By: Natalie Johnson
Startup founders are rarely short on advice. They hear it from investors, friends, former bosses, industry acquaintances, and people who once stood near a company that scaled. The harder thing to find is guidance from someone who has actually lived through the decisions a founder is trying to make.
That distinction matters in ad tech, digital out-of-home, programmatic advertising, and adjacent emerging technology markets. These are not simple software categories. They sit between technology, media, sales, infrastructure, buyer behavior, venues, agencies, brands, data, and capital pressure. A founder may have a strong product and still misread the market or struggle to build a viable commercial path.
Joel Martin has spent 30 years inside that reality. His career has moved through advertising technology, experiential marketing, motorcycle importation, charging networks, micromobility, digital signage, programmatic advertising, startup advisory work, and board-level service. He is currently Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Trillboards, a Google incubator-backed company in the DOOH market, but his larger credibility comes from the range of markets he has had to understand up close.
He has been a founder, operator, advisor, mentor, and board member. He has seen companies raise capital, pivot, scale, stall, exit, and fail. He has advised more than 15 companies across advertising, hardware, event technology, mobility, and related emerging tech categories. The thread running through that experience is not just longevity; it is proximity to the work.
The Difference Between Advice and Operating Memory
Advice is often clean because it is delivered from a distance. Operating experience is messier. It includes payroll, bad hires, investor questions, customer resistance, trade show floors, market timing, regulation, sales cycles, and the moment when a founder realizes that a good idea is not the same thing as a durable business.
Martin’s first startup began in his early 20s, when he secured North American distribution rights for Malaguti Moto, an Italian motorbike and moped brand based in Bologna. That business took him into importation, compliance, dealer relationships, trade shows, celebrity attention, and market forces that eventually overwhelmed even well-executed plans.
He later explored electric mobility before the infrastructure and consumer appetite were ready for it. The technology existed, but the timing was wrong. Years later, when micromobility became mainstream, those earlier lessons became useful again.
As Martin puts it, “You learn nothing from success. You learn from failure.”
That line is not cynicism. It is a warning against the mythology that surrounds startup culture. Success stories are often polished after the fact. The more valuable lessons usually come from the decisions that did not work, the companies that ran out of time, and the moments when a founder had to admit the market was not behaving the way the deck said it would.
Why Ad Tech Is Harder Than It Looks
Ad tech has a way of humbling simple narratives. A company may be selling software, but the work often touches physical locations, data collection, brand safety, agency buying habits, screen networks, venue economics, measurement standards, and the pressure to prove value.
Martin saw that clearly when he moved deeper into advertising technology through charging networks and place-based media. A phone charging station inside a hospital did not carry the same value proposition as one inside a shopping center, a stadium, a hotel, or a retailer. The product might look similar, but the buyer’s reason for caring changed with the environment.
At a hospital, charging could reduce anxiety for patients and families. In a shopping center, it could extend dwell time. Inside a retailer, it could become a value-add tied to an app. Once screens and ads were added, the business had to answer questions about audiences, impressions, location, and media buying.
That kind of pattern recognition is difficult to develop from a spreadsheet. Martin credits much of it to years spent at trade shows, conferences, and industry gatherings, not as a casual attendee, but as someone trying to understand how each market actually worked.
“The best way to really understand an industry is to go hang out with the industry itself,” he says. “You can’t do that with a phone call or just by reading a magazine.”
For founders in ad tech and DOOH, that matters. Many early-stage companies underestimate how much market education is required before a buyer can say yes. They build the product, then discover that the real challenge is helping customers understand where it belongs, who should pay for it, and why it is worth changing an existing workflow.
The Advisor Problem
Martin is direct about one of the most common mistakes founders make: they choose advisors from inside their existing circle rather than seeking out people with relevant market experience.
A founder may bring in a friend, a relative, or a familiar business contact because trust is already there. But trust alone does not make someone useful in a technical or commercially complex category. A person who built a successful company in one field may have little to offer in another.
Martin has learned to say no when he is not the right fit.
“You’ve got to be the right advisor for the right company,” he says. “What are they looking for? Is it something in my wheelhouse that I can do? And can I actually help them get to the next level?”
That restraint separates operators from generic advisors. The wrong advisor may take the title, the check, or the equity and offer broad encouragement. The right advisor should know where they can help, where they cannot, and when another person is better suited to the problem.
Martin also believes founders need advisors they are willing to tell the truth to. An advisory board becomes useless if the founder filters the facts, hides setbacks, or only wants affirmation. The best advisors do not exist to flatter a founder’s instincts. They exist to pressure-test them.
What Experience Brings to the Table
Martin often emphasizes the importance of adapting strategy while staying grounded in core principles. Markets change, so tactics may need to change with them. But he believes the underlying values have to remain steady. For him, those values include honesty, truth, kindness, and a realistic understanding of what success actually means.
“I don’t look at everything with rosy-colored lenses,” he says. “I try to tell people, let’s do some research. Let’s be realistic about the roadmap.”
In a market full of commentators, operators carry a different kind of authority. They know what tends to happen when people, money, timing, technology, and pressure collide.
That perspective underpins how Martin approaches advisory work in ad tech and emerging technology. He has built through market shifts, learned across industries, survived failure, contributed to successful outcomes, and stayed close enough to the work to keep seeing new patterns as they form.
For early-stage ad tech companies, that kind of experience is often the difference between advice that sounds good and guidance that can actually be used.
Martin’s approach is grounded, direct, and shaped by decades of operating inside the industries he now advises. That depth of experience allows him to help founders move beyond theory and into decisions that can stand up to real-world pressure.
