Podcast: Scale Tales

Ep. 45: How Rich Kahn Built and Scaled a Company that Protects over 2 Million Domains from Ad Fraud

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What happens when innovation collides with integrity in the fast-moving world of digital advertising? For Rich Kahn, CEO and Co-Founder of Anura.io, the answer lay in a problem often overlooked: Ad fraud. From bootstrapping his first online venture in the early days of the internet to building a technology that now protects over 2 million domains worldwide, Rich’s journey is a masterclass in resilience, reinvention, and relentless pursuit of quality.

 

In this episode, Rich shares how he and his wife transformed an early ad network into a cutting-edge fraud detection company after discovering the scale of fraudulent traffic plaguing advertisers. Through rigorous testing, self-funded R&D, and countless iterations, they developed a platform that outperformed industry competitors and became a trusted safeguard for global brands. Along the way, Rich reveals how he personally emailed thousands of LinkedIn contacts to land Anura’s first clients, why he chose to scale through relationships rather than paid acquisition, and how disciplined operations, structured processes, and tools like Trainual, Slack, Zoom, and HubSpot now keep his growing team aligned. His story underscores that true scale isn’t just about growth – it’s about clarity, communication, and culture.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • How Rich identified ad fraud as a billion-dollar blind spot and turned it into a profitable SaaS opportunity.
  • The testing process that validated Anura’s fraud detection accuracy and gave them market credibility.
  • Why proof of concept and customer validation are essential before seeking exponential growth.
  • Leadership lessons from scaling with a spouse, building trust-based teams, and fostering a culture of transparency.
  • The operational frameworks and daily rituals—like morning huddles and structured onboarding—that keep Anura agile as it expands.

 

Join us with Rich Kahn as he reveals how discipline, data, and a deep sense of purpose can transform a bootstrapped startup into a trusted global leader in digital fraud prevention.

Episode Info

Special Guest: Rich Kahn – CEO and Co-Founder

Location: Middletown, Delaware, United States

Air Date: November, 00 ,2025

Transcript

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Welcome to Scale Tales – the business storytelling podcast where entrepreneurs, executives and experts share firsthand accounts of those magical moments when they achieved something bigger than even they could have imagined.

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre, your guide during this next scale tale. Technological advancements always seem to be a double-edged sword. On one end, it gives you access to tools that make life and work faster, easier, simpler, and honestly it may even level the playing field for you or your organization. But on the other end it can open you up to privacy invasions, uncontrollable spam, and…fraud.

Fraud comes in many shapes and forms, but one thing is for sure if you or your company becomes a victim, the effects can be damaging if not downright catastrophic. Today’s tale takes us on one hero’s journey to change the digital fraud detection and prevention trajectory and save as many companies from fraud as possible.

This is Ep. 45: How Rich Kahn Built and Scaled a Company that Protects over 2M Domains from Ad Fraud

Hello, my name is Rich Kahn, CEO and co-founder of Anura.io. I’m currently in Middletown, Delaware and this is my scale tale.

It all started about 2003. My wife and I decided to start a company together. We were high school sweethearts and somehow we decided let’s really put our love on test and start up a company and the best way to describe the company is a much scaled down version of a Google. Basically, advertisers can come and place text-based ads across hundreds of thousands of websites that we had access to across the Internet.

We launched the company in 2003 and late 2004 we started getting some complaints from advertisers that the traffic quality wasn’t quite the same. They initially loved the quality of the traffic and the traffic started to change. They weren’t quite sure what it was. So I’m the developer. I started looking at the code, looking at the analytics, trying to look at the data and realized it was fraud. I had dealt with fraud earlier in my career, but I figured, okay, we’re getting affected by fraud. So, my goal was to run out, find a solution that does fraud detection, bolt it onto my platform and continued building my business.

Unfortunately back in 2004, 2005, nothing existed. So I wrote my own software and I remember telling my wife, I don’t want to be the guy solving fraud. I want to just continue building my ad network and growing it that way. And unfortunately nothing existed. In fact, the first commercially available fraud detection solution didn’t come out until 2008. So I was a little ahead at the time looking for that solution that didn’t exist and I started writing my own and it worked great. Solved the problem that we were having. People are loving the product and, and then our business started to grow and over time we started getting people asking, “Hey, can I license that product outside of your network?” And I guess we were a little naive at the time.

