performance-advertising
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The App Install That Wasn’t There
FeedMob makes a business of finding mobile customers beyond search and social. Its more interesting job begins when the numbers look too good to be true.
Sunil Rayan and the Price of Attention
Across mobile apps, streaming and machine-learning advertising, Sunil Rayan has pursued the same stubborn question: can attention be turned into an outcome without wasting either? His career is a tour through the systems that decide what the world sees next.
Decide
Decide is a St. Louis-based advertising technology company - the rebrand of LockerDome, founded in 2008 - that runs a machine-learning platform called the Decision Marketplace. Rather than relying on third-party cookies or intrusive identity data, Decide lets multiple ML models compete in real time to select and price ad impressions, powering a two-sided marketplace that connects publishers and brands across the open web. Its widgets and content-recommendation units have reached over 100 million monthly users, positioning the company as a cookieless, performance-focused alternative to legacy programmatic ad stacks.
Herman Yang
Herman Yang is the CEO and co-founder of Upscale AI, an AI-native platform that lets e-commerce brands create, run, and optimize performance TV ads on streaming channels. A Stanford CS grad with an MBA from Harvard Business School, Yang spent over a decade reshaping mobile advertising at AdMob (acquired by Google) and MoPub (acquired by Twitter, then AppLovin), before stints at Facet Data, Chatgrid, and Moloco. In May 2025, he emerged from stealth with $5.5M in seed funding - backed by Nvidia Ventures, M12, Eniac, and others - to democratize what was once a $100K-minimum medium: streaming TV ads, rebuilt from scratch for performance marketers.