Caitlin Gould, Schreiber High School graduate and Port Washington native, has recently sold Yashi, the company she founded with her husband, for $33 million to Nexstar Broadcasting Group. Gould and her husband Jay founded Yashi in 2007. Yashi is a location-based online video company that is dedicated to using location as a primary signal in targeting and measuring programmatic online video ads. The company’s platform analyzes tens of billions of video ads in real time on a monthly basis across thousands of websites.
Yashi will continue to operate as a division of Nexstar, and Caitlin’s role within the company will remain unchanged. “The name Yashi means success,” said Gould.
Gould grew up in Port Washington and attended Sousa and Weber, as well as Schreiber. At Schreiber, Gould played basketball, soccer and lacrosse. She was an All-American for lacrosse in high school. Gould got a lacrosse scholarship to Boston College. She was inducted into the Schreiber High School lacrosse hall of fame recently. Some of her family still lives in Port Washington. Her father was an assistant principal at Schreiber.
Over the past few years, Yashi and Gould have won several awards. Gould won a bronze Stevie Award for female entrepreneur of the year. Yashi was named one of the best places to work in New Jersey for 2014 by NJBIZ. NJBIZ’s annual award program identifies, recognizes and honors the top employers in New Jersey.
Gould’s first job out of college was at Bolt Media. “Bolt no longer exists. They were sued by Universal Music and closed down because of that. They couldn’t fight it,” said Gould. “Jay and I decided to break off and started Yashi. I had been a sales rep at Bolt. Jay was a publisher, and we had relationships with the ad side. We started with casual gaming sites. Then, we branched out to rep all different types of companies. Then, we decided to automate it. We always kept the company profitable. We had several angel investors, hedge-fund guys. We also didn’t have any debt and kept the company lean,” said Gould. “We worked out of our home from 2007 to 2010. We sold to Nexstar because they already had the 600-person sales force.”
Caitlin is the head of strategy and development, and Jay is president. “We have tons of reach now. And we have proprietary technology. Everything is based around locations. We can show advertisers on a granular level how to optimize and target based on location. We can target based on the weather in an area. If it’s snowing or if it’s sunny, advertisers can target based on that information. We can show advertisers where customers went in the past 30 days.”
Yashi now has 30 employees. Nexstar is based in Dallas. Yashi is still located in Toms River, New Jersey, where it had been based. They will be opening an office in New York City soon.
