Introducing Cento Ventures, the new name for Digital Media Partners (DMP)

Announcement

October 6, 2017

Introducing Cento Ventures, the new name for Digital Media Partners (DMP)

Over the years we’ve had an on-again, off-again debate about our company name ‘Digital Media Partners’ and whether it accurately conveys what we do as an organisation. While no particular issues exist around it, we do get a number of recurring bits of feedback when we talk to people. The word ‘media’ is quite often misinterpreted to mean we focus specifically on media companies, including those in traditional media such as print, TV, and radio. We don’t, we look at technology companies, and our scope of interest is much wider than the media sector alone. Another persistent one is “does the D stand for Dmitry” – our founder. It doesn’t. A further source of mild confusion arose from the emergence of Data Management Platforms, which are often referred to as ‘DMPs’.

Our search for a new name has produced ‘Cento Ventures’. ‘Cento’ means one hundred (in Italian), and is part of ‘percent’ (English / Latin). Percentages have great relevance to our day-to-day jobs since they serve as a way to measure growth, probabilities, and returns. Finding ‘one in a hundred’ alludes to the process we go through when looking for investments. More generally, achieving 100% of something is considered a success.

More obscurely, the word ‘Cento’ also means:

  • literary work made up of quotations from other authors or a poetic technique of assembling a poem from excerpts of other authors’ writings.
  • In old English: a patchwork, a garment consisting of disparate pieces
  • In Japanese, helpfully and unexpectedly, Cento refers to ‘moving the capital city to a different place’, or the ‘emergence of new capital city’

In different ways, each of these meanings has significance to our work:

  • We build a narrative based on the individual stories of our founders, and our results are the sum of the hard work by portfolio company founders and teams
  • We pull together disjointed pieces of fragmented markets, value chains, assets to achieve results
  • We’re part of a shift in the centre of economic gravity towards emerging markets

Naturally, we now expect to hear a few jokes about cents-on-a-dollar and counting every percent-o.