Michael Ovitz is the CEO and co-founder of Expanly. With over 15 years of experience on the front lines of digital commerce, he has architected growth strategies for some of the most recognizable brands in the Nordics, including Foodora, Verkkokauppa.com, and Mehiläinen. As a member of multiple management teams, he has a deep, first-hand understanding of the critical gap between marketing performance and real business profitability. This experience became the driving force behind Expanly, a platform designed to give strategic control back to business leaders.
At the heart of every great company is a founder who saw a fundamental problem and couldn't look away. For Expanly, that problem is the growing, dangerous gap between a company's strategy and the automated tools meant to execute it. We sat down with our co-founder and CEO, Michael Ovitz, to discuss the conviction behind 'Reclaim Control, Unlock Growth' and his vision for a smarter e-commerce future.
You could have built any number of tools for the e-commerce market. Why focus so intensely on solving the disconnect between a company's business logic and its ad platforms?
Over the last decade, I watched as some of the smartest marketing leaders I know, myself included, were forced to surrender our greatest asset: strategic judgment.
At one of my previous companies, a place with a relentless campaign pace, I'd often want to pivot our advertising to reflect a new theme or a sudden market opportunity. The response from the team was frequently, 'We can't do it. It will break the algorithm.' For the longest time, I felt chained by the very automation that was supposed to liberate us. We had become servants to the machine's learning phase.
In another company before that, we were pouring millions into Google Ads. We had a clear business strategy, with different seasonal priorities every single month. But our advertising rarely reflected that nuanced strategy. Not because we didn't want it to, but because we simply lacked the tools to give the algorithm a proper, real-time briefing.
I became obsessed with this paradox. Imagine hiring a brilliant Head of Sales, giving them a massive budget, but refusing to tell them which products have the best margins. It would be managerial malpractice. Yet, that is exactly what the industry does every day with its automated ad spend.
What was a popular industry trend or a piece of 'conventional wisdom' that you and the team made a conscious decision to reject, and why?
The dominant trend for years has been this relentless pursuit of 'more.' More data points, more audience signals, more integrations. The conventional wisdom was that if you just fed the machine enough information, it would eventually find the answer. We made a conscious decision to reject that. It's a siren song that leads to complexity and confusion.
We believe that more data isn't the answer. The right data is.
A handful of critical, real-time business metrics, like your actual profit margin per SKU, your variant-level stock, and your product return rates, have more strategic value than a petabyte of demographic or behavioral data. Our bet wasn't on building the biggest data pipe; it was on building the smartest one. We chose to focus with ruthless simplicity on the few signals that have a direct, causal link to a company's P&L. It's a less trendy approach, but it's the one that delivers predictable, profitable outcomes, not just more charts on a dashboard.
Our tagline is 'Reclaim Control, Unlock Growth.' In your view, what critical form of 'control' have e-commerce leaders lost without even realizing it?
They've lost control over their most dynamic and fluid capital allocation decision. Every single day, an e-commerce leader allocates thousands, or even millions, of euros with the goal of generating a return. That allocation is their ad budget. Yet, the final decision on which 'assets'—which specific products—that capital gets invested in is handed over to a machine that has no concept of a P&L.
They would never let an uninformed algorithm decide which new stores to open or which software to invest in. But they let it decide how to invest the single largest variable portion of their budget on a daily basis.
They haven't just lost control of their marketing. They've lost control of a core financial lever. We're not just giving them back control over their ads; we're giving them back control over their daily investment portfolio. And when you control your investments with intelligence, growth is the natural result.
CEOs often need to explain complex ideas in simple, powerful terms. If you had to describe the fundamental logic of Expanly using a metaphor, what would it be?
I like to think of a business as being on a road trip. The destination is your annual profit goal. Default ad platforms are like an old paper map. They can show you the general direction, but they have no idea about the current conditions of the road.
Expanly is like upgrading to a modern GPS or satellite navigation system.
Suddenly, your map is alive. It doesn't just know the destination; it knows the real-time traffic (your inventory levels). It knows which roads have costly tolls (high return rates). It knows the most fuel-efficient routes (your most profitable products). It can even see a brand new highway that was just built (a new product launch) and guide you there immediately.
You're still the one driving the car, but now you have an intelligent system feeding you the best possible information to get you to your destination faster and more efficiently. We give your advertising that same live, intelligent guidance.
From where you sit, what is the single biggest unseen risk for a scaling e-commerce business right now, and how does Expanly act as a form of insurance against it?
The biggest unseen risk is what I call the 'Success Trap.' It's the danger of a company's own past success becoming its biggest liability.
Here’s how it works: A scaling business has a handful of 'hero' products that got them where they are. Their ad platforms, which are designed to optimize based on historical data, learn to love these heroes and pour all the budget into them. But as the company scales, the economics change. The supply chain for those heroes gets strained, the return rates might creep up on a larger audience, and the margins might get squeezed.
The business is trapped. Its automated systems are doubling down on a strategy that is becoming less and less profitable, while ignoring the next generation of potential hero products because they don't have the same historical data. The company is slowly being suffocated by its own success.
