appnexus
(4)
Brian O’Kelley and the trouble with a working machine
He helped turn online advertising into an automated market. After AppNexus, Scope3 and a detour through physical supply chains, Brian O’Kelley is asking which parts of that machine deserve to be rebuilt.
Samir Shergill and the price of a big break
A cousin’s large retail order exposed a small-business trap: success can arrive before the cash to pay for it. Samir Shergill built Highbeam around the founders caught in that gap.
Michael Rubenstein and the ad that learned to listen
From a browser in McGill’s library to the exchanges behind online advertising, Michael Rubenstein has kept finding reasons to start again. At Firsthand, his next bet is a brand that can answer back.
Matthew Goldhill
Matthew Goldhill is the founder and CEO of Picnic, a London-born adtech company that pioneered 'social display' advertising - Stories, Posts and Carousels dropped mid-article on Google AMP pages, a format that didn't exist before he built it. He left AppNexus at 25 to start the company, bootstrapped it for years, delivered 600+ campaigns for brands like EE, L'Oreal and Amazon, then raised £1m in 2023 and moved to New York to crack the US market. He builds user-first, low-carbon ad products and is unusually candid about the near-disasters along the way.