David Kostman and the art of the second act

Before the television screen and the advertising platform, consider the hummus. David Kostman, whose working life has included investment banking and public-company boardrooms, also co-founded Nanoosh, a Mediterranean restaurant business in New York. By 2010 it had four locations. Customers could sit down, order a meal and leave with a bill that was modest by Manhattan standards. Here was a business proposition with unusually little need for a PowerPoint presentation.

Kostman cared about the details. The restaurants served freshly made hummus, with toppings rather than a parade of blended flavors. Wine and beer belonged on the menu, but a vast drinks list did not. He favored a short drinks list. The idea was a meal, a pleasant setting and a price people would accept. Even a former investment banker could see the appeal of keeping lunch comprehensible.

Today, his menu is considerably harder to explain. As chief executive of Teads, he runs the advertising company formed when Outbrain acquired the video advertising business in February 2025. The proposition joins brand building, which tries to make people remember a product, with performance advertising, which tries to make them do something measurable. Kostman wants both jobs under one roof. His career makes a useful introduction to that ambition: he has spent years moving between businesses that speak different languages.

“We don’t have to have 20 varieties.”

David Kostman, on Nanoosh’s drinks selection, 2010

A passport before a platform

Kostman was born in Düsseldorf and grew up in Brazil, Austria and Israel. He studied law at Tel Aviv University, earned an MBA at INSEAD and worked in London. New York has been his base since the mid-1990s. He speaks fluent German, although a 2025 interview with a German advertising publication took place in English. A neat national label does rather less work here than an itinerary.

His banking career began at NM Rothschild & Sons, with work on mergers, acquisitions and privatizations in South America. At Lehman Brothers, where he worked from 1994 to 2000, his remit included the Global Internet Group. Those years put him close to the commercial machinery of the emerging internet: companies seeking capital, buyers seeking companies, and executives trying to persuade somebody that tomorrow’s market justified today’s price.

He then crossed into operations. From 2000 to 2002, he held senior roles at VerticalNet, including president of its international division and chief operating officer. Between April 2003 and July 2006 he was chief operating officer and then CEO of Delta Galil USA, part of the textile group. He returned to Lehman as a managing director from 2006 to 2008. This is a résumé with actual changes of subject. Software, clothing and restaurants give an executive quite different opportunities to discover whether a proposition survives contact with a customer.

From a board seat to the opening bell

Another strand of Kostman’s career has been much steadier. He became chairman of NICE in February 2013, after an association with its board stretching back to 2001, with an interruption in 2007–08. He remains its chairman. That long relationship sits alongside his changes of operating role, adding the perspective of somebody responsible for oversight as well as execution.

He joined Outbrain’s board in July 2014. In 2017, he became co-CEO alongside co-founder Yaron Galai. The distinction matters: Kostman arrived at an existing company, then moved from supervising its direction to sharing responsibility for running it. Outbrain’s founders were Galai and Ori Lahav. Kostman’s contribution belongs to the subsequent work of managing and developing the business.

On July 23, 2021, Galai and Kostman rang Nasdaq’s opening bell as Outbrain became publicly traded. The listing gave the company a market price and a more demanding audience for its plans. Its offering sold eight million shares at $20 apiece. For the banker who had helped internet businesses explain themselves to investors, this was a turn on the other side of the conversation.

The shared leadership arrangement ended in April 2024, when Kostman became sole CEO and Galai stayed chairman. Their six years working together supplied continuity through that transition. In the following year, Kostman also left Unity’s board, effective June 9, 2025. Unity stated that the resignation involved no disagreement. His professional connections span several corners of technology, but the Teads combination placed a particularly concrete task on his desk.

The deal that took three tries

Outbrain’s pursuit of Teads had a long prehistory. Kostman has described three attempts to buy the business, including one before Altice acquired it in 2017. Governance and control complicated earlier efforts. Over time, the management teams became friendly. “We became pretty close friends,” he recalled. Corporate courtship, it seems, can include an extended period of knowing exactly why the relationship ought to work.