We thought, you know, it would be kind of cool. Like, if you want this clean traffic, you gotta buy it just from us. But we weren’t looking at the bigger picture where people could license it for Google and the other networks that weren’t out in the marketplace at the time. So we kept on doing that. And then we got to a point where we had won lots of awards. We were on the Inc. 5000 list five years in a row. I had won the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year for technology red herring awards. Things were going crazy. We thought, you know what, maybe we can sell the company.

So we hired an M & A banker, did a full process, spoke to about a dozen companies that included Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, and probably half a dozen other companies. And they all said the same thing. They don’t care about the customer network that we had built. What they cared about was the fraud detection solution. And they asked us if it was standalone by itself, and do we have clients behind it. And I had to answer no for both of those. They all said the same thing,

“Once you do, call us back.”

And that was the end of the conversation.

So kind of got a learning curve there that, okay, while we’re making a lot of money and we’re growing the business with this ad network, the real value seemed to be in the fraud detection solution. And at that time, we had a lot of people asking us to still license it outside the network. So, two things we did.

One, was I figured I would “jerryrig” the software to work outside of the network and work on a client’s site for them because they were having a lot of problems. And I knew the guy in the industry for a bunch of years, and I figured, let me see if I can help him out, see if the software works outside of our network. And it was amazing. He had organic traffic only. And once we deployed the technology, we identified 30% of his traffic was fraud. It was eye opening. We were able to mitigate the traffic for him, and it solved the problem that he was having.

We’re like, wow, this, this really worked well. So then we said, before we run out and build another platform, do we really bring something special to the marketplace? All these companies were asking, is it special that can they license it outside the network? And, you know, people are willing to buy that type of company. Let’s test it. So we had access to about four or five of our competitors at the time that did fraud detection. And we decided to run a campaign spending our own money.

We spent six figures of our own money running a test.

This test was the second thing that Rich and his wife did to determine if they in fact could build a viable fraud detection product that they could license.

We ran traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing, through a page that would detect using us and the four or five other competitors that we had access to, all mark the traffic and then we drop it down to a conversion page. Once the conversion took place, we would validate the conversions using human efforts. So we’d call them up

“Hey, you filled out a form trying to save money on car insurance.”

Or whatever the campaign was.

I can’t remember the campaign was that we ran, but we try to confirm them that, yes, this person came to the site. Yes, this person fill out the form. Yes, this person wants more information. So we knew it was a legitimate conversion. So we human verified all the conversions. Then we went back and analyzed the data and we blew the competition out of the water as far as accuracy, meaning identifying actual people were really fraud, like there was actual fraud and thoroughness, we were finding more fraud. So I knew what that meant. It meant we had to go out and take a second mortgage on our house and go build another platform.

Because we’re bootstrappers, we’re not used to getting funding and raising funding for our project. So I said, all right, let’s focus on running the test one more time. I want to be certain. And the test came back, we ran it in a different way, and again, we outshined the competition. And I said, one more time. So the team put together another series of reports and each test took three months to run. Between building the campaigns, running the analytics, doing the verification took about three months. So after the third run, I said, okay, fine, we’re going to build this new platform..

And by April 1, 2017 their new company, Anura, was born. “Anura” means “frog,” a fitting ode to their original company’s mascot.

It was difficult because we got the platform launched, we got a basic website up, we got a pricing model that we think is going to work. Who’s going to sell it? So that’s me. As a CEO of the company, it’s my job to sell the product. I remember sitting in my basement for months and I had probably a couple thousand contacts on LinkedIn. I hand emailed every single contact in my LinkedIn database.

These are people that I met and had relationships with. It wasn’t like the spam is today. I know on LinkedIn you get a lot of spam, people just trying to get another connection so they can drop and sell you something. These were all handcrafted connections that I met at trade shows, people I spoke to. And I used to be very adamant about connecting with all these people. And as I connected with them, I started emailing them all one by one.

