The Build with Mike O'Sullivan

Mike O'Sullivan and Ian Myers with sit down ad tech founders and builders for conversations about how their products actually got made. This episode collects the WFIO moments (short for "we're f*****, it's over) from across those conversations, covering a year of failed hiring and a homemade DSP, a budget system that quietly overspent in production, and a bootstrapped startup that went unpaid thro...

Brian Stempeck is the CEO and co-founder of Evertune AI , a platform that helps brands and agencies understand and influence how AI models represent them in consumer search. In this episode (00:00:00), he traces the path from employee #8 at The Trade Desk to founder, and breaks down why AI search is a fundamentally different marketing channel...not just the next version of SEO. Before Brian Stempe...

Ari Paparo co-wrote the VAST spec (00:02:00), spearheaded the creation of the IAB Tech Lab (00:07:40), and later co-founded Beeswax, a bidder-as-a-service company acquired by Comcast in 2021. This episode covers the origin of video ad standards, the rise and fall of the custom bidder market, the lessons Ari draws from Beeswax's trajectory, and what he's doing now at Marketecture. Long before anyon...

Most ad tech companies optimize for the platform. Ali Manning built Chalice to do the opposite, and did it mid-pandemic, alongside her husband. Their savings was draining and the company almost didn't make it. Mike and Ian uncover why it did. Ali Manning didn't set out to start a company. When COVID hit and her job imploded, she got pulled into Chalice gradually: drafting models, workshopping pitc...

Scott Howe, CEO of LiveRamp, traces his career from BCG and Avenue A/Razorfish through the aQuantive acquisition by Microsoft and into his current role leading LiveRamp. Scott Howe's entry into advertising was accidental (00:05:03). A BCG yield management project for Qantas convinced him data would be the defining competitive advantage of the internet era. That conviction led him to Avenue A/Razor...

Mike and Ian sit down with David Buonasera, CTO of Magnite (00:00:00), to unpack what it really takes to build and scale complex systems in ad tech. Before becoming the CTO of Magnite, David co-founded SpringServe--a bootstrapped, video-native ad server that grew from an internal tool into an acquisition target. He started his career in finance before joining AppNexus as one of its first 18 employ...

Ad tech moves fast, but the real stories happen behind the scenes. This is where the architects of the industry come to talk shop. Hosted by Mike O’Sullivan and co-host Ian Meyers - who first teamed up as the founders of Sincera - this is a builder-to-builder podcast for the founders, engineers, and innovators scaling the next generation of ad tech infrastructure. Drawing on their shared history o...

Mike O’Sullivan (Co-Founder of Sincera and GM of Product at The Trade Desk) sits down with Michael Rubenstein, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Firsthand, for a candid founder-to-founder conversation about innovation, risk, and leadership in the age of AI. From DoubleClick to AppNexus (00:38) to Firsthand, Michael shares lessons from decades at the forefront of ad tech: what it means to build with purpose...