Founders' Forum

The Future of Advertising: How Hikari Senju Uses AI to Drive Results

• Marc Bernstein / Hikari Senju • Episode 101

Share episode

Can AI supercharge your advertising strategy? Hikari Senju, CEO of Omneky, reveals how generative AI is reshaping personalized content and driving real results for brands. With a background in computer science from Harvard and a lifelong passion for technology and art, Hikari’s journey to founding Omneky seems almost inevitable.

In this episode, Hikari shares how his childhood experiences, cross-registering at MIT while at Harvard, and encountering early generative AI models sparked his vision to revolutionize advertising. He dives into the challenges of scaling Omneky, growing his team to 40 employees, and learning the delicate balance of delegation and leadership.


Key Takeaways:

  • Mastering the Art of Delegation: Why trusting your team is essential for scaling a business.
  • Building High-Performing Teams: The three key traits Hikari looks for when hiring—high integrity, high curiosity, and high energy.
  • AI as a Collaborative Tool: How Hikari envisions AI augmenting, not replacing, human creativity.
  • Leadership Lessons: Navigating team dynamics, communicating strategy, and fostering continuous growth.
  • Omneky’s Vision for the Future: Taking the company public by 2027 or well on the path to an IPO.

Hikari’s story is a testament to blending innovation with purpose and scaling a company that empowers brands to leverage AI for maximum impact.


About Hikari Senju:

Hikari Senju is the Founder & CEO of Omneky, a generative AI company based in San Francisco that personalizes and orchestrates omnichannel creative content. Hikari previously studied Computer Science at Harvard, founded an edtech company which he sold to Yup.com and became its Head of Growth. Omneky, founded in 2018, has raised over $13M in seed from Softbank, AIX Ventures and Village Global. The company is the first mover in generative AI advertising, was the first generative AI company to pitch as a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt, and most recently was highlighted in Jensen Huang's GTC keynote.

Connect:

Website omneky.com

LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/hikari-senju-63780199

X x.com/hisenju


This episode is brought to you by Omneky; Smarter Digital Ads For Scale. Go to omneky.com to learn more.

📅 New episodes every Wednesday—hit “Subscribe” now!

💬 Love the show? Let us know! Leave a quick rating & review here—your feedback helps us grow!

📲 Stay connected with Marc Bernstein:
➡️ Follow on Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook

🎤 Got a success story worth sharing?
We’re always looking for visionary founders to feature! Apply here to be a guest on the Founders' Forum Radio Show & Podcast.

📩 Join our email list here so you never miss an episode.

Announcer:

Entrepreneur, founder, author and financial advisor, Marc Bernstein helps high-performing business owners turn their visions into reality. Through his innovative work and the Forward Focus Forums, Marc connects entrepreneurs to resources that fuel their success. Founders Forum is a radio show and podcast where entrepreneurs share their journeys, revealing the lessons they've learned and the stories behind their success. Join Marc and his guests for a mix of inspiration, valuable insights and a little fun. Now let's dive in.

Marc Bernstein:

Good morning America. How are you? This is another cloudy day in Philadelphia, cloudy winter day. How's our level there, tyler? They're perfect, okay, great. So we have a new engineer. I didn't hear the volume change between the music and my headphones, so sorry about that. Anyway, we're here today with Mike Martin as our co-host. Mike Martin is give me one second to get his stuff out, but Mike is. His company is well. His book. He's an author, is the Self-Fulfilling Formula. His company is Top Down Strategies. He's a TEDx speaker, business coach and technology leader. Welcome, mike.

Marc Bernstein:

Yeah, thanks, happy to be, here and I'll introduce our guest in a minute. But before we do that, our topic of the day I've got a quote for you. I collect quotes and many of you know that I'm a follower of Dan Sullivan, the strategic coach, and went through his program and I just think he's an outside-the-box thinker and he's created a lot of new kind of thinking and I've got a number of his quotes from his books, but this one I like a lot. Your number one responsibility as an entrepreneur is to protect your confidence and I've got thoughts about what that means because I've been through his program and that's really like the heart of his program. But, mike, what does that mean to you?