“Hey, I’ve got this new product. This is what it does. I’d love to talk to you about it.“ We landed our first 10 clients that way, which was enough to get it up off the ground and start running. And then I started joining different groups, going to different trade shows, starting to meet different people, started getting referrals, and that started to scale the business. And now we’re at a point where this year we identified last year that I think 40% of our new clients came from trade shows, 40% came from referrals and the other 20% came from organic traffic.

We wanted to step it up on each avenue. So this year we decided we always do about six trade shows a year. The first five months of the year, I did 11 trade shows, I got another eight more to go this year. So we’re focusing heavily on face-to-face communications. Organic traffic is still growing on its own, doing what we’re supposed to be doing. And the referrals, as we’re growing the user base, the referrals just keep coming in. And that’s how we started scaling the company.

In case you’re wondering, this is what scale looks like for Rich’s company, Anura.

One of the statistics that we use is that we have over 2 million domains that we’re protecting.

In a span of 14 years, the groundwork that eventually led to this scale included serious conversations with Merger & Acquisition (M&A) attorneys, extensive testing, and…building a team. I asked Rich if he could provide more details about each of these areas.

2014 was the year that we hired an M & A firm and ran the full process that whole year, because those processes can take anywhere from six to 12 months. And at that time, we were somewhere between 40 and 50 employees as a company.

What continues to intrigue me in my interviews with different entrepreneurs and experts on the Scale Tales podcast is how many of them end up building their own software when they are unable to find an off-the-shelf solution. That might not sound interesting or novel, but it is when you consider that most of them either don’t have a background in coding or development, or, as in Rich’s case, they’re self-taught. 

I’ll give you something that’s not on my LinkedIn. So I wanted to be a robotics Engineer Back in 1990, when robots were cool in the movies, but the technology wasn’t quite there to actually build robots the way we think about them today. I had gotten accepted to MIT for their electromechanical engineering program because you needed a degree in electrical engineering and mechanical engineering in order to be able to build robots.

The problem was I got accepted to this program, which was awesome, but I didn’t have the funds to go and I didn’t want to be in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Let me start off at a community college. Let me start there. Let me just bulk up on all the computer courses I get my hands on, get myself a good foundation, and then reapply to MIT for my last two years so I can get the balance of the education that way.

And it turned out I was teaching the teachers better ways of programming in their own languages that they were teaching. I ended up walking out of a lot of classes because it was just that much more advanced than what they were in the languages. I’m like, all right, well, I want to make good money. I want to build a family and take care of my family. And I started looking and doing some research. And because robotics was just so new there wasn’t a lot of job opportunities or a lot of money in the space.

It was, if you enjoy doing it, that’s great. But there wasn’t a whole lot of money in the space. So I said, let me flip my major because I wasn’t learning anything to business management so I could take some business courses and, and figure out what I want to do when I get out of here. I stayed in school for two years and I realized, you know what, this is not where I’m going to learn to do what I want to do.

By the time Rich made that decision it was 1992, just as this thing called the internet came onto the scene.

I got on the Internet and was enthralled with the Internet and said, you know what, I’m not a writer, but I wanna write a blog or I should say a newsletter back then on what’s going on with the Internet because I was doing so much research and there was really no area to get information on the changing Internet because the Internet when it was first put out there in 91, 92, 93, it was all command line. There was no point and click interface, there was no browser. You had to be techie to know how to log into systems, telnet to other systems to get information, download information through FTP.

It was not user friendly at all. But I loved it because I was a developer, love working on that kind of stuff. So in 1993 I launched a newsletter. And what I did was I trolled AOL newsgroups back in the day and just bounce into a group and say, hey, by the way, I’m writing a newsletter on the changing things that are happening on the Internet. If you’re interested, you know, here’s an email address to send your email address to so I can add you to the list. And I want to say within the first six months I had over 20,000 subscribers on that newsletter for that back then that was phenomenal.

Wow!

I started writing this newsletter I would just buy by my way of relaxing throughout the week, was learning anything, get my hands on. So I was looking at stuff on the Internet that was coming out, more or less magazines, news articles, the newspaper, learning what’s going on with the Internet. Then write an article for the week, send it out to my list. And then one day somebody emailed me and said,

Can I advertise in your newsletter?

