I founded Affiliate Window (now Awin.com) in 2000 with the goal of building a tracking infrastructure that could attribute every online sale to the publisher who caused it. I wrote the tracking software myself. Over the next eleven years as CEO, we grew the company to over £110 million in annual revenue, 850 advertisers, 80,000 publishers, and offices in London and Baltimore. Major clients included Nike, Vodafone, and Dixons Store Group. We acquired Buy.At from AOL and sold a majority stake to Axel Springer in 2009. The company merged with Zanox and rebranded as Awin, which is now one of the largest affiliate networks in the world. The entire business was built on one principle: cost-per-action attribution. The advertiser only pays when a sale happens, and every sale must be attributed ...