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Google grabbed ad-technology startup Invite Media last summer just as ad exchanges and real-time bidding for display ads were heating up. It was a necessary fit for Google's own exchange, AdX, and a boon for founders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, who started the company as undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. We sat down with Messrs. Turner and Weinberg to talk about the future of display advertising, ad exchanges and the emerging trends in video and mobile buying.
You guys started a business that, despite your age, feels like one that should have been developed by ad executives who've been in the trenches a while.
MR. TURNER: It's funny. We met with a VC, and he said that "businesses like yours" are typically done by older people who knew what they were doing prior to doing it. "Why don't you go start the next Facebook?" is what he told us. But we had these great advisers who were in this space who didn't have the energy anymore to start their own thing. What we were lacking was the industry knowledge. We knew nothing. But we knew how to build things. We just needed a product to build. So a few key people early on told us what was happening in display advertising--basically how media buying was changing.
There were a couple of options. The sell side, the AdMelds of the world; the buy side, which we ended up doing; the exchanges; and the data side. And all those things were happening at once. We decided to go on the buy side. We wanted to be close to where the dollars are starting.
Were you aware that there were other players in the space already?
MR. TURNER: MediaMath founded itself about six months prior to us, but the term DSP [demand-side platform] didn't come around for two years. We called it a universal buying platform.
MR. WEINBERG:...