And that started the first Internet company for me back in 93.

Wow, a company that you sold, right?

That one I didn’t quite sell. So here’s what happened, okay? And that’s the next part of the story. So what ended up happening was this started taking off, and it was going great. But then in 1994, the web browser came out. It was a whole new thrill for me because now you got this opportunity that the average person doesn’t have to be a geekhead to jump online and be able to surf the web. Like there’s this really cool tool that you can do. So I decided I want to build websites for people.

I remember sending an email out to my base and said, if you’re interested in getting on the Internet, I can build a website for you, put you into a mall so you have some traffic and do this all for $150. And then it was like $50 a month to host your website. I received that week, like $8,000 in checks.

Took a week off from work, figured out how to build a mall, how to build the websites, built the whole thing, had the whole thing done in like four or five days. I don’t think I slept that week. I was just so enthralled! This has some legs behind it. And what I did was as it started growing, I thought, you know what, why not add an ISP to the mix where people can dial into the Internet. So I brought a T1 into my house.

For most of you who don’t know what a T1 is, the high-speed line back then it was 1.5 megabits, today, if you get 1.5 megabits on your cell phone, you’re upset. But had this high-speed Internet come in, bought racks of modems, and I ordered 300 phone lines for my house. So my neighbors must have thought I was crazy because I called up Verizon, I said, “I need 300 phone lines. 300 lines should be enough.”

Meanwhile, I had no intent of having 300 phone lines in the house, but that’s how they sold what I needed in the house. So I remember they closed down our street for the day because they had to string this wire, which was probably about 2 inches thick and had 300 pair of lines on there. In order to bring in the phone lines, they put it up on the poles, had to restructure the poles, they put it into the house, and now I had phone lines in the house, started selling dial up customers, and long story short, I went to a presentation called Time Warner Roadrunner, which was the first cable modem that I came across. And it was so much faster than dial up.

And I’m like, our clients are with us because we’re the fastest Internet in town. We’re going to lose all them to cable modems because everyone’s going to switch to cable. No one’s going to want dial up. So that’s when I was able to sell that company to another dial up provider, still betting that people need a dial up service for a long time.  We got out and I was happy to get out.

And throughout it all Rich and his wife are still together and yes, they still work together too!

Yep, we’ve been dating since we’re 15. We never had a fight.

Wait, what?  Really?

I’m only kidding. I’m only kidding. I’m only kidding.

Well, I tell everybody the same thing.It’s either you grow together or you grow apart. Because nothing stresses a marriage more than working together. Because normally if you work at different locations, you come home, How was your day? How was your day? But now you’re working together, making decisions together, working on stuff. When you get home, you don’t want to talk about each other’s day because you just lived it. So you talk about other things. I’ve seen a lot of couples that have started businesses that have left the marriages. But for us, we grew together with it. We have four kids with three grandkids. And, you know, you just build a life together. And we built it. We built everything side by side together.

It’s amazing what can be accomplished when people work together on one accord with a single mission and a laser like focus. You can build strong businesses that can weather storms and sustain the setbacks and blows. But don’t be fooled my friend, it takes work. A lot of work. And, it’s a process. Coming up after the break, Rich will reveal even more details about the work and behind-the-scenes processes it takes to keep Anura and their customers thriving. 

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Welcome back! Before the break, you heard the story of Rich Kahn, a successful tech entrepreneur who unintentionally started his ad fraud journey while scaling a company called eZanga. A product derivative eventually paved the way to another, even bigger standalone ad fraud product. As you know, running a successful business is more than just having a great product. It takes business development and sales to build a customer base, operations to keep daily tasks in motion, financial acumen to fund it all, and HR to hire a dedicated team of people to make it all happen. Speaking of HR, Rich will now share even more details about how he built his team. He even has a special offer for you! 

The first person we hired was a salesperson. The second person. This is interesting. The second person I hired was either 18 or 19, fresh out of high school. As a web developer. And believe it or not, he’s still with us today.

That’s. That’s incredible.