Mike Martin:

Yeah. So I love that quote. I'll apply it back to my core right, which is the self-fulfilling formula. The book right, and that the formula for thriving in this world is mental, social and execution fitness. And so that quote to me really resonates with the mental fitness component of that. A super fast story when my parents took me to kindergarten, my father told the kindergarten teacher that my IQ was tested, it was extremely high, and expect me to be the best student. The catch was my dad totally made that up. He created a self-fulfilling prophecy for me.

Marc Bernstein:

Wow.

Mike Martin:

Love that, yeah. So I had the belief at the core there was that I was an excellent student, and I became one right so very nice. This to me is you become what you think about. You become what you think about, and your confidence is about your mental fitness and the belief you have in yourself. So protecting that is critical to making that whatever prophecy be real. I'm an entrepreneur, I'm an author. Whatever it is for you protecting your confidence and having that unshakable belief super powerful.

Marc Bernstein:

Wonderful. The first name of our guest today I'm going to introduce him in a minute is Hikari Hikari. What occurs to you about that quote?

Hikari Senju:

I think being an entrepreneur is an act of faith and contrarianism. You're often seeing something early in the market, something that most people have not seen and are executing in. That's why no one's done it yet. That's why no one's been successful at it, and the reason why no one's been successful at it is because it's probably really hard, and so you have to have confidence in yourself throughout. You know, through that journey, as you kind of overcome each one of these challenges that you know to like, fulfill your vision and see through the opportunity, and so that could be very fast, that could be that could take a long time.

Hikari Senju:

And I think in some ways, you know being great entrepreneur or being great investor, I mean it's similar thing of you know you're, you're, you're making contrarian bet and no one's really seen yet. You have to see through that thesis, execute against that thesis, and you need to have faith throughout that process. And so, and if you give up, you know, I think the biggest difference between successful people and people who aren't successful is really, ultimately, that the people who aren't successful give up. Successful people always manage to pull through the failures. And so, yeah, and confidence and faith in your office, I think was very key to anchor of that.

Marc Bernstein:

So I love what both of you had to say about it. You both talked about really about acquiring confidence and having it. So since I've been through the strategic coach, I'll just add a little bit of dimension to that. How do you protect it once you have it as an example?

Marc Bernstein:

Another quote of dan sullivan's is frank sinatra didn't move pianos.

Marc Bernstein:

So imagine if he's this singer and he's getting ready and all the mental preparation he has to do to do that and his only job is to go out on the stage and sing. But prior to the show he had to move the piano, you know, and change his clothes and move the piano and and do like physical work and all that. Would he be as well prepared to do what he does? So one of the things is you figure out what your unique ability is and what brings the most value to whoever your audience is and your company, and you protect it by having other people do everything else. That's one of many ways, but that's one of the things that occurs to me that you find your unique ability, you delegate the rest. You find the people that are best at what they do around you. We talked about that a little bit in our last show, and that is what helps protect your confidence, so that you're doing, your energy is all focused on what it is you should be doing.

Mike Martin:

Stick to the things you're the best at.

Marc Bernstein:

Yes, so Hikari Senju is the founder and CEO of Omneky, a generative AI company based in San Francisco, so he's joining us here from San Francisco today. It personalizes and orchestrates omnichannel creative content. Hikari previously studied computer science at Harvard, founded an ed-tech company which he sold to Yupcom and became its head of growth. Omneky was founded in 2018 and has raised over $13 million in seed money from SoftBank, aix Ventures and Village Global. The company is the first mover in generative advertising and was the first generative AI company to pitch as a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt and most recently, was highlighted in Jensen Huang's GTC keynote. Micah, you're a technology guy yourself, so I'm sure you have some good questions for Hikari and Hikari. Welcome Thanks for being here today.

Hikari Senju:

Thank you, Marc, thank you, mike for having me. I'm really excited to be here and, yes, I'm calling from beautiful San Francisco. Great weather today in the 60s and such.

