Jason was the co-founder with his fellow Yahoo veteran Tim Cadogan of OpenX, a pioneering ad server and then programmatic exchange that launched in 2008. Today he is co-founder and CEO of tvScientific, a CTV-oriented programmatic platform. Jason began his journey in business development in Southern California at one of the original ISPs, Earthlink, which persists to this day. Then living in Pasadena, he was an avid follower of the Idealab incubator, led by the monumental Bill Gross, who became a mentor. One of Idealab’s startups that Jason noticed was GoTo.com – and he joined as one of the com ..read more

Jonah Goodhart is a co-founder of Montauk Labs, a technology venture studio. Jonah was the CEO and co-founder of Moat (acquired by Oracle in 2017), founding investor of Right Media (acquired by Yahoo in 2007), and co-founder of WGI Group, an entrepreneur investment fund. Goodhart was a recipient of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2017. Jonah was also a member of Mayor Bloomberg’s Council on Technology and Innovation. [Note: a more in-depth bio and discussion about Jonah’s intriguing career — which spans the arc of ad tech from the 1990s to today — can be found in this p ..read more

Katrin was a co-founder of Datorama in 2012, and the platform was acquired by Salesforce in 2018 for a reported $800 million. Datorama built an innovative data aggregation, transformation and visualization engine that allowed digital marketers to understand campaigns holistically and in detail, and to optimize ROAS. It proved particularly attractive to large media agencies. These days she is an angel investor and CEO of the early stage startup Ask-Y, also in the data analytics space. A native of Belgium, Katrin began her advertising career around the digital planning function at Havas, first i ..read more

Andy was VP of pricing and yield management at Yahoo and helped lead a revamp and professionalization of the portal’s approach to pricing and selling ads. He brought on both Rapt (via our previous guest Tom Chavez) and Right Media (via Brian O’Kelley) to improve yield management and to gain access to demand on RM’s exchange. After Yahoo, Andy co-founded Brand.net, a media buying platform for upper-funnel campaigns, and was SVP and GM of Marketplaces at AppNexus. Today he is Chief Operating Officer at Solestial, a company in space tech that develops solar panels. After graduating from MIT, Andy ..read more

Jeff was founder and CRO of the FastClick ad network, acquired by ValueClick. He was later the CRO and then CEO at AudienceScience, which may have invented the DMP for clients WSJ and P&G. He was also CMO at SundaySky and Chief Commercial Officer at Pubmatic. Today he is a strategic advisor with Pubmatic, based in NY. Jeff spent the dawn of the internet and its frenetic aftermath in the luxe milieu of Santa Barbara, where a number of pragmatic ad tech players got their start (e.g., AdECN, Commission Junction, The Trade Desk). As he tells Marty in this fast-paced episode, his parents were e ..read more

Mike Yavonditte is the CEO and co-founder of Yieldmo, an advertising platform specializing in mobile, optimization and curation. He was formerly CEO of Quigo, an innovative semantic ad network that built a formidable competitor to Google’s AdSense and was acquired by AOL in 2007 for a reported $340 million. Before that, he worked at Alta Vista and Juno, a pioneering ISP that launched a number of luminous ad tech careers at the dawn of the internet. Mike’s journey began with a “desktop news” startup, built with his first cousin Ray LaChance, which was scrutinized, rejected and then copied by Ha ..read more

Tom co-founded the Data Management Platform (DMP) Krux in 2010, and it was acquired by Salesforce in 2016 and became part of its Marketing Cloud. Before Krux, Tom co-founded a company called Rapt in the late 1990s, a yield-management optimization platform that sold into supply chain providers before making a hard pivot into advertising, managing publisher inventory by applying the same mathematical principles used for supply chains. Rapt was acquired by Microsoft as part of its impressive ad tech acquisition binge in 2007-08, when it also swept up aQuantive, Ad:ECN, and more. Currently, Tom is ..read more

Ari Paparo is a well-known ad tech influencer, blogger, fellow podcast host, serial entrepreneur, raconteur and man-about-town in his longtime home of Manhattan. He worked in product management at DoubleClick, AppNexus and Nielsen – and was the CEO and co-founder of Beeswax, which was acquired by Comcast’s Freewheel division in 2020 for an undisclosed amount at a time when it had raised $28 million. Ari co-founded Marketecture.tv in 2022 with our friend Zach Rodgers, Eric Seufert and Mike Shields, and he recently launched yet another company, called LaunchScience, focused on product launch wor ..read more

Lee was the first head of marketing at DoubleClick, hired by co-founder Kevin O’Connor in 1996 as employee #17 with a mandate to help the other 16 people meet Kevin’s vision-quest to “dominate internet advertising.” The startup had been clicked-off barely two years earlier in the basement of O’Connor’s home in suburban Alpharetta, Georgia. These days, Lee is a fractional CMO, executive guide and founder of the Sherpa Marketing agency, based in New York. He’s also an ad industry influencer, entwined with the Advertising Club for years, inducted into the AAF Hall of Achievement and named by Ad A ..read more

Ana Milicevic was a seasoned product manager in New York City in 2009 when she joined a wily data management startup called Demdex, which was then swirling around a programmatic audience-building space soon labeled Data Management Platform (DMP). Within two years, Adobe acquired Demdex and folded it into its emerging ad tech and data suite as Adobe Audience Manager, which persists to this day. Currently, Ana is principal and co-founder of Sparrow Advisors, a consultancy focused on data management. She founded it in 2015 with her sister, Maja, an ad tech vet (AppNexus, Sovern). At the time of i ..read more