Now, there was a little hiatus. He was our CTO, and AWS called him up and offered him a boatload of money. And I told him, “Look, if you’re my own son, I’d tell you to take the job. I just can’t compete.” He went there and hated it. They didn’t treat the people well. From what I understand a lot of these big companies, what they do is they bring in fresh talent and they work them so hard that they burn out in two years.

And then their payout structure drops after two years, they almost entice you to leave so they can bring in some people with fresh energy. Guess that’s the model for these big companies. He was there for a couple years and just was burnt out. Wasn’t happy with what he was doing, just miserable. And he calls up, he says, is there a spot for me? I’m like, we’ll make one. I’m not going to pay Amazon dollars, but we’ll make one work, and we end up coming to a deal that made sense for both of us. And he now runs our office in Texas.

That explains how Rich hired a CTO, but it also made me wonder how he began to build a team back when he said he personally emailed over 2,000 people on LinkedIn. Did he really do that by himself, or did he have some people helping him? At what point did he start to build a team beyond his first two hires?

It took me a couple months to get through that list because I was writing a lot of people. If I didn’t recognize a person, I would have kind of a standard email. But I would go back, you know, to their LinkedIn if I see something that connected us. Hey, I think we worked together. When you were at this company, I was at that company, I had to make them personalized. It took a couple months to get through that list.

And then, of course, I started getting responses back that I had to respond to. So that whole process took a couple months. But it was 2017. When we first launched. We’re like, great. We launched a product, launched a company, now we need to sell it. We didn’t have a sales process built. We didn’t have a demo built. We had nothing when we first started. We just had a product that worked, and now it’s time to prove to the market. And they always say that first million is the hardest to make, because in a SaaS business, that’s your proof of concept.

If you can’t get past that first million is probably not a viable company. So it’s like you’re working your butt off to get to that first million dollars in business. Because that first million dollars of business represents proof of concept that not only did you build a product, but the marketplace likes it. Now you got the first million. Let’s grow to the next level.

It turned out that growing to the next level involved scaling down to scale up. Keep in mind that, at this point, Rich had an existing company called eZanga and a new startup called Anura.

What happened was we kept on going to trade shows, doing everything. But that business model that was building that company was starting to wind down in the, general marketplace because you had other bigger players to go to. You had your Facebook’s out, Instagram, Bing, Yahoo. Are bigger players now in that space where you can buy traffic. So we were kind of like second tier search results. And that model started to die down a little bit. And as it died down, we realized, look, we’re spending all this resources and marketing and selling and we’re not growing, we’re not bringing on any new clients.

So what we did was we took all the staff that we had because, you know, it takes time to build the rights. And at that point, staff had dwindled down a little bit as we started building out Anura. And we left with like a core of like 12 or 15 people that we took from one company, moved it to another company. We did what was probably not a smart idea. We took people from a company that was making money and put them into a company that wasn’t making money. And I kept the skeleton crew running the Zanga just because we had clients that were with us for 10, 15 years that loved our product and our service. And it was profitable. So we just kept it running for those people. And as the natural attrition came, eventually we shut down the business because 100% of our focus was on Anura.

So, eventually Rich closed eZanga, transitioned more of that team to Anura, and began to build the team even more as they poured more time, effort, and energy into this business. As they continued with development, testing, and product launching, the need for more developers and project managers became apparent.

Essentially we have a whole development cycle that we run typical scrum and we’re building out the product. So for us it’s all hands on deck for new fraud alerts. In other words, if our systems kick up information that looks like there’s a new fraud threat, which happens every week, goes to our developers hands, they look at it, they figure out what the problem is. Either retrain the machine learning or go out and solve the problem and then roll out an update to our product.

Last year $140 billion was stolen by fraudsters from advertisers. People don’t realize how big of a problem that is. I’m a big fan of Shark Tank and someone will come up with this great idea and they’re like, well, how big is the market? Oh, the market’s like a $3 billion market and it’s, it’s big and I just want a small piece of that. Meanwhile, we’re trying to protect $140 billion loss. Big industry, big problems. I mean, if I had to point my finger as to fraud, it’s run by organized crime.

