Some people only climb a mountain when they know what is on the other side. Others just climb.
Daniel Nissan has spent 30 years building companies that did not fit any existing map. He joined a tiny startup in 1992 when no one had heard of the internet. He helped launch the first internet phone product. He built a nationwide grocery delivery service before e-commerce existed. And now, after 26 years leading Structured, he is throwing away the platform he built and starting from scratch.
The reason is the same as it has always been: he sees what is coming before most people know to look.
In 1992, a group of developers reached out to Nissan. They had built sound cards for desktop computers and ended up stuck with a warehouse full of inventory no one wanted. Their solution: create an office intercom so everyone could talk over microphones and speakers at their desk.
Nissan's first reaction was blunt. "This is a stupid idea," he thought. "I don't see why people need an intercom in their office. Who would talk about it? Privacy, everybody has a phone on their desk."
But he noticed something. The team kept mentioning a network called the internet. Almost no one had heard of it. Nissan had. He saw it differently: if you could route that office intercom through this new global network, people could talk to each other for free anywhere in the world.
He joined. The company was five or six people and had just raised $1.5 million from a local VC.
It took three years of technical work to make the idea real. Protocol limitations. Hardware constraints. An industry that had not yet matured enough to support what the team was trying to build.
Nissan made the first test call around 1993 or 1994. There was only one place in Israel with a fast enough internet connection to try it. He drove to Jerusalem. Another person waited near Tel Aviv. They connected.
"I couldn't hear anything, but I heard the grubble and something went through," Nissan said. "And I was so excited. So this is going to work."
A few days later, after sorting out a protocol issue, the next test worked well. In 1995, they launched the first internet phone product under the name "iPhone" -- internet phone. The company went public on NASDAQ in 1996.
One thing led to another. While selling the internet phone software at VocalTec, Nissan built what may have been the first online commerce transaction: a simple web form where customers entered their credit card and received an unlock code by email. They sold nearly $10 million worth of software in a year.
That experience got him thinking about what else could be sold online. He teamed up with a co-founder who knew the consumer packaged goods industry. Together they built NetGrocer, one of the first online grocery delivery services in the country.
The company grew from four or five people to about 200 at its peak. The core promise was simple: order groceries from home, get them delivered to your door nationwide, pay 25 percent below what your local supermarket charges.
The hardest part of NetGrocer was not technology. It was logistics. To deliver groceries across the country, Nissan needed a partner with national reach.
He emailed Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx. His pitch: NetGrocer would deliver steady volume in local neighborhoods year-round, which would help fill FedEx's B2C network that typically only peaked around the holidays. Smith replied, invited Nissan to Memphis, and FedEx became their delivery partner.
That one deal changed everything. A warehouse in one location could now ship nationwide on FedEx planes and trucks. It gave NetGrocer a story no local competitor could match, and it brought attention from CNN, Good Morning America, and others covering the promise of e-commerce.
NetGrocer was not just a supermarket. Nissan saw it as a network connecting brands with consumers in ways that had never existed. To lock in that position, the company bought exclusive advertising inventory across AOL, Excite, AltaVista, and Yahoo for consumer packaged goods, household supplies, and over-the-counter drugs.
"If you're a consumer packaged goods company and you want to go and advertise online, we own the inventory," Nissan explained.
They also built tools that did not yet exist anywhere else. Nutrition facts were tagged for every product in the store so customers could filter by calories, sugar, or dietary needs. Automatic replenishment lets customers subscribe to regular deliveries with a single click. And brands like Procter and Gamble received weekly data on purchases, flavors, repurchases, and promotions sliced by region and state.
The company raised over $50 million and was set to go public in 1998. Two weeks before the roadshow, a crisis tied to a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management shut down the IPO market for over a year. NetGrocer was burning a million dollars a month with no path to more capital.
"Running like a train, bullet train on the track," Nissan said. "One day you hit a wall and there is no way to overcome that."
Two or three days after NetGrocer collapsed, Nissan got a phone call from his investors. They had a $500,000 check ready. What did he want to do next?
He came to their office on a Friday afternoon with a pitch: give him a million dollars to evaluate ten ideas over a few months, then pick the right one.
They smiled, opened their eyes wide, and said, "Go home. Come on Monday with one idea."
He went home, worked through his list, and came back Monday with Structured Web. Got his $500,000. The rest is 26 years of history.
The insight was simple. Nissan had been using the internet since 1992. By 2000, he still could not book an appointment at his doctor's office online. Most businesses had no website at all. The ones that did had scanned a brochure and posted the image.
Building a real website required data centers, servers, HTML knowledge, and constant upkeep as technology changed. No small business had time for that.
Nissan's answer: build vertical marketing solutions for specific industries. Ready-made websites for chiropractors and travel agents. Put in your logo and opening hours, click save, and you are up and running in five minutes. The company handles all the technology underneath.