Marc Bernstein:

We're in the 60s too, but it's kind of like raw and you know, cloudy, rainy. So you know, but it is what it is. San Francisco beautiful weather, though I love it out there yeah, me too. So tell us your story. You know kind of how you got into this, and we'll have a lot of questions for you along the way.

Hikari Senju:

Yeah, I grew up in Westchester, new York, and the reason why I grew up in Westchester, new York and the reason why I grew up in Westchester, new York is because it's near the IBM headquarters.

Hikari Senju:

My grandfather worked at IBM and so that's also why my mother went to the same high school that I did in a horse wheeling high school and so early on it definitely was an early milieu of technology On breaks going with my grandfather to see demos because he became a venture capitalist afterward Early access to learning to program, early competing robotics, competitions just enjoying making things, things and then just in some ways getting some intuition of the exponential rate in which technology evolves and accelerates.

Hikari Senju:

Separately, my dad's a painter and so I also grew up going to art studios and painting alongside my dad, growing up and developing some kind of intuition related to colors and balance and how do you have harmony in a design and how do you create a visual experience for people. I got into Harvard, I got into MIT and Princeton and many of these other schools ultimately chose to go to Harvard, but cross-registered at MIT, focusing on machine learning and AI, and it was there at MIT, actually taking class there, that I saw the early generative AI models, and that's really where everything comes together my background in technology as well as art and seeing the possibility of generative art in particular, and that if an.

Hikari Senju:

AI could create art better than humans or as good as humans, and this is kind of what the early demos was showing is, and especially if you could kind of intuit Moore's law, and that it would exponentially improve that, its implication is pretty massive. That's what really got me hooked into generative AI in college about a decade ago. Separately, though, you know, it was very early in the technology. It wasn't productionizable, it wasn't, you know, the go-to market wasn't. You know, the product was nowhere near, or the technology was nowhere near, a go-to market. So I but I'm an entrepreneurial person I started two venture-backed companies in college, and one of which was an education company product. It was a personalized learning application connecting students to personalized tutors. This was acquired by another company in San Francisco, where it became the head of growth, and so it was their running growth, combined with my passion for generative art and generative AI, that I saw the opportunity to start OmniHeat back in 2018 to generate and optimize creative autonomously advertising creative autonomously with AI.

Marc Bernstein:

Wonderful, that's amazing.

Mike Martin:

Yeah, I just want to comment there because you made a really excellent point. That is something I believe in and I'm sure, Marc, you can relate to this, us both being musicians is the union of the logical and the artistic, the technology with the artistic. You look at companies like Apple and Steve Jobs. Right, he worried about the way the fonts looked and what the screens looked like, and I just find that having that creative look and sensibility really makes the technology palatable and sellable. Do you find that? What's your thoughts on sort of that union of art and technology?

Hikari Senju:

Yeah, I mean I think it like you're both. You know you're ultimately a creator, you know an engineer is a creator, an artist is a creator. You're creating, you're birthing a new experience into the world. Um, and I think it's kind of a spectrum from you know, hardcore engineering where everything is kind of, you know, fixed based on the kind of the reality is physics to like, you know, like you have a blank canvas and I think really the best products are something that you know really finds the right balance between those two. So you mentioning you know Steve Jobs being you know building these beautiful products.

Hikari Senju:

But I think great engineers also kind of view themselves as artists. I think there's probably there's elements of when you go through the code of a great software engineer. You go through the code. There's some artistry there. There's probably some stuff that they do in terms of the way they write, in the logic that the code has. That isn't necessarily necessary, but you know, because they're very proud of their craft and so ultimately, I think they're both engineers, artists. They're craftspeople. They like making things, they like milking things for other people. They like other people experiencing the things that they make. They like creating experiences into the world that didn't exist before and that's really what got me into computer science early on was actually through just enjoying to make art so early on middle school, enjoying to make art so early on, you know, middle school I was, you know, um artist of the week.