You know, they’re putting together lots of good, smart people to go after people. You’re talking about a big problem that exists in the marketplace. So constantly testing the systems, constantly trying to identify new threats and new ways of getting around software like ours and many of our competitors in the space. We identify it and then we’re able to do something about it. And we have updates going out every week. We have a very robust development cycle to find the problem, fix the problem, test it, roll it out. While we’re doing all that, we still have another group of people that have to work on new product updates, like new types of reporting mechanisms, new types of data to look at, new types of visualizations to use.

So it’s a concentrated process and the team is working on the data. I’ve got one guy who’s got a new thing that he wants to work on. He’s working day and night on it. Normally we kick everybody out of the office at 5 o’clock, he goes home, has dinner, sits down for another four or five hours, work on it because these people are invested in solving this problem. It’s almost as if someone’s stealing money directly out of their own pocket. And it’s just great to see the team react in such a positive way to solve a crime, but it’s not listed as a crime in any law. Right?

We all know it’s stealing, but there’s nothing verbally in the legal documents that call it out. We know it’s theft. The beautiful thing is we sit down, we show a client, Hey, this is where it’s coming from. We help them mitigate also. They see a lift in ROI. Their clients are happy, they’re making more money. And then of course, we become part of their tech stack for life. And that’s what we’re looking for, is those types of relationships.

As of 2025, the Anura team consists of anywhere between 25 to 30 people. Considering the daily operations of managing client accounts, working on new product development, and all the other things that a leader in this type of fast-paced environment has to juggle, I asked Rich, how do you do it? Having a team is important, yes. Having solid processes is also important too. But there’s that third element of business infrastructure they also have in place – their tools and technologies. But it all would mean nothing without effective communication.

Our philosophy, we’re big in office people. We only have a few remotes based on needs of the business, but we’re big in office. I love getting up and walking across the hall and having a conversation with my development team. I love going down and sitting down and celebrating a new client that we just got with the sales team. Then we have our marketing department, our support department. I just grabbing everybody and jumping into a room and face to face communications, it’s kind of gotten lost after Covid. I’m a big fan of that. I hire first for the office and then if I can’t find the role locally after trying for several months, then I’ll hire remote. But I’m a big fan of being in the office.

There’s just something lost with it when you’re not in the office. But anyway, the tools we use to keep that all together is we use Slack for instant communication. We use Zoom for face-to-face conference calls. We don’t do anything by phone. Everything’s 100% in person through a Zoom meeting, HubSpot for our CRM that keeps all of our data in one spot so we can keep track of sales and contacts and leads and things like that.

And we just signed up a new product that I’ve gotten good references from called Trainual. Because as you start to grow, you have all these processes and procedures that you know, as an owner, you have in your head, but your staff doesn’t have it right. So then when you’re like, no, no, I changed that, we’re going to do it this way. Well, nobody told the staff. So now what happens is you have one central place where every time I do a training video, I have a place to stick it so that when we onboard somebody new, they can go through all the stuff that we put together.

If I have an update to a travel policy, I can put out the travel policy, press a button, goes out to the entire staff so they’re required to read it and sign it that they’ve read it and understand it. So this way we’re all on the same page. Because I told them, as we double and triple and quadruple the company size, I don’t want the wheels falling off. Trainual is supposed to be a really good tool for that kind of process.

We have other technology that we use for different things, but those are probably the biggest components to keeping the team cohesive. We start at 8 o’clock, I kick everybody out at 5. This way we can have a work life balance. And we start the day with a morning meeting with our support team, our CSMs, our sales team. We all meet together in the conference room.

We bridge in any of the remotes onto the big screen we have in the conference room and we have a conversation every day. That’s how we start our day.

Having these daily meetings is key to their success, making sure everyone is guided by the same compass and that no one veers off in the wrong direction. It’s during one of these team meetings that a suggestion was made to develop the special offer that Rich has for you. 

So our team looked around and we’re trying to find new documents because we have a lot of ebooks on our site, a lot of white papers, a lot of case studies, and we had this book, an e-book, it’s probably eight pages long, called Ad Fraud 101. And our team looked at and said, you know, it’s kind of outdated. So we sat down. It took us eight or nine months to put this thing together.