The first vertical launched in summer 2000. Chiropractors. The core principle -- give businesses ready-made marketing programs they can use without managing the technology -- has stayed the same ever since.
Today, Structured helps the world's largest brands run distributed marketing for their channel partners globally. Companies like Microsoft, IBM, ServiceNow, Google, and Zoom run their partner marketing through Structured's platform.
In January 2025, Structured took its first outside capital in over two decades: a $30 million majority investment from Invictus Growth Partners. The goal was to fund a shift Nissan had already begun two years earlier.
That shift was not to add AI features to the existing platform. It was to throw the platform out and rebuild it from the ground up.
Most companies are bolting AI on. Adding a chatbot here. Dropping an "AI-powered" label on a feature there. Nissan argues that this approach misses everything.
The current Structured platform works the way most marketing tools do: log in, click menus, scroll, search, find what you need, drag and drop, edit in a Canva-style interface. The new platform works differently.
"The new product, just type: change the colors, learn the way I present my business and change the email," Nissan said. No menus. No searching. Just tell it what you want.
Nissan put it plainly: trying to retrofit AI onto an existing platform is like taking a 2006 website and adjusting it to work on mobile. It never feels natural. Mobile-first means built for mobile from the start. AI-first means the same.
Nissan sees marketing AI moving through distinct phases. Today, AI acts as an assistant: create content, analyze data, but a person is still doing most of the work. The next stage, arriving soon, is conversational platforms where everything happens through prompts and natural language replaces menus.
After that comes agentic AI. "Not just create the content for me, but do the actual work of sending it, analyzing it, following up on it," Nissan said. His goal is a complete marketing machine that businesses can run with no direct day-to-day involvement by the end of 2026.
The new Structured platform, built entirely in this new architecture, is set to launch in early 2026.
Two years ago, when Nissan told his team they were going to rebuild using AI, the response was skepticism. Earlier this year, when he sat down with his R&D team and said they needed to have it done by the end of the year, the first response was: "It's impossible."
So he sat with them for a week. Not lecturing. Working through it together. Breaking it down piece by piece. Showing what could be done.
"At the end of that week, they came back to us and said, you know what? Not only that we can do it, we can do it faster than you think."
The shift did not come from motivation. It came from clarity. Nissan observed that many people need to see what is on the other side before they will commit. His job as a leader is to draw that picture clearly enough that they can believe it.
"If they understand it, it starts to be like magic, it starts to spread. Then you can sit back and just watch it happen."
Nissan is direct about AI and employment. "150 years ago, there were people in town that would go in the evening before sunset and would light the gas lights," he said. "I don't see people like that in my town anymore, but I don't see people unemployed in my town either."
Jobs change. Work evolves. But only if people choose to move with it.
"If you sit there and say, it's not changing, I have nothing to do, my job was taken, yes, it will be taken."
Thirty years ago, Nissan had to fly overseas and attend trade shows just to learn basic things about a company. Today, all the tools are free and available online. There is no excuse for standing still.
When Paxton Gray asked what advice Nissan would give marketers right now, the answer was short.
"Go out and learn and explore and try." The world is changing faster than it ever has. That is not a threat. It is an opening.
"As I say to a lot of my friends: jump in the water and start to swim. You cannot learn to swim if you're not in the water."
The marketers treating AI as a nice-to-have feature are the same people who thought office intercoms were a stupid idea in 1992. The ones willing to rebuild from scratch are the ones making tomorrow's first calls.
"Some people when they climb, they will climb the mountain only if they know what's on the other side of the mountain," Nissan said. "And some people get thrilled, but not knowing what's on the other side of the mountain."
Which one are you?
04:27 - Why join a "stupid idea" startup
05:03 - Making the first VoIP call
51:20 - Traditional platforms vs AI conversation
52:38 - Agentic AI timeline
55:10 - Getting teams to believe
57:50 - The lamplighter analogy
See what Daniel’s up to at https://structured.ai/.
Find Daniel Nissan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielnissan/
Connect with Paxton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paxtongray/
Looking for an agency that'll be worth the investment? 97th Floor creates custom, audience-first campaigns that drive pipeline and conversions. Get started here: https://97thfloor.com/lets-talk/.
Daniel founded Structured in 1999 and leads the company’s strategic vision across marketing, engineering, and product development efforts. From 1996 to 1999, Daniel was the President and CEO of NetGrocer, which he led to be a highly recognized and established leader in the field of eCommerce. He served as a Vice President of Marketing for VocalTec Communications, Ltd. (VOCL) from 1993 to 1996. Part of the original VocalTec group that created the Internet Phone, Daniel was responsible for its breakthrough product concept, marketing, and strategy development.
