Brian O’Kelley On Building A $1.6 Billion Company Acquired By Microsoft And Creating A Protocol To Measure And Lower Carbon Emissions In Digital Supply Chains

The entrepreneurial path is rarely a straight line, and for Brian O’Kelley, it’s been a winding road of remarkable successes, humbling failures, and surprising turns. He has built multiple companies, one of which was incredibly successful and culminated in a $1.6B exit.

Brian’s latest venture, Scope3, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Room40 Ventures, Google Ventures, Craft Venture, and Venrock.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Brian O’Kelley’s entrepreneurial journey shows that failures, like being fired twice, can catalyze profound growth and innovation.
• His transition from technical brilliance to empathetic leadership highlights the importance of prioritizing people in building successful ventures.
• Brian’s foresight in real-time data optimization laid the foundation for programmatic advertising, reshaping a $100B industry.
• Turning down a $1.5B offer for AppNexus led to a $1.6B exit, underscoring the power of strategic decision-making in high-stakes negotiations.
• With Scope3, Brian aims to decarbonize digital ecosystems and align AI efficiency with environmental impact, blending business with a mission.
• Shifting from CTO to CEO of AppNexus, Brian learned to navigate sales, P&L, and large-scale management to build a 1,000-person global powerhouse.
• Brian emphasizes scaling for maximum impact in ad tech or sustainability, proving that purpose-driven businesses can thrive.

 

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About Brian O’Kelley:

Brian O’Kelley is CEO and co-founder of Scope3, leading the decarbonization of the media and advertising industry. He is a respected entrepreneur and executive with a track record of building companies that have defined and led multi-billion dollar categories,

Brian was the co-founder and CEO of AppNexus through its $1.6B sale to AT&T in 2018. He co-founded Waybridge, a supply chain technology company, and served as CTO of Right Media through its successful acquisition by Yahoo.

Brian is an active board member of LiveRamp (RAMP), Tech: NYC, and the IAB Tech Lab and executive producer of the Wonderstruck podcast.

Credited with the invention of programmatic advertising and the online ad exchange, Brian is deeply committed to technology-driven innovations that benefit society while improving the planet’s health.

Brian has been named to Crain’s 40 Under 40, Adweek 50, and Silicon Alley 100 lists, holds multiple patents, and was recognized as an E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year in the New York region in 2012.

Brian was an early supporter of Girls Who Code and Moms First and is deeply committed to making the technology industry more inclusive.

Brian has a B.S.E. in Computer Science from Princeton University and resides in Brooklyn.

Connect with Brian O’Kelley:

• LinkedIn
• RocketReach
• TheOrg
• Crunchbase

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty. Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Deal Maker Show. so Today, we have a really fantastic founder you know joining us. He’s built a multiple companies, you know some of them incredibly successful, um and we’re going to be talking about that in detail, the building, the scaling, um the the the financing, even the exiting. He’s done an exit for 1.6 billion. So let that sink in. And and again, you know we’re going to be talking about some of the stories about his journey, how him getting fired led to something even greater. I mean, it’s really remarkable journey, even, for example, getting a heart surgery, how that led to getting a smashing round of financing. So be ready for a quite an inspiring episode today. And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Brian O’Keeley. Welcome to the show.

Brian O’Kelley: Thanks Alejandro, great to see you.

Alejandro Cremades: so Originally born in Atlanta, and then you grew up in Oregon, so give us a walkthrough memory lane. How was life growing up for you, Brian?

Brian O’Kelley: You know, Eugene’s a college town and you know, I had a great life. My dad’s a law professor and played basketball and tennis and you know, sort of the ah the kind of childhood you look back on and realize you didn’t appreciate once you’re an adult.

Alejandro Cremades: How did you get into the whole problem-solving and computers and stuff like that?

Brian O’Kelley: Oh my gosh, I was obsessed with computers. My mom had to have marbles in a jar, and if I was on the computer, every time I was on the computer, every hour I had to take a marble out. And, uh, you know, I just always found it fascinating that you could, you know, this is like back with 2,400 baud modems, you know, the ones that went, you know, like I could talk to people, I could find things I could learn. I mean, this idea of connecting to the world, I just found fascinating. Like I was always trying to program so bad at it. I tried to program a game and it would never work. You know, I was just obsessed with this like idea of technology. Um, and I guess I’m still am.

