ad-tech
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Shahid Butt Has Spent a Career Making Television Behave More Like the Internet
From bargain broadband to live TV on a laptop and addressable ads on offline set-top boxes, Shahid Butt's career follows one persistent idea: make complicated media technology useful to ordinary people.
Terri Walter Has Spent a Career Naming What Advertising Cannot Yet See
From the first 'Digital Mom' to the blind spots of AI-era advertising, Terri Walter has built a career around a stubborn question: what are marketers still failing to see?
Scott McKinley
Scott McKinley is the founder and CEO of Truthset, an Oakland-based data validation company that scores the accuracy of consumer data used across advertising and marketing. A former captain of the 1988 US Olympic Road Cycling Team who walked away from the sport as doping spread, he spent roughly two decades in ad tech and martech - including a stretch as an EVP at Nielsen and CEO of IDify - before starting Truthset in 2019 to bring transparency and accountability to an industry he felt was full of unchecked claims about data.
David Weinfeld
David Weinfeld is the co-founder and CEO of Screenverse, a New York-based ad management and monetization company for digital screens in the physical world. Launched in April 2020 at the start of the pandemic, Screenverse now represents more than 100,000 digital out-of-home screens, from billboards and urban panels to Walmart pharmacy displays and digital jukeboxes. Before Screenverse, Weinfeld was Vistar Media's first supply sales hire, where he grew the partner network from 30 to over 120 global media owners. In 2024 the company raised $10.5 million from Volition Capital.
Jonathan Frohlinger
Jonathan Frohlinger is the founder and CEO of Big Happy, a New York ad tech company that builds cinematic, story-driven 3D advertising across mobile and digital out-of-home (DOOH) screens. After years on the media-buying side spending over $100M and selling for firms like Verve, Starcom and Conde Nast, he started Big Happy in 2019 on a simple conviction: creative is a performance lever, not decoration. The company centralizes 3D creative production, media activation, targeting and measurement, runs on 1M+ DOOH screens and 7,000+ mobile publishers, and reports brand-recall and engagement lifts well above industry norms. Big Happy raised a $2.5M strategic round from Infolinks in 2024, was named Best Overall Mobile Marketing Company in the 2025 MarTech Breakthrough Awards, and in 2026 launched dynamic creative optimization for 3D DOOH and formed a board of advisors to scale creative-led omnichannel advertising.
Jonathan Heller
Jonathan Heller is the chairman, founder and co-CEO of Firsthand, a New York AI startup building Brand Agents - AI representatives that talk directly to consumers on behalf of publishers and brands. An adtech lifer, he co-founded the online video advertising platform FreeWheel in 2007 and sold it to Comcast for roughly $360 million in 2014. At Firsthand he is reuniting with his old DoubleClick colleague Michael Rubenstein to argue that generative AI is not a better ad-serving engine but an entirely new medium for reaching people.
Alex Kelleher
Alex Kelleher is the founder and CEO of Quantum Rise, a Chicago AI consulting startup that raised a $15M seed in 2024 to pursue what he calls 'Consulting 2.0' - replacing billable-hours advice with heavy engineering and automation for mid-market companies. An Oxford-trained experimental psychologist, he has founded four data and decisioning software companies, with exits including Touch Clarity (to Omniture/Adobe), Cognitive Match (to Magnetic), and Vivid Edge. He went on to serve as Global CMO at Deloitte Digital and Chief Data Officer / President of Intelligence at Advantage Solutions. He is also a TED Global speaker and an exhibited artist.
Brian Brown
Brian Brown is the Chief Business Officer of Brave Software, the privacy-first browser company founded by JavaScript creator Brendan Eich. Since 2016 he has led the business side of Brave's bet to rewire online advertising around consent and the Basic Attention Token (BAT), pitching publishers, brands, and platforms on a model where users get paid for their attention. A veteran startup operator, he co-founded and helped run cloud-computing pioneer Joyent (later acquired by Samsung), founded enterprise and software startups before that, and began his career in journalism and human rights work. He is a Vassar graduate and a marathon runner who likes to quote Aristotle when people ask him about success.
Tod Sacerdoti
Tod Sacerdoti is a two-time founder and prolific seed investor. He built BrightRoll into a video ad-tech powerhouse that Yahoo bought for $640 million in 2014, then reassembled the band to start Pipedream, a developer integration platform that Workday acquired in early 2026. As a general partner at Flex Capital he has backed 400-plus companies at the seed stage, including Chime, Vercel, Replit and Mercury.
Tim Craycroft
Tim Craycroft is a veteran technology executive who spent over two decades building the plumbing behind digital advertising. After 14 years at Amazon - where he helped architect their multi-billion dollar ads business and opened the Boulder ad tech office - he joined Google in 2020 as VP & GM of Google Advertising, overseeing YouTube, apps, and display ads. In September 2025, he took center stage at the Google ad tech antitrust remedies trial, testifying about internal analyses (Project Sunday and Project Monday) that explored divesting AdX and DFP. He's now joined Flywheel as Senior VP of Engineering. An early cloud storage pioneer who co-founded i-drive.com in the late 1990s, Craycroft brings Dartmouth computer science roots and a Boulder, Colorado sensibility - equal parts algorithm and altitude.