And they basically picked my brain, got a lot of information out of it, looked at the site, looked at some of the data that we put together. It’s between 70 and 80 pages long, broken down to 10 chapters, so you don’t have to read it cover to cover. But you know, you might see a section on lead generation fraud or affiliate fraud that’s important to you and you want to read just that one section.

They’re standalone sections and everything else. You can go to our website, Anura.io. We have a link to it right at the top of the page. Just click it. It’s free. Download the guide, read it, any questions, you can always talk to our staff. It’s a great report. We give it out free so people can learn about the space and hopefully when the time comes, if they need a fraud solution, we’re the ones that they think of.

And the name of this free e-book is called The Ultimate Guide to Ad Fraud. You can access the link to it in this episode’s show notes.

We call it ad fraud, but it’s basically digital fraud. Somebody comes to your site and they’re fraudulent. Maybe they want to log into your ADP account. And if they can log into your ADP account, they can change where your weekly deposits or your ACH goes. That happens on a regular basis. We can stop that.

We have a gaming company out of Germany called Gagen. What ends up happening is people come in, they run a bot, it creates an account, the bot logs into the account, it plays the game up to a certain level, and then they take that username and password and they sell it on the black market for 20 bucks an account. Because people want to get past the basic levels and play the different level. But meanwhile, it’s an ad produced game. So all the advertisers that see this bot are complaining that there’s fraud.

We can stop that before they even open up the account. So we get into a lot more than just advertising fraud, but that’s the type of fraud we get into. We don’t get into other types of fraud. If you look up the word fraud, you’ll find probably 100 different types of fraud that are out there. We focus on the digital front on the Internet.

Rich is a true entrepreneur – his ambition and burning desire to learn the latest about cutting-edge technologies fueled his entrepreneurial journey. Along the journey he took us on there were some powerful, and maybe even unexpected lessons learned he shared along the way. Here’s a recap of some of them: 

  1.  Never underestimate the power of face-to-face or in-person networking. With all the advancements in technologies to connect us across the globe through video and audio, networking in person is far more powerful and productive.
  2. Business partnerships are also like marriages. Some people like Rich happen to have both – a spouse who is also a business partner. Over time, it’s natural for people to evolve, objectives and motives can change. It’s a good idea to constantly check in with your business partners to ensure alignment. Yes, arguments and disagreements will happen. But as long as there is mutual respect, you’ll work past those arguments and disagreements and, if you need to go your separate ways, then you can at least do so amicably.
  3. Proof of concept is important in any business or project, regardless of industry. There must be proof that an idea will work and that there is a need for the product or service spawned from that idea.
  4. Know when to stop working. Setting boundaries is important to maintain great health, balance and sanity. Plus, you may often find that once you take a break from something you’re working on, you may figure out the solution.
  5. Consider conducting a daily huddle or stand up call every morning to level set and manage the work for the day. This could be project-specific or it could include a Gemba walk where you look at physical and/or all digital operations and discuss what went well the previous day, and what is in store for the current day.
  6. As with networking, in-person collaboration is much more effective than remote collaboration. There also aren’t as many distractions like sideline chatting or trying to figure out what’s up with the painting in someone’s background on the screen. In-person collaboration forces eye contact and attentiveness, and you might find yourself in big trouble if you do some of the things you do in remote meetings!

A special thank you to Rich Kahn for sharing his scale tale with us. As more of us continue to conduct business online, having access to top notch fraud prevention and protection services is so important. Be sure to download the free e-book Rich mentioned.

It’s available in this episode’s show notes as well as links to other resources he mentioned. Visit ScaleTalesPodcast.com. Again, that’s ScaleTalesPodcast.com.

Education is the best defense! If you want to know more about how Anura works and how your organization can leverage data to prove that certain metrics like number of subscribers or number of customers is a real number representative of real people and not bots, then check out our bonus chat with Rich.

Accessing that bonus chat requires membership, which starts at $9.99 per month for unlimited access to other member-only content, special offers, and the ability to earn PDUs and continuous education credits. Click the link in the show notes to sign up for a membership today!

Thank you for Listening! If you learned something valuable from this episode, please leave us a five-star rating and review wherever you’re listening.