Alejandro Cremades: So in your case, you ended up going to Princeton and you know you obviously studied computer science out of all things. And it was say you know coming out of that where you venture into the world of entrepreneurship. you know It was kind of like a little small rodeo that they didn’t end up in the way that they you had hoped for and getting fired. But walk us through that. How was that first day entrepreneur entrepreneurial chapter for you?

Brian O’Kelley: Yeah, well, most of my stories end up with me getting fired or quitting in a huff. So um this one I got fired. i I started a company in college with two of my friends called la2night.com. That’s l LA, the number two, nite.com. We actually got radio commercials in LA to try to advertise this. And we were selling tickets online. We thought that Ticketmaster,

Brian O’Kelley: If you can believe this, in 1999, Ticketmaster did not sell tickets online. You had to pick up a phone and call them. And so we thought this was a huge opportunity to buy tickets online. um And so we set up our headquarters in l LA on the same floor of the building right across from Ticketmaster. Why would you do this? I don’t know. We had our launch party in the plaza between the two buildings.

Brian O’Kelley: um And of course they were very smart and they just basically called all of their venues and said if you give those guys tickets You can’t sell them by phone Which at that point like how many people had computers and could buy things online? so we got our butts kicked and Even so a company in New York offered us six or seven million dollars to buy the company by the way all this happened in six weeks after graduating college and so I was like, guys, we should take this deal. Like, this is not a business. This is just, you know, like a beautiful website that does nothing because we have no tickets. And my two co-founders said, no, Brian, like everybody in the Internet is making huge amounts of money. I mean, if pets dot.com is worth a hundred million, we can’t sell our ticketing site for just six or seven.

Brian O’Kelley: And so ah they fired me. And rather than be a multimillionaire, six weeks after college, I actually went and lived on my dad’s sofa in Georgia for the next six weeks trying to figure out like what I was going to do with my life.

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, I’m sure that there were all types of things that went through your head, but I’m wondering, you know like what what do you think was that thing lesson that you needed to learn from that experience, if any? right or Or how was that journey from an emotional perspective? Because now, you know here you were thinking about becoming a billionaire, being a possibility to then all of a sudden and you know reality kicking in into what were the cards that you were going to be dealt with.

Brian O’Kelley: Well, I’d already been, ah I’d always been a computer geek, right? I mean, I love computers. But it turns out that companies are about people. And one thing that I got from that experience was the three of us actually went to a coaching session before they fired me. And the coach said, you know, you need to think about emotional intelligence. And I’d always thought that emotions and intelligence were totally different concepts. And so I bought a book,

Brian O’Kelley: um by ah Goldman, I think, about you know emotional intelligence in the workplace. And there was a quiz at the back where you could measure your own EQ, and mine was like zero. And I started realizing that if I wanted to be a leader and get people to come on a journey with me, like I had to learn how to lead. I had to learn how to be empathetic and connect with people. and so very early in my life, like I was 21, I realized that leadership was going to be more important than technical capacity. And so it set me on a journey to learn about people and organizations and management and all these things that matter just as much in the entrepreneurial journey as your technical competence or your ability to sell something. It’s all about people.

Alejandro Cremades: and really It really is. So I guess in your case, you know how did you recover from that and you know ended up going into consulting? And most importantly, how did you get into the whole ad you know industry space? Because at that time, it was booming.

Brian O’Kelley: Yeah, well, I didn’t mean to. um you know One of my mentors at LA Tonight it was this guy named Alan Crowther, who was a Princeton alumnus. He was ancient. like He was 10 years older than me. He was 31, right? But at the time, I thought he was the oldest person I could imagine. And he’s like, come work for my startup consulting company, and I’ll teach you everything I know about consulting.

Brian O’Kelley: And I was like, well, what do you know about consulting? And he said, well, I’ll teach you how to manage teams. I’ll teach you how to set expectations and how to meet them and run a project and how to hire people using like consulting company techniques. I’ll teach you how to, you know, really understand like how to, how to manage and hire and execute. And I was like, that’s what I need. Like I can do the tech stuff.

Brian O’Kelley: And so I joined as a consultant and I did projects and their expertise was in real time personalization. It started in call centers. When you’d call a call center, they would actually mine the data that the company knew about you as the customer.

Brian O’Kelley: and give a script that would sort of tell them what to say. Very much like AI kind of does today, we were doing in 1999. And the idea was, what if we could do this on a website? What if when you log into the American Express site, it could, in a blink of an eye, look up everything they know about you and figure out, should they recommend a cruise? Should they recommend a different credit card? What should they sell you as a as ah customer?

