Hartford Business Journal

C T I N N O V A T O R S , 2 0 2 3 3 9 S WANSTON André Swan€on Co-Founder, Tru Optik Founder, The Swanston Organization Education: University of Connecticut Age: 43 e other value he remembers being non-negotiable, a concept he now calls "evolution of the family." "My dad talked about — we weren't rich, but he had infinitely more, and was able to provide infinitely more opportunity for me than his dad, who passed when he was 13. So, this mindset of oppor- tunity stuck with me," Swanston said. "It's almost like your only real responsibility in life is the evolution of your family." If Swanston's parents provided a kind of "first down" for their kids, moving from poverty to a middle class life in New York, Swanston and his wife Michelle have reached the goal line. In 2020, the ad tech company they launched and nurtured, Tru Optik, was acquired by TransUnion for more than $100 million. at's set the Swanstons up for their new chapter as philanthropists, angel investors and entrepreneurs on an even larger scale. André Swanston recently made headlines when he unveiled a billion-dollar plan to devel- op a mixed-use stadium complex in Bridge- port, which he hopes will eventually serve as home base for a Major League Soccer and/or National Women's Soccer League team. Thinking ahead Swanston describes himself as a "power user" of his note-taking app. "I've written hundreds of business ideas — like hundreds. And not in one sentence, I mean pages," he said. "Anything that I do or see, I think about the business of it." And that always-switched-on brain is also very goal-oriented. "Whether it's financial, whether it's professional, personal, ev- erything for me is laser-focused on where I want to be five to ten years from now," he said. Initially, Swanston's path from his modest Bronx neighborhood led, via an accelerated educational program for gied kids, to a pri- vate school on the Upper East Side, and from there to Hotchkiss, the exclusive boarding school in Lakeville, Connecticut. "e rapport and trust and camaraderie that you build with all these people from different backgrounds is amazing," he recalls. "A lot of this has shaped my outlook and my ability to fit into mul- tiple different ecosystems and feel comfortable." en came UConn, that Division I spot, a degree in economics, and a very important meeting: with his future wife Michelle — also a track athlete. Swanston pledged Alpha Phi Alpha, the oldest Black intercolle- giate fraternity in America. It provided fun, service and commu- nity — and a start to his entrepreneurial journey. "I was the person that coordinated all the fundraiser parties and events for the fraternity," he said, "booking the DJs and venues and security and insurance. And I was good at it." Still at UConn, he started an entertainment company. He opened his first nightclub when he was 23, then in partnership with Mi- chelle, a restaurant in Storrs — Fanatic Sports Bar and Grill. As he turned 25, the two got married. "And then my mom said, 'you have to get a real job. Right? Restaurant, nightclub? It's not a real job,'" he recalled. Taking the leap Settling down — and listening to his mom — meant a pivot to a much more conventional career in finance. He joined Ameriprise Financial in East Hartford to learn the ropes of wealth management, and aer a few years got recruited into JPMorgan Chase. By this time, the Swanstons had a two-year-old daughter and a newborn son, a situation in which most people would have been delighted to be holding down a good salary at a blue-chip financial firm. But the entrepreneurial itch — and Swanston's long-term plan — was still there. He had been brainstorming with an old buddy from Hotchkiss, Alex Geis, watching the changing technology around TV in the very earliest days of streaming video — way before our now-universal, internet-connected sets. "I'm seeing everybody streaming on their laptops and their computers, doing more and more media discovery," Swanston said. "And now you're saying that the biggest screen in the house may have those types of capabilities in the coming years? I said to myself, 'whoever can control the data and the insight on how this stuff is distributed is gonna be a billionaire.'" He told his wife he was quitting JPMorgan Chase and founding a startup, Tru Optik. Geis, who had studied computer science, became the chief technology officer, while Swanston took on business strategy. As the company grew, it became evident they needed an operations manager, and Michelle Swan- ston signed up too. e next few years were, he said, "brutally hard. Mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritu- ally. It was way harder than I thought it was going to be." "My wife and I had no social life in our thirties. We missed wed- dings, birthday parties, funerals, baby showers. We were locked in," he said. "It was this or nothing for us." By the time they had 10 employees, they moved the business into a coworking space in Stamford. "We were really good at stretching money," he said. "Neither my co-founder and I paid ourselves. We had employees that probably were getting paid 20, 25 percent of what they could have made elsewhere, but took stock." Audience intelligence In the early days of streaming, everyone in the ecosystem was trying to figure out audience demographics, and therefore the value of their content. "My co-founder said, 'the biggest source of streaming data is not Netflix or any of this other stuff. It's BitTorrent,'" said Swanston, referring to the peer-to-peer, file-sharing technology. "It's people pirating illegal TV shows and movies all over the world." Geis built a system that could connect with and harvest data from computers that were pirating shows. "And all of a sudden we had the biggest source of data in the world for streaming," said Swanston. "We literally had audience intelligence on hundreds of millions of people back to what type of device at what IP address." ey licensed that data to the big media companies for them to play moneyball with their content licensing plans. Next, they wanted to be taken seriously by the ad companies, so they started to make strategic hires to help them package and market their data. "en we had the ad agencies reach out," he said. "And they said, Continued on next page

• Cover