Mario Neto: In college you worked as part of the entrepreneurship club. Is that something you’ve always wanted to do?
Welcome Read: I think I was kind of shown by my family — there are a lot of pros and cons to the side of business ownership, and I always thought that was a really interesting thing from a really young age, and I wanted to do it. Funny enough, I actually started marketing at fourteen for a synthetic lawn company, and that’s kind of where I started finding my interest in marketing. I really thought that could be a path I go down, and I did that for a while. Then in college, I started a company called Origin — originally Origin Innovations — basically working with dentists and orthodontists, running their ads, doing their websites, managing their social profiles, things like that. That was really nice because it allowed me to help pay through a good portion of my college, which is awesome. This is a bit of a tangent, but it also introduced me to the software world, because one of my clients used dental software, and I started talking with that company about marketing strategies and working with them. Eventually I realized I really liked software and felt it would be cooler to work with a software company — something a lot more scalable than a dental practice, a lot more reliant on marketing and sales than on word of mouth, which is really what a dentist relies on. So I thought it would be cool to pivot more into the software direction after college. What about you — have you always been in marketing?
Mario Neto: No, I’ve done a lot of things. I was actually a late bloomer in marketing — I only started working directly in marketing when I was twenty-eight, thirty years old. I’d been out of college for a couple of years, and before that I always worked for big multinationals: Abbott Labs, and Sky, which was part of the Direct TV group. I’m not sure if you know it — they used to have those satellite dish TVs. I’m not sure if they’re still around, but about two years after graduating is when I started working in marketing. It wasn’t during college or right after it. My last job during college was as an internal auditor — nothing related to marketing, the complete opposite. Then I started working in marketing and fell in love with it, but my career took a completely different path. One question I wanted to ask you: your first job, or the thing you thought you’d do when you grew up as a kid — anything related to marketing?
Welcome Read: As a really little kid, it was probably something like a firefighter. But honestly, as far back as I can remember, it was a business owner. It’s so ingrained in my family and my DNA — it was pretty much, “you’ve got to do it,” is what I’ve always been told. So it was always interesting seeing people who own a business, or even just seeing a franchise or something and thinking, that’s so cool, they own that place, they own that building, and they’re making money and it’s theirs. I don’t know, business ownership was always fascinating to me.