Brian O’Kelley: And we implemented this real-time personalization tech from a company called WritePoint, and we doubled their conversion rate. We made them a billion dollars of profit just by, you know, mining data. And my life was changed. This idea that you could just write an algorithm that would double the profit of a company of that size was mind-boggling.

Brian O’Kelley: And they also had this little, I don’t know, like, piece of HTML on the site from a company called DoubleClick. And I said, what’s that? They’re like, well, that’s the dumb tech. You’re writing the smart tech that knows everything about our customers. That’s the one we put on other people’s sites when we don’t know who it is. And I was like, well, what if we could optimize that?

Brian O’Kelley: And they’re like, no, that’s not possible. And that became the foundation of my ad tech journey was, could you take this very light bit of information that you could get from a cookie or from, you know, some behavioral pathway through a site and could you use that to make marketing work better? Um, and so that real time personalization became real time advertising. And, uh, you know, somewhere in that journey, programmatic advertising was born.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s incredible. Now, obviously, as you were saying, you know getting fired you know seems to be opening you know the doors for you. So right media you know i ended up getting acquired by Yahoo ah in 2007. And literally three days before, you know you get fired. That’s kind of crazy.

Brian O’Kelley: Well, you know, it turns out, and this is just some advice for other founders, um if you’re the CTO of a company and there’s a board meeting where they’re talking about selling the company, you probably shouldn’t walk in and start yelling about how they’re freaking crazy to sell the company. It turns out that gets you fired.

Brian O’Kelley: Now, the reason I was yelling was because I had just closed Yahoo to join the platform, the right media platform, and and it was the biggest internet company in the world. It’s hard to imagine, but Yahoo is way bigger than Google, way bigger than anything else. Yahoo was massive in 2007, and they were using our tech, and I was like, guys, this thing, like we’re this tiny little company, but now that Yahoo’s adopted it, so will everybody else.

Brian O’Kelley: Real-time programmatic advertising is going to take over the entire internet. We can’t sell it now. This is a $100 billion dollar industry and you’re selling it for less than a billion. Are you crazy? And so they fired me. um And in one sense, they were right. Like the two angel investors had invested combined $500,000 and they made $200 million dollars on that sale.

Brian O’Kelley: That’s, I get why they wanted to sell. um I owned like 9% of the company. And so when I got fired, I lost two thirds of my equity. And so I still made a lot, like I still was a great exit. But I was right too, because now programmatic advertising is $100 billion dollar industry. And it did completely change the internet. um But I was so,

Brian O’Kelley: you know passionate about what we were doing, that I put myself in the position to get fired. um And it was a blessing, by the way, because I don’t think that working for Yahoo, I would have invented header bidding, or I would have invented all the real time technologies that are now the foundation of the internet. um you know So good for me, probably good for the internet. um But at the time, it was absolutely devastating. I loved that company. I loved what we were doing.

Brian O’Kelley: and Yeah, that was definitely about 10 years of therapy to get through that particular ah firing.

Alejandro Cremades: No kidding. But obviously, that was the segue for you to build you know what has been your biggest you know successful company and I guess outcome no exit ah today. and So how did that you know really lead you into, hey, now ah I get fired. Now I’m going to build my own destiny you know and start it up next to us. What were the sequences of events that needed to happen?

Brian O’Kelley: Yeah, well first, you know, I was just so hurt and upset that I got fired. um I did go into therapy, but I also realized that, you know, I was the CTO of that company and I kind of thought that maybe I could be a CEO. And so um I was really fascinated with cloud computing. It was just the beginning. Like AWS was tiny. It really hadn’t taken off yet.

Brian O’Kelley: And I’d seen at Right Media that we needed this exponential number of servers to keep up with our compute needs, like to power the entire internet. And I’m like, oh my gosh, like how is any company, if if we’re going to be real time bidding every ad on the internet, if if this kind of tech is going to mean that hundreds of companies are going to bid on every ad, we’re going to need so much compute. Someone’s got to build a cloud that can handle this.

Brian O’Kelley: And so AppNexus was the first high-performance cloud computing company. I’d met this guy named Ron Conway in one of my right media trips. And so I flew out to San Francisco and I sat with Ron and I said, hey Ron, you know, you told me what to tell you what I was doing next. Well, I’m going to start a cloud computing company.

Brian O’Kelley: and he laughs at me and he says, Brian, I need you to go meet Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who founded LoudCloud, but I want you to wear a football helmet because they’re gonna tell you how terrible your idea is. They’ve been through it, it’s impossible, don’t do it, but like go talk to them.