Hikari Senju:

Every week, you know like I often, uh, I would like submit artwork to like the school art teacher, and you know there'll be competition, um, and so it always comes from um, this kind of desire to create. Yeah, um, and what was great about software in particular was that you can do it at scale. So, you know, if I create a piece of art painting, maybe, you know, 10 people can see it, 20 people can see it, but 100 million people can see it, but if I create a piece of software, it's immediately scalable to potentially, you know, hundreds of millions or billions of people, and so that was that was what um uh got, but it comes from this, you know, similar source of this desire to create.

Marc Bernstein:

Yeah, the importance of creativity and the union of form and function, um by the way you said Mike, I could you said I could probably relate to it, not to take the story away from Macari, but I'm a lawyer who went to music school first. There you go, and now I'm a financial planner and I feel that there's a lot of logic in music and there's a lot of creativity in law, and financial planning to me actually combines it all together.

Mike Martin:

I think the importance of creativity as a skill is really undervalued.

Marc Bernstein:

I understand creativity as a skill is really undervalued. I understand we have just a minute or two before our commercial break, but, hikari, I know you know there's hills and valleys. When you're an entrepreneur it's not all, you know, just a joy ride. What kind of challenges have you faced in the building of OmneKy?

Hikari Senju:

Oh gosh, I mean you have every. I mean I've been running OmneKy for six years. I've been an entrepreneur for basically my entire career. I mean you face every single kind of challenge. You face the challenge of not having enough money.

Hikari Senju:

What are some of your favorite challenges?

Hikari Senju:

The thing that I've learned most recently is how to just be a great, to be a great because there's evolution as an entrepreneur from, say, being the person that builds MVP and building a great initial product with a team of people, to then scaling to a much larger team where you have to start hiring and delegating work, and just the art of delegation I think you mentioned prior to this kind of pre-call was, you know, it was a theme from the previous session as well, but it is not an easy skill.

Hikari Senju:

I mean, there is an urge to micromanage, there's an urge to get everything perfect, and you have to trust people and you have to trust their abilities and you have to communicate well as well. I mean, that is also, you know, you're only as good as your ability to communicate a strategy. You can have the perfect strategy in your head, but if you can't communicate it properly, then it's as good as not a great strategy, and so that whole art of managing a team of people who you know have more, maybe specific domain knowledge than you, and then communicating and then and then communicating and having everyone's function as a strong team is, you know, not not an easy skill and and that has been, you know, you know kind of learning through through.

Marc Bernstein:

Yeah, and I also inferred from there, you know, perfection is, perfection is there's an urge for perfection, but perfection is usually non-existent. So progress is probably the better measure. I would think right.

Hikari Senju:

Absolutely. You know, every day, just seeing, are you putting one foot in front of the other? Are you you know what have you accomplished today? And then just you know, I think, at the end of every day, really being proud that you proud that at least we move one step forward in some key initiative throughout the org.

Hikari Senju:

I think, the CEO, you run both engineering products, marketing, sales, financing, and so you have to be good at at least be able to supervise all those things, and so making sure that you're incrementally making progress in at least one of these dimensions every day is you know the way to keep going.

Marc Bernstein:

Forward movement. With that. We want to take a quick commercial break and hear a little bit more about OmneKy.

Announcer:

Frustrated with your ad campaigns? Let OmneKy take the wheel. We use the power of AI to generate high-performing ads, personalized for every customer. Omneky analyzes millions of data points to optimize your creatives and target the right audience across all channels. Stop wasting time and money. Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, Omneky helps you reach the right people with the right message at the right time. Visit Omneky. com today for a free trial and see your ROI soar. That's Omneky. com.

Marc Bernstein:

I like that music in that commercial. Yeah, I think it fits the theme of forward movement. You know, absolutely. Do you like that, mike? How?

Mike Martin:

about you.

Marc Bernstein:

You like the music Hikari.

Hikari Senju:

Yeah, I listened to like a version of this with your team before this and, yeah, it was good, I thought it turned out good.

Marc Bernstein:

You always got to have music in the end, yeah, so you talked a little bit about well, you talked about challenges. You talked about some of the strengths you've had to develop to deal with those challenges. Mike, you probably have some questions, yeah.

