Rakuten Advertising is the global affiliate and performance-marketing arm of Japan's Rakuten Group. Born as LinkShare in 1996 and acquired by Rakuten in 2005, it connects the world's top brands with publishers, creators and highly engaged audiences across 200+ countries. Today it pairs a pioneering affiliate network with AI-powered tools for fraud detection, partnership discovery and reporting, while pushing influencer and affiliate marketing closer together.
Cali Tran is CEO of Simpli.fi, a programmatic advertising platform backed by Blackstone and GTCR that runs 140,000+ ad campaigns monthly for 40,000 advertisers. Born in a Vietnamese refugee camp at Camp Pendleton and raised as the youngest of six in a family restaurant, he built a career spanning investment banking, venture capital, startup co-founding, and C-suite leadership at Ancestry, Valassis, Centerfield, Brandwatch, and Cision. At Valassis, he engineered a 5x expansion of digital revenue for a $2 billion company. He is an advisor at SignalFire, a board member of OneVietnamNetwork, and a Bowdoin College alumni council member who graduated cum laude in History before earning his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Rajeev Goel is the co-founder and CEO of PubMatic, the publicly traded (Nasdaq: PUBM) supply-side ad tech company he started with his brother Amar in 2006 to give publishers a seat at the programmatic table. Two decades in, he is steering PubMatic into Connected TV, agentic AI buying, and an NVIDIA-powered infrastructure overhaul while continuing to argue that the open web deserves more than the walled gardens it competes against.
Amar Goel is a serial entrepreneur and the Co-founder and CEO of Bito, an AI-powered code review and developer productivity platform. He previously co-founded PubMatic, a programmatic advertising exchange that went public on NASDAQ in 2020. Earlier, at age 19, he built Chipshot.com to $30M in annual sales from his parents' garage. He studied Computer Science and Economics at Harvard, raised over $100M in venture capital across his career, and was recognized with the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2011 for Northern California. At Bito, he is building AI agents that give development teams codebase-aware code reviews, with the goal of letting software be built 'at the speed of thought.'