The successful transaction closed on February 3, 2025, with announced consideration of approximately $900 million: $625 million in cash and 43.75 million Outbrain shares. It had originally been announced at approximately $1 billion in August 2024. The revised closing terms matter; the announcement and the completed purchase are different points in the story. Outbrain bought Teads, and the combined business adopted the acquired company’s name.

The choice carried its own argument. Teads brought video advertising expertise and relationships with large brands and agencies. Outbrain brought its performance advertising business and predictive technology. Using Teads as the shared brand signaled the customers the combination wanted to serve. For Kostman, the attraction lay in offering advertisers a route from initial awareness to a subsequent action, across web, mobile and connected television.

There was a sizable integration job attached. At closing, the company described a team of nearly 1,800 people across 36 countries and relationships with more than 10,000 publishers and 20,000 advertisers. Those are snapshots of the combined operation at that moment. Bringing together that many people and commercial relationships requires far more than changing the name on a presentation. A buyer can complete a transaction in a day; a customer experiences the integration campaign by campaign.

The person at the other end of the click

An advertising executive can disappear into the language of inventory and optimization. Kostman’s own writing offers a more ordinary test: what happens to the person who clicks? In 2024, he argued that publishers were responding to buying metrics that rewarded reach and viewability while giving insufficient weight to the actual experience of reading a page. An ad can meet a measurement rule and still send somebody somewhere thoroughly irritating.

He announced that Outbrain had removed Jounce-classified Made For Advertising domains from its supply-side platform as of May 2024. He also described landing-page guidelines addressing aggressive ad refresh and ad density, with automation intended to help enforcement. These were announced measures, rather than proof that every poor experience had disappeared. The distinction is useful in a business where the next click can be much easier to count than the disappointment after it.

There is a commercial reason for his interest in journalism. Independent publishers need revenue, and advertisers need settings where people pay attention. His argument is that better experiences can help both. At Cannes in June 2025, he again emphasized attention as a predictor of advertising outcomes. This gives his merger thesis a human dependency: the technology needs an audience willing to remain in the room.

The television before you press play

Connected television supplies a particularly tangible version of that room. In a May 2026 interview at the Possible conference in Miami, Kostman discussed the home screen: the place where a viewer decides which app or program to open. Teads has pursued relationships with television manufacturers to put advertising into that interval. The moment before a choice becomes another place to reach a customer.

For Kostman, the practical selling point is a unified entry into campaigns across manufacturers. That is consistent with the larger Teads pitch: reduce the number of separate arrangements an advertiser must manage. It also puts the company closer to a familiar household ritual. A viewer has sat down to watch something; an advertiser would like a brief appointment before the entertainment begins.

By the second quarter of 2026, there was measurable movement in that direction. Connected-TV revenue grew 67% year over year and accounted for 13% of total revenue, up from 7% a year earlier. The wider picture was tougher. Quarterly revenue fell 17%, from $343.1 million to $284.6 million, and the company recorded a $42.5 million net loss. Growth in one part of the business was happening alongside contraction in the whole.

The same results included an expanded attention-measurement partnership with Lumen Research, a renewed LG agreement across Europe and Asia-Pacific, and an integration with TiVo Ads. These developments give substance to the television strategy. They also leave Kostman with a clear management problem: build on the growing business while addressing the weakness elsewhere. A convincing explanation of the market still has to become a workable set of results.

What survives the sales pitch

The work also includes financing the operation. On September 30, 2026, Teads and its subsidiaries entered into a four-year, $125 million accounts-receivable financing facility. Kostman signed the disclosure on October 5. Alongside the talk about creative campaigns sits the less photogenic business of managing cash.

His stated ambition is to make Teads a preferred platform for open-internet advertisers, with connected television and retail media among the opportunities. It is an expansive aim from somebody whose career has repeatedly moved between the transaction and the operation. The legal training, banking work, board service and operating jobs form a record of those moves. They do not settle how this one ends.

Nanoosh offers a smaller, pleasantly stubborn point of reference. A restaurant has to make its offer intelligible to somebody who is hungry now. Teads has to make a much more complicated offer intelligible to advertisers, publishers and viewers, each with different expectations. Kostman has brought the businesses together. The second act is getting all those customers to find something worth returning for.