Mike Martin:

I mean I think you also highlighted there sort of the importance of communication. You know, being able to articulate your vision in order to delegate. So talk a little bit about the importance of saying no and having you know other people take over as a CEO. It's hard to let go, so how do you deal with that?

Hikari Senju:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at the end of the day, you know and you mentioned Frank Sinatra earlier is that you know you have a job and you can't do everyone's job. I mean you're not going to be. You know everyone has to focus on their core area. If you're doing somebody else's job, then you're not doing your job, and so, yeah, it's about, you know there's that great Jim Collins, you know quote, which is you know you got to get the right people on the bus and you got to get the right people in the right seats on the bus. And so, yeah, that that is the key. The key important thing of having a, you know, elite team is everyone's in the right position, they know what they're doing and they're the best in that position. Yeah, love Jim Collins.

Marc Bernstein:

How do you? We were talking about this on our last show, but how do you? What is your? What they say and what you kind of agree on is required as a team.

Hikari Senju:

So making sure there's clarity across the team what everyone's responsibility is, what their expectations are, and if people aren't meeting those expectations, then problem-solving with them and figuring out why, uh, why that is the case, and and um, and then, um, you know, trying to really find the source of the riddle of the problem. Is it? Is it a personnel problem? Is it? Um? I mean, in some ways every problem is a personnel problem. You can argue, but but you know it's, it can be. The situation could just be a very tough situation, and you have the understanding it could be a timing issue. Sometimes it's just going to have more patience. Also, you know people learn and people change, and so you know providing the right feedback. You know the CEO is also. The job is to be the coach for the team, and so sometimes you do switch players out, but other times it's really just about coaching the players to really excel at their role. And so those are the nuances of leadership.

Marc Bernstein:

How many employees do you have today?

Hikari Senju:

Yeah, so today we have 40 employees.

Marc Bernstein:

And is that the most you've had?

Hikari Senju:

I think we've scaled up and down. I would say that we may have had slightly more employees at some point, but because the business model has also somewhat shifted, we used to do a lot more services work than today, which predominantly were essentially product-driven company, and so the people that you need has changed. But yeah, around that range.

Mike Martin:

Mike, you had a. Yeah, I was just going to highlight the. You talked about the importance of accountability, and I'm a huge believer in accountability as a key ingredient to execution and achieving what you're trying to, what you set out to do, whether that's accountability to yourself or having it within a team as a manager or CEO. So, yeah, I love that point and I guess I was going to ask you with how rapidly technology is changing, especially in the AI space, how are you staying current and staying adaptable to all the changes that are happening there?

Hikari Senju:

Yeah, I mean, it definitely helps me. In San Francisco, you know, at the epicenter of a lot of you know, the Silicon Valley, at the epicenter of all this change, our office is in Sunnyvale. We have a, you know, people are in the office, and so it's not just me staying up to date, but making sure that our, you know, key product team, engineering team, sales team, is up to date in terms of all the information. People are constantly learning things. They're learning about competitors, they're learning about new tools, they're learning about new technologies, new interesting projects, interesting tools, and so they're bringing back to the team sharing that knowledge and, as a group, just tools, and so they're bringing back to the team sharing that knowledge and and, as a group, just being an information hungry organization. I think generally, you know, when we're hiring people, we look for three characteristics high integrity, high curiosity and high energy. And so, and so you know, the people that we've assembled are all kind of, you know, always seeking information and bringing it back to the team.

Marc Bernstein:

Hikari. This show is about really looking to the future and we talked about forward movement and momentum and progression. I'd like to ask you about you know, if this were December of 2027, and we're talking and we're looking back on the last three years what would have to happen in your life and I know a huge part of your life is the business at this point, what would have to happen for you to feel that that was a successful three-year progression in your life and business?

Hikari Senju:

I mean, I think, either IPO-ed or on the way to be IPO-ing, being a public company. This is something that I think is an important step in achieving the skill that we want to achieve and the impact we want to achieve. And so something, yeah, like somewhere along that IPO journey and definitely closer, or having surpassed it in the next but three years is also a long time, but also a short period of time Right.

