My Digital Hero
Dorian Spackman is the Founder and CEO of Colateral.io, a retail media and marketing software company whose platform helps retailers to monetise their in-store and omnichannel media inventory.
Who is your digital hero?
Meg Whitman, tech executive and former President and CEO Hewlett-Packard Company and eBay, and more recently, US Ambassador to Kenya.
What has she done to win hero status in your eyes?
I attended a launch event for Intershop Communications’ 3rd generation product launch in New York, at the time they were launching on Nasdaq and making a huge push into the American market in 1998, and Meg Whitman was keynote speaker at the event. It was the year she joined eBay and her words stayed with me.
I watched Whitman take eBay from a $4 million novelty candy dispenser sales (hobbyist garage-sale model platform?) platform to an $8 billion digital goliath, a global ecommerce leader, in under 10 years. Even more impressively, it was at a time when the first dot-com bust happened and so many companies went to the wall.
Her determination and strategic thinking proved that online marketplaces could work at mass scale – and bigger than that – that whole industries could transform with brave and determined leadership.
How has her heroism helped drive digital?
Showing others what is possible in even the most challenging market conditions, and being bold enough to step into an industry that was heavily, likely completely, male dominated at the time. She pushed major companies to embrace the internet and digital business models when they still felt uncertain and risky.
I have no doubt Meg Whitman has encouraged many women – and men – to step into, and excel in, tech roles. Her heroism wasn’t about one dramatic act, but about repeatedly choosing the uncertain digital future over the safe traditional path.
What are the biggest challenges in digital we need another hero to solve?
How Ai coexists with humans.
How do we harness the benefits of AI without destroying employment and our own society? How do we prevent it from being used to funnel all the wealth in the world to a select handful of people?
We need a partnership between humans and AI that focuses on solving what is actually important in the world and its future, first.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
Building a B2B software company in rural Cornwall. You don’t need to be in The Valley, Soho or Silicon Roundabout to make things happen.
Colateral helps retailers and other physical customer facing businesses gain control of their marketing assets, streamline delivery of their marketing programmes and also monetise them, creating valuable revenues from existing retail and commerce media inventory,