Expanly is the insurance against this trap. By feeding the platforms real-time data on profit, inventory, and returns, we force them to adapt to the business's current reality, not its history. We make sure the system can identify when a hero is fading and, more importantly, can spot and nurture the next one before it's obvious. It's insurance for your future growth.
You've brought together a team of experts in tech, growth, and e-commerce. What's the one core belief or principle you've instilled in the company culture to ensure you're all building a solution that truly serves the customer?
The principle that truly defines us is one we call 'Ownership is Strategic Control.' And it applies as much to our own team as it does to our clients.
Internally, it means we give our people high autonomy and we trust them with the strategic control to execute. We hire experts and empower them to own their domain.
But this principle is also the very soul of our product. We realized that for years, e-commerce leaders had been forced to give up ownership of their ad strategy. They were accountable for the results, but they had lost strategic control to the black box algorithms. We saw this as a fundamental breakdown of modern business leadership.
Our entire mission is to restore that principle. We're giving strategic control back to our clients. When we say 'Reclaim Control,' we are giving them the same ownership over their growth engine that we demand for our own team. It's the single idea that unites our culture and our code.
You're building a new 'operating system' for e-commerce advertising. What's the 'operating system' for Expanly itself? As a remote-first company with global ambition, what are the core principles you've put in place to ensure your team stays aligned, innovative, and connected across different time zones?
Our internal operating system is built on three pillars that directly mirror our ambition.
First, Global Talent over Local Limits. Our decision to be remote-first is a direct extension of our strategy. To build a world-class product, we need world-class talent, regardless of their zip code. We hire the best talent globally, wherever they live, Lisbon, Helsinki or beyond.
Second, Deep Focus over Constant Interruption. The problems we're solving are incredibly complex. We protect our team's ability to do deep, intelligent work by creating an environment free from the 'interruption factory' of a traditional office. We value thoughtful documentation over constant meetings.
Third, Outcomes over Optics. This is the most important pillar. We measure success by the impact our team makes, not the hours they're online. We set clear goals and trust our people to deliver. It's the same ethos we sell to our clients: tangible results are what matter.
These three principles - hiring the best, giving them the focus to do their best work, and trusting them to deliver - that's the operating system that allows us to build a global company.
Let's talk about the future of the e-commerce leader themselves. As platforms get more automated, what will be the single most important skill or mindset for a Head of E-commerce or a CEO to cultivate in the next five years to stay ahead?
The single most important mindset will be the shift from 'Campaign Manager' to 'Business Architect.'
For the last decade, the job has been about mastering the tactical levers inside the ad platforms. It was about out-tweaking the competition. But as those platforms become increasingly automated black boxes, those tactical skills are becoming less of a differentiator.
The successful leaders of the next five years won't be the ones who can build the best campaign; they'll be the ones who can design the best briefing for the automation that builds the campaign.
They will need to be architects who can integrate disparate data sources, from finance, merchandising, and marketing, into a single, coherent blueprint. Their core skill won't be tweaking bids, but defining the business rules, profit goals, and strategic logic that the automation will then execute. They're moving from playing the game to designing the rules of the game. That's the future, and the leaders who embrace that architectural mindset will be the ones who win.
Running a startup is an intense journey that demands incredible focus. What's your 'why' outside of the business? You're a family man; how does that personal role ground you and give you perspective on the high-stakes world of building a company?
It's simple: my family is my 'why.' I've been married for fifteen years and have a daughter and a son, ten and nine. They are both active in competitive sports, and what grounds me is the absolute clarity of my role as their father. My job isn't to play the game for them. My job is to give them the right tools, the right mindset, and the freedom to find their own way to succeed. I want to raise them to be curious and creative, to build their own playbooks for life.
That's the exact perspective I bring to Expanly. The e-commerce world can be incredibly noisy and complex. It's easy to lose focus. But my role as a CEO, like my role as a father, is to provide clarity of purpose.
For our team, it means creating a culture where they have the tools and autonomy to do their best work. For our customers, it means cutting through the noise of vanity metrics and giving them back the strategic control they deserve. My family reminds me that the most powerful thing a leader can do is not to have all the answers, but to create an environment where others are empowered to find them. That's the kind of company I'm building.
When you look back on your career in ten years, what is the one legacy or fundamental change you hope Expanly has brought to the e-commerce industry?
I hope that when people look back, they'll say Expanly made the 'e' in e-commerce invisible.
For too long, 'e-commerce' has been treated as a separate department, with its own language and its own siloed metrics like ROAS and CPA. This created a huge disconnect between the digital marketing team and the core business functions of finance and merchandising.
My vision is for our legacy to be the creation of a truly unified commerce model. I want people to say that Expanly was the platform that finally allowed the entire business to speak the same language. We made it possible for a company's P&L statement, its inventory reality, and its marketing engine to operate from a single source of truth.
In that world, there's no longer 'e-commerce marketing'; there's just 'commerce,' intelligently executed across all channels. If we can be seen as the company that broke down those internal walls and helped build truly unified, profitable businesses, then that's a legacy I would be incredibly proud of.
