We’re looking forward to introducing you to Connor Borrego. Check out our conversation below.
Connor, a huge thanks to you for investing the time to share your wisdom with those who are seeking it. We think it’s so important for us to share stories with our neighbors, friends and community because knowledge multiples when we share with each other. Let’s jump in: Are you walking a path—or wandering?
Most people I’ve encountered across this journey think I’m wandering, but I’ve been carving a path between known points. There just wasn’t a clear path between them, not as far as I could tell.
I started playhaus nearly 5 years ago as I am writing this. I knew at the time that technology was on the precipice of serious change. Consumer privacy legislation was gaining serious awareness and momentum, and the widespread gap in digital literacy was starting to show. The weaponization of surveillance capitalism by the state was accelerating. What was needed then, is the same thing that is needed now, and what playhaus has continued to work towards building. A personal, cryptographically secure, cookie jar for protecting your data while browsing online, and giving you a way to earn from that data if you choose to licence it to the AI systems using it today.
Since the begining I knew we needed to bootstrap as an agency to get my product built, and while I tried to raise money for this idea, I was right in believing that my work operating as a digital agency business would be the main way to fund it’s development. Today we have 2 large customers as well as 10s of small ones, we’ve won several grants to fund the development of our software, and that software has been in use for over a year now.
As we look forward to the milestones still ahead on our path, we still have to demonstrate product market fit with out current customers, and identify a core, scalable aqusition channel, so that we can raise blitzscale funds from investors. Hopefully it takes us half as long as it took us to get the first version of the software built.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m Connor Borrego, CEO of playhaus, a company built to help people and brands take ownership over their identity data. Today our focus is on serving business’ and their brands to utilize that data to save 30% or more on growth metrics like cost of customer acquisition. My career started at an AdTech company named AdAdpted, now worth over $200M, I was employee number 9 starting on the sales team, learning to code, and moving over to a special projects team under the CEO. I recieved my bachelors from the University of Michigan, and earned a Masters of Science in Business Analytics with an Advanced Degree Certification in Data Warehousing from Syracuse University. The height of my career before starting playhaus was working as a Product Expert for Google on their Accelerated Growth Team; I specialized in developing datawarehouses that connected with Google’s own advertising systems, and ultimately inspired us to build our product.
Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. What was your earliest memory of feeling powerful?
When I was in Middle School my cousin showed me this software program called Handbrake. Handbrake allowed you to put a DVD into your computer and save it as an .MP4 file, so you could watch it there, or on your iPod, or wherever else you wanted to watch it. I digitized my entire DVD collection over a weekend, and had the biggest iTunes movie libraries of all of my friends. Such a simple tool in hindsight, but the knowledge of existence and my ability to use it, and the ability to do it for my friends, that was powerful.
What have been the defining wounds of your life—and how have you healed them?
This one is always hard to address. The defining wounds of my life were a lot of normal early childhood ones, and maybe one less relatable one.
To start with, I’m adopted, and I couldn’t have been more blessed to be adopted by the giant sprawling family that’s adopted me, but it still comes with some psycological elements that I’ve had to address in myself; and then there was the seperate trauma associated with reading a letter from my birth mother (written during her pregnancy) to me at the age of 25, that essentially set me on this journey of building this company a few months later. The letter confirmed my suspision that I was supposed to be adopted by a miracle of sorts happened, and that had her carry me to term and give me up, she was in high school after all; the frankness with which it stated things shook me, because it sounded like my own voice, and those were things that were ultimately hard to read. Like many adopted kids my gratitude for my situation, also kept me back from being my trueself at times afraid to be in opposition or disagreement with my parents, but I’ve since learned not to see things that way, and knowing now that they never were.
I shared those fears earlier on in my life and the reassured me then also, but it’s still something personal to become comfortable with yourself, and a grown version of yourself, with people who’ve seen you at your most immature. Which I think is probably really relatable to most people in operating with their parents. My parents also happened to have a pretty nasty divorce that it was hard to stay out of the middle of, and at times I personally made worse. But ultimately, I think I’ve learned healthy communication skills, and self confidence as a result of confronting these pretty common hardships
But the real way I’ve healed them has been on this entrepreneurial journey, because of the way it’s forced me to confront various short comings in the way I go about my day-to-day. While my hustle, ambition, and vision were there from day one, my consistency & routine have really emerged in the years since because I addressed the personal relationship issues at the heart of my avoidance for those lifeskills.
I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. Is the public version of you the real you?
I try to be the real me all the time. I’m an ambivert, though officially an extrovert, so I think when I draw energy from a group setting sometimes that my personality becomes more exagerated and cartoonish. As such I’ve noticed my personality tends 1 of 2 ways in these exagerated enviornements, so I gave them names and have incorporated them into my brand. There’s el Prof, the more thoughtful, articulate, and measured character, he comes out more in writing and sort of academic enviornments. The other character is Dr. Business, and this is my more shoot from the hip, fun, witty self, that might contradict himself at times. I am just me, and those are ways I like to think about the sides of my personality, so I claim all of them as the real me, but I guess to an unkeen obsever I might be seen to be playing a character at times.
Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: What do you understand deeply that most people don’t?
Executing on a good idea takes the amount of time, that most people are afraid to lose.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.playhaus.tv
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/playhaustv/