Kshitij Jain
Kshitij Jain - widely known as KJ - is the Founder and CEO of Joveo, a Menlo Park-based AI-powered programmatic recruitment advertising platform that serves Fortune 500 employers including Wells Fargo, Barclays, Rolls-Royce, and Sony. A two-time founder with 20-plus years in the recruitment industry, he previously built MoBolt, a job application optimization startup acquired by Indeed in 2014 for a double-digit million dollar sum in under two years of operation. Before that he spent roughly eleven years at Monster Worldwide across roles spanning Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and India. KJ's driving mission - delivering the right job to every person - is embedded in Joveo's name itself, and his 4-3-2-1 model (four clicks, three applies, two shortlists, one hire) defines his philosophy on making recruitment humane at scale.
Oren Kaniel
Oren Kaniel is the CEO and co-founder of AppsFlyer, the world's leading mobile attribution and marketing analytics platform. Starting from a small apartment in 2011, he and co-founder Reshef Mann built a $2 billion company that serves 12,000+ customers including Nike, eBay, and Macy's. AppsFlyer reached $508.4M ARR in 2024, its first profitable year, and is positioning for a potential IPO. A Technion computer science graduate who started coding at age 8, Kaniel is known for spending 1.5 years without salary to build AppsFlyer and for operating the company for six years without a dedicated sales team.
Susan Kuo
Susan Kuo is the Co-Founder and COO of Singular, a marketing intelligence platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California that unifies marketing analytics and attribution for the world's top performance marketers. A veteran of mobile ad tech and gaming, she previously built go-to-market strategy from the ground up as SVP of Sales & Business Development at Onavo (acquired by Facebook in 2013), and held senior roles at InMobi, Booyah, Gaia Online, and Electronic Arts. Since co-founding Singular in 2014 alongside Gadi Eliashiv and Eran Friedman, she has led global partnerships and business development while also championing diversity in tech through THRIVE, a community platform she founded to connect and empower women in growth marketing.
Austin Harrison
Austin Harrison is the co-founder and CEO of Northbeam, a San Francisco-based marketing intelligence platform that uses first-party data and machine learning to give e-commerce and D2C brands an accurate picture of which ads are actually driving revenue. Before pivoting to martech, Harrison built a parallel career in digital entertainment — co-founding an animation company that worked with Hasbro, Disney, and NBC Universal, and earlier running MediaTrip, an online animation channel that earned an Entertainment Weekly Top 10 Internet Phenomenon ranking. At Northbeam, he has led the company to track over $130 billion in ad-attributed revenue across 800+ brands, raised $40 million in total funding, and launched industry-first attribution models developed in partnership with Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat.
Maxx Lobo
Maxx Lobo is the Chief Executive Officer of Ask Media Group, the IAC-owned digital media and performance marketing company behind Ask.com and other properties reaching 245 million people monthly. A two-decade veteran of ad-tech, cloud infrastructure, and digital media, Lobo rose through the ranks as CTO and COO/President before taking the top role in 2025. Under his operational leadership, Ask Media Group tripled its EBITDA from $50 million to over $100 million in four years, cementing his reputation as one of the more quietly effective operators in the digital media landscape.
Nick Stamos
Nick Stamos is the CEO of Rakuten Advertising, one of the world's largest affiliate and performance marketing networks, where he leads an AI-driven initiative called 'Affiliate Intelligence' to reshape how brands and publishers connect. A MIT-trained strategist turned serial entrepreneur, Stamos previously co-founded Sindeo, a digital mortgage startup, built mobile analytics at Telephia through its acquisition by Nielsen, and spent nearly a decade in management consulting before pivoting to tech. Based in Mill Valley, California, he champions the convergence of brand and partner marketing and has positioned Rakuten Advertising at the forefront of influencer and affiliate innovation.
Sath Nelakonda
Sath Nelakonda is the CEO and CTO of Cinarra Systems, a SoftBank company that turns mobile network signals into privacy-safe advertising and venue analytics. A co-founder of the company since 2013, he came out of the deep plumbing of the internet - IP/MPLS routing at TiMetra, then Alcatel-Lucent, then Juniper - and now runs an ad-tech outfit built on telco-grade data.
Elizabeth Yin
Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, the pre-seed venture firm she launched in 2017 with two Stanford dorm-mates. A former founder (LaunchBit, acquired by BuySellAds) and 500 Startups Partner, she invests in software startups within 48 hours of a first call, has built a portfolio of 375+ companies including unicorns Gamma, Webflow, and Boom Supersonic, and has made angel investing accessible to over 10,000 applicants across 50+ countries through Angel Squad — all while sporting a Twitter handle (@dunkhippo33) that honors her lifelong collection of stuffed hippos.