How to Build & Scale a $3.5 Billion Rocketship
summary
Platform processes about 9 million opportunities per second to pick where to place an ad, built a buyer-only, data-driven RTB stack starting in 2009, spends 2010–2011 iterating through tech failures, and scales via agency land-and-expand deals. Funding history is raised $7M then $20M, stays lightly capitalized, reaches profitability pre-IPO, goes public in 2016 and hits a ~$3.8–3.9B market cap while operating ~800–900 people across Ventura, Boulder, Sydney, London and Shanghai.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction to The Trade Desk
- 1:04What The Trade Desk does
- 2:06Differences from Google and Facebook
- 3:10Early challenges and failures
- 4:35Funding in a tough market
- 5:38Benefits of light capitalization
- 6:22Acquiring first customers
- 7:25Scaling the business model
- 8:50Partnering with competitors
- 9:52Maintaining company culture
- 10:56Autonomous teams in practice
- 11:38Decision to go public
- 13:00IPO in a challenging market
- 14:02Building a top culture
- 15:45Hiring outside Silicon Valley
- 17:10Remote and distributed teams
- 17:52Post-IPO motivation and vision
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