Mike Choi is the co-founder of Koah, the monetization layer for AI applications that the market has dubbed 'AdSense for AI.' A Korean national, he followed his Air Force father to Tucson, Arizona in third grade, returned to the U.S. as a middle-school exchange student with a host family in Kansas, and fell in love with building consumer apps after jailbreaking a Christmas iPod via Cydia. That obsession carried him to a dream job at Apple, then to Twitter under Elon Musk, and finally to co-founding Koah — inspired by his own teenage struggle to monetize the apps he built with AdMob banner ads. Koah has raised over $20M from Theory Ventures, processes 170M+ queries, and sees 5%+ click-through rates (four to five times traditional display). His thesis: every paradigm shift reinvents advertising, and AI can finally deliver the 'marketing holy grail' — a unique, generated ad for every person, at scale — while returning ads to craft and art.
“There's ad blindness to those banner ads, and they're not really something consumers like. App developers don't like those banners either because it makes your app feel cheap and it doesn't respect the amount of craft and effort that went into creating those apps.”
“What if everyone is served an ad that is tailored made for them specifically? That is the marketing holy grail — and AI is able to do that at scale.”
“It's the moments where the ad shows up and I go, 'Yeah, I didn't know I needed that, but I need that right now.' Those are the moments we're trying to unlock.”
“If you're slightly off, then it feels creepy. But if it's just right, there's this moment where it's, 'Wow, thank you for showing me that ad.'”
“There will also be apps that had to exist, or just add value to the world, but couldn't have been made before because the dev costs were too high.”
“We just believe that the surface area, the real estate the publishers have granted us, is sacred almost. The ads deserve the same amount of care and attention as the app.”
“CTR is an interesting measurement, because the user can click and the number of clicks can be high. But if the user isn't converting at the end, then the CTR really isn't the best way to measure success.”
“A lot of the patterns or know-hows learned over the last decade or two of ads will be completely irrelevant — kind of like how most PM books or engineering books written before this year are practically out of date.”