It’s a small world after all.
On Tuesday, Super{set}, a venture studio led by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya – co-founders of Krux back in the day – announced that serial entrepreneur and Rembrand CEO Omar Tawakol is joining their outfit as a general partner.
But just over a decade ago, Tawakol, Chavez and Vaidya were steely-eyed competitors in the DMP wars.
Memory Lane
BlueKai and Krux – led by Tawakol and Chavez respectively – were data management platforms duking it out before Oracle swooped in to acquire BlueKai in 2014 for roughly $400 million and Salesforce followed suit with its purchase of Krux in 2016 for $700 million.
“We competed fiercely but honorably,” Chavez told AdExchanger.
At one point, before their exits, BlueKai and Krux were involved in a business dispute, as rivals often are, but the details are lost to time.
“Who can even remember what the issue was about at this point? But our teams were rabid about it,” Chavez said.
When tempers were flaring on both sides, Chavez drove to Menlo Park to negotiate face to face with Tawakol.
“My team was telling me, ‘This guy’s bad. He’s got horns. He kills puppies,” Chavez joked. “And then there we were having coffee, and I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, what a nice, smart, thoughtful, honest dude.’”
And now, more than 10 years later, Chavez, Tawakol and Vaidya are working together to build new tech companies.
Jam sessions
Super{set}’s approach is different from a traditional VC firm.
Super{set} occasionally invests in existing companies. It was the lead investor, for example, in a $23 million Series A funding round earlier this year to support Rembrand, Tawakol’s AI-powered virtual product placement startup.
But its raison d’être is to help assemble startups from scratch.
The Super{set} team runs what it calls “jam sessions” to zero in on problems facing a given market. They look for issues they can fix using AI, data and enterprise software and ask blue-sky questions, like: “How could we solve these if we had no constraints?”
From there, Super{set} does intensive market research, including conversations with potential customers, partners and entrepreneurs who could build the product and lead the company.
If the ducks line up, Super{set} forms and funds the new venture. It raised a $65 million investment fund in 2019 and closed a second $90 million fund in March 2024.
Super{set} was launched by folks who cut their teeth in ad tech, but the studio invests in many different sectors, including applied AI, HR tech, mar tech, privacy, health care, the creator economy and cloud management.
Its portfolio of 10 companies and counting is varied. Ketch, for example, is a data governance and privacy platform. Kapstan automates the deployment of cloud infrastructure. Boombox.io is a platform for helping musicians create, collaborate and connect. And Habu, of course, is the data clean room provider incubated by Super{set} that got acquired by LiveRamp for $200 million early last year.
Niche and nerdy
There’s a clear connection, however, between the companies in Super{set}’s portfolio: They’re “niche and nerdy,” Chavez said.
“And I’ve also heard people call what we focus on ‘boring but bountiful,’” he added. “These descriptions kind of hurt my feelings in the beginning, but then I realized how much I like them. ‘Niche and nerdy:’ That’s us.”
Because nerdy is usually needed and having a niche focus doesn’t necessarily mean entering a small market.
Take data management, which was Chavez, Tawakol and Vaidya’s main jam for years. It’s not the sexiest category, and when Chavez co-founded Krux in 2010, the addressable market for data management was only around $450 million.
But just a few years down the line, Krux and BlueKai were competing in a market worth roughly $35 billion, Chavez said.
“That’s where we prefer to play, in large and growing markets,” he said. “They might be perceived as niche, but we’re maniacal about finding insertion points where we can come in and build an enduring, sustainable company.”
And that’s what Tawakol is looking forward to doing: cracking the hard nuts and using his experience, but also having some fun.
“Participating in the formation stage, identifying good ideas, critiquing others, bringing in new entrepreneurs; that’s what I enjoy doing,” said Tawakol, who will also continue to serve as CEO of Rembrand. “I don’t paint. This right here is my creative outlet.”
