Why The AI Bubble Isn’t Dot-Com 2.0 with David Steinberg, Zeta Global Founder & CEO

About this episode

Dan Nathan hosts David Steinberg, CEO and founder of Zeta Global, for a wide-ranging conversation recorded after Zeta Live in New York, where Steinberg says the event drove $10 of business for every dollar spent last year and expects 12–14x this year. Steinberg explains Zeta’s 2017 decision to re-architect its platform with proprietary data and AI native to the application layer, a bet he says paid off after ChatGPT made AI a boardroom priority; he cites growth from $283M trailing revenue at the 2021 IPO to about $1.8B this year and strong ROI metrics for clients. He describes intent-driven marketing built on a large opted-in data cloud, expansion into Dynamic Enterprise Intelligence, and the launch of Athena evolving into Athena OS for enterprise-wide use cases. They discuss announcements including making Athena headless and integrated with major models, a custom chip strategy, recent acquisitions like SensorAI for agentic commerce, and a partnership with Palantir Foundry tied to speed, ontology, data sovereignty, and Zeta Gov/FedRAMP. The conversation also covers public-market repricing, valuation multiples, key SaaS KPIs, and the outlook for frontier vs open models and an emergi