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre and I produced and narrated this episode. Audio editing by Olanrewaju Adeyemo. That German male voiceover you heard earlier was also me. Additional male voiceover by Clarence Levy III. Music production and original score by Sabor! Music Enterprises. Video editing by Gladiola Films. Show notes by Hashim Tale.

You’ve been listening to Scale Tales, a podcast by Equilibria, Inc.

Resources

Websites:

  • Shark Tank TV ShowThe Sharks give budding entrepreneurs the chance to secure business deals that could make them millionaires.

Software:

  • Anura.io: The world’s most accurate fraud solution protects your web assets by eliminating bots, malware and human fraud, ensuring your content is seen by real people.
  • Trainual: built to document faster, drive consistency, reduce costly mistakes, and make trusted answers easy to find.
  • Google Tag Managera free tool from Google that allows users to manage and deploy marketing and analytics tags on a website or mobile app without modifying the site’s code
  • Hubspot: Increase Leads — Generate leads, close deals, and create remarkable customer experiences.
  • Slack: Bring your people, projects, tools, and AI together on the world’s most beloved work operating system.

Book :

Credits

Producer & Host: Alicia Butler Pierre
Producer & Voiceover Artist: Clarence Levy III
Audio Editors: Olanrewaju Adeyemo and Sabor! Music Enterprises
Sound Design: Sabor! Music Enterprises
Video Editor: Gladys Jimenez
Show Notes: Hashim Tale
Sponsor: Equilibria, Inc.

Related Episodes

Bios

More About Guest, Rich Kahn.

Rich Kahn is an award-winning tech entrepreneur, self-taught developer, and the CEO and co-founder of Anura.io, a cutting-edge digital fraud detection company that protects over 2 million domains worldwide. Based in Middletown, Delaware, Rich has spent more than three decades at the forefront of digital innovation, building and scaling multiple successful ventures that bridge technology, advertising, and cybersecurity.

Rich’s entrepreneurial journey began in the early 1990s when he launched one of the first internet newsletters, amassing over 20,000 subscribers at a time when the web was still text-based. He quickly transitioned into website development, internet service provision, and digital advertising founding and growing multiple companies, including eZanga, a digital ad network that appeared on the Inc. 5000 list five consecutive years. His achievements earned him the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award and multiple Red Herring Awards for innovation and growth.

In 2017, after identifying the escalating threat of ad fraud, Rich and his wife and co-founder launched Anura.io, a platform engineered to accurately detect and eliminate fraudulent online traffic. Their proprietary technology, refined through rigorous multi-year testing, consistently outperformed competitors and has become a trusted solution for brands, agencies, and platforms globally.

Under Rich’s leadership, Anura has become synonymous with precision in digital fraud prevention. His team’s tireless commitment to combating organized, large-scale fraud has saved advertisers billions while restoring integrity to digital marketing ecosystems. Beyond leading a fast-growing SaaS company, Rich is deeply invested in cultivating company culture, advocating for in-person collaboration, daily team alignment, and work-life balance as essential elements of sustainable growth.

A lifelong learner with a passion for emerging technologies, Rich continues to inspire entrepreneurs and technologists with his philosophy of proving concepts through disciplined experimentation, building strong teams through trust and shared purpose, and growing businesses by solving real-world problems. His story embodies the evolution of digital entrepreneurship from dial-up modems to machine learning and the power of perseverance in turning obstacles into industry-changing opportunities.

 

More About Host, Alicia Butler Pierre:
Alicia Butler Pierre is the Founder & CEO of Equilibria, Inc. Her career in operations began over 25 years ago while working in various chemical plants and oil refineries. She invented the Kasennu™ framework for business infrastructure and authored, Behind the Façade: How to Structure Company Operations for Sustainable Success.  She is the producer of Scale Tales podcast and the weekly top 2% Business Infrastructure podcast with a global audience across 70+ countries.

 

More About Sponsor, Equilibria:
Equilibria, Inc. is a 20-year-old boutique operations management firm. We build the business infrastructure necessary for fast-growing businesses to scale with less pain. With a range of services and products, entrepreneurs can get the operational support and resources they need on demand.

 

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