sell. The question for advertisers is what he's selling now, because the pitch for Discord's ads sounds an awful lot like that trophy case: every number is true, and none of them is the whole story.

Full disclosure before we go further: I'm a gamer. Starflight on dual floppies, Warzone today, and in the 1990s I built and sold Future Games Network, an ad network for gamers. So I want this to work. That's exactly why I read the fine print.

Bauer started where every honest ad tech career starts, buying media nobody wanted to talk about at dinner. He was an assistant media planner at Ignited in 2007, then an interactive media planner at Saatchi & Saatchi, buying digital for Toyota. He says he bought in-game ads back then. "I used to buy that inventory," he told Mike Shields on Next in Media. So he knows the product from the side that writes the checks.

Then came ShareThis, five years and change, where he started as the company's first West Coast account executive and, by his own LinkedIn, was the #1 salesperson on a 23-person national team. He left as vice president of sales. ShareThis sold data built from the share buttons on other people's websites. It was ad tech before ad tech had a conscience problem.

Shazam came next, 2017 to 2018, as VP of brand partnerships. He relaunched the ad portfolio as Shazam for Brands, and Apple bought the company in September 2018. Credit where due. That one counts.

GIPHY followed in 2019. Bauer joined to "launch GIPHY's business model," which is a polite way of saying GIPHY didn't really have one. Facebook bought it in May 2020 for $315 million. Then the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority decided Facebook owning the internet's GIF library was a competition problem, ordered a divestiture, and Meta sold GIPHY to Shutterstock in 2023 for $53 million. That's an 83% haircut. On LinkedIn, it's an exit. At Meta, it's a write-down with a reaction GIF.

Then FaZe Clan, July 2020 to September 2024, as SVP of partnerships and business development. FaZe was the biggest name in gaming esports and creator culture, and in July 2022 it went public through a SPAC at a $725 million valuation. The stock topped $24 that September. It lost $48.7 million from operations in 2022 and $28.4 million more in the first half of 2023. By October 2023, shares traded under 20 cents, and GameSquare agreed to buy the whole thing for stock worth about $17 million. Bauer stayed almost another year after that.

"Venture-backed exit" is technically accurate. The venture backers did exit. Some of them just exited through the floor.

When Bauer announced the Discord job, he signed off with "Buy the ticket. Take the ride." That's Hunter S. Thompson. It's a hell of a choice for a guy about to put ads in front of a Gen Z audience that blocks ads for sport.

A year in, he posted that "It's more fun to be a Pirate than join the Navy," which is Steve Jobs, and listed what the team shipped: "a year ago we had one product. One." Since then, video, mobile, a new virtual currency, targeting, measurement and a global sales team.

The pirate line is fun until you remember who's buying. Advertisers don't hire pirates. They hire the Navy, and then they audit it.

Keep reading free with your email: the 94, 96 and 97 percent completion rates on ads Discord pays gamers to finish, and the virtual currency only ads can mint.