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Troy Kopischke Builds Companies in the Messy Middle
The Minneapolis engineer turned venture-studio builder has spent three decades translating difficult science into operating companies - and lately, applying the same appetite for data to the cockpit.
Deren Baker
Deren Baker is the CEO of Flywheel Ventures, the innovation arm of Flywheel Commerce Network - now part of Omnicom Group after a landmark $835 million acquisition in 2023. A serial operator with deep roots in digital commerce analytics, Baker has led transformative companies including Jumpshot (which tracked 160 billion monthly clicks) and Edge by Ascential. He is a recognized thought leader in ecommerce strategy, retail media, and data-driven advertising, with bylines in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Entrepreneur Magazine.
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.