Marc Bernstein:

What challenges do you see in front of you to get there?

Hikari Senju:

Generative AI is such an interesting space because it is constantly evolving and the dynamics are constantly changing. The competition is changing, the technology is changing, the consumer and business demand for that technology. As they learn more about technology, it's changing their appetite, it's changing their regard to technology, and so I think it's continuously making sure we're at the forefront of generative AI, building the best products generative AI products for our customers, which are marketers and advertisers, and, yeah, just making sure that we're the best at delivering their need with our technology.

Mike Martin:

Yeah, gotcha, I'll ask too this is a question I love asking people If you could wave a magic wand over your business and have any result you wanted, in any area, what would that be?

Hikari Senju:

I think it's just, you know, making sure that we have the very best product in general, ai, and that includes the best AI, the best engineering, and I think from there, you know, by having the very best product, you know many other facts kind of come together sales, you know, then you can have the very best sales. You have the very best word of mouth, you have the very best, you know understanding, best understanding in the general market. So we're a product-centric, product-oriented company and if I would have imagined to have the best product and therefore also the best team to build that to you know, that can build that product.

Marc Bernstein:

I'm going to switch gears because we only have a couple minutes left. I know you're a voracious reader. We've talked about many books. First of all, what are your favorite books? And then I'd like to ask you what you're currently reading.

Hikari Senju:

Yeah, my favorite book is and we've actually had this conversation over just spanning half a year, Marc. But right now my favorite book is a book called Accelerando and it's actually a sci-fi book about AI, about AI, about AI. Yeah, yeah, it's about artificial intelligence and kind of the future. It's a book called Accelerando.

Marc Bernstein:

I'm sorry, it just broke up a little bit, that's why I wasn't sure. Go ahead. Yep, yeah, it's called Accelerando.

Hikari Senju:

I'm sorry it just broke up a little bit, that's why I wasn't sure Go ahead. Yeah, it's by Charles Strauss and it's about kind of a world where you know the AI or kind of collective AI, human intelligence or path is, there's this brain, where AI and humanity, you know the collective intelligence of this kind of this total like, improves every you know decade by like leaps and bounds. And so you know you have this. You know every chapter almost begins with like MIPS, like how much million instructions per second can humanity collectively calculate? And you know you start the 2000s and it's a certain amount of MIPS. But then as the computers get more and more powerful and the humans kind of brain melt with the computers and it's like just you know, like just exponentially grow. And you know at some point that humanity has built Dyson spheres around the sun and they're exploring other galaxies, and so it's an optimistic book.

Hikari Senju:

It's a book that I think is actually a vision of the future. I think that is quite possible as AI accelerates. I don't think AI is going to replace humans. I think AI will coexist and evolve with humans. They will come in time, probably when all the computation in the world powered by machines will be greater than humanity. Hopefully we can enter a world where that would, but because there's a brain merge with humanity, it kind of expands humanity's horizons as well. That is currently my favorite book, especially at this moment in time, given the high change that we're seeing related to AI and kind of all the hype that we're hearing about AI and seeing about AI.

Marc Bernstein:

Sounds like one, sounds like one. We should all read actually.

Mike Martin:

Yeah.

Marc Bernstein:

I've written it down. Yeah, I'm going to check it out.

Hikari Senju:

It's, it's, it's, it's a great book it's. I don't really read a lot of science fiction. I mostly read business books.

Marc Bernstein:

Well, this is like a business, right? Yeah, yeah it is it is?

Hikari Senju:

It is kind of a very practical book in some ways, and listen.

Marc Bernstein:

I thank you. We're out of time, but thank you for being here.

Announcer:

Kari Senju, thank you, mike Martin, thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week on Founders Forum. We hope you enjoyed your time with Founders Forum and that you found value to take with you throughout your day. Join us again next week for another episode of Founders Forum on WXKB 1039 HD2.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Marc Bernstein

Host