Brian O’Kelley: So I’m like, ah okay, did you just say Mark Andreessen? Because he’s my hero. And he’s like, yeah, okay. So I get on Highway 101. I drive down to, I forget where they were, but you know just past Palo Alto. And I go to the Ron Conway Enterprise Conference Room, because he’d been an advisor to LoudCloud. Now it’s called Opsware. And there’s Mark Andreessen in a tracksuit. And there’s been Horowitz, who I didn’t know.

Brian O’Kelley: and I tell them my idea, and they spend 30 minutes tearing it apart, telling me all the reasons it’s not going to work, telling me the most horrible horror stories of Loud Cloud. And at the end, I’m like, guys, like this notebook is amazing. like It’s everything they learned in the hardest business in the world. And I’m like, fine. I appreciate you. Thanks for taking the time. I’ll leave you alone. They’re like, no, no, Brian. We want to invest. I’m like, why in hell would you want to invest in this? You just told me how dumb it is.

Brian O’Kelley: They said, you’re the kind of person who’s going to figure it out. And you know what? Even if you’d come in saying you were selling lemonade, we’d invest because you’re going to find something better. And I was like, wow. So I got back on the airplane to New York with a term sheet from Mark and Ben in hand. ah This is before A16Z. And over the next couple of years, they spent so much time with me. Like, it was incredible. I was getting, like, coaching from My heroes, um Ben is now my hero.

Brian O’Kelley: um And I went from being a kick-ass CTO to being, you know, a CEO who could run a thousand-person company. I had other amazing mentors along the way. um But that was really the transformational moment was was getting the support of these incredible leaders.

Brian O’Kelley: Ron was an investor and an advisor. I mean, it was kind of a miracle. Like i I tell this story. I still don’t believe what I am telling you happened, but it did.

Alejandro Cremades: And and what what would you say was the toughest thing part of that transition of going from the technical side of things to now more the business side of things? Because that’s not ah that’s not an easy bridge to cross.

Brian O’Kelley: I mean, I’d managed people before, I’d always been selling. The hardest parts for me were letting go of the technical details because it’s hard when you’re like the expert on something to step back and it took a a long time. And the second thing, it was hard to hire and manage people in jobs that I’d never seen before. I’d always been a startup guy. So how do you hire a CMO if you’ve never actually worked with a CMO?

Brian O’Kelley: You know, how do you hire a head of people when you’ve always worked at tiny companies, even a CFO? So learning what a company felt like when I was managing a company bigger than I’d ever worked for was really hard. um And that, you know, the the cadence, the rhythm, you know, technically I could understand a P and&L, but how do you motivate people? How do you think of sales comp plans? How do you talk to a sales organization? I i don’t know. You know, I never done it. So that was, that was the hardest part.

Alejandro Cremades: So at what point do you receive the phone call from Marissa Miller or the fact that she was not happy with what was going on?

Brian O’Kelley: Well, I mean, at some point along the journey, you know, we started taking customers from Yahoo. They bought right media. I think they rebranded the the Yahoo ad exchange. um But we started taking customers and actually met her. This will sound very she, she.

Brian O’Kelley: I met her in Davos, and I’d been invited as a technology pioneer. I was really excited. She was a big deal at that moment. Dan Loba just invested and joined the board. And I wanted to have a conversation about, like could I buy back right media? Could I have my company back instead of like just attacking Yahoo? Could we partner? Could I power Yahoo? And I’d also pitched AOL, and I pitched Microsoft. Microsoft had said yes and actually invested $50 million dollars into AppNexus. So I had Microsoft.

Brian O’Kelley: I thought I could get Yahoo. And so I met with her. It’s like this big, you know, conference room floor. And I said, hey, I’m Brian O’Kelley, I run AppNexus, you know, I’d love to talk to you. And she goes, oh, I’d love to talk to you too. I just have to run to my room real quick. And I’m like, she’s like, I’ll be right back. And so I’m like, cool. And I wait. And I wait. And all of a sudden, oh my god, she just ghosted me. Why did I fall for that? She ran away. And so I’m standing all by myself in this conference room.

Brian O’Kelley: So the next day, I’m sitting with Sir Martin Sorrell from WPP, the largest advertising agent in the world.

Alejandro Cremades: yeah he’s been He’s been on the show. He’s he’s been on the show.

Brian O’Kelley: There you go, my buddy SMS.

Alejandro Cremades: Yeah.

Brian O’Kelley: And you know they’re a major client, and he’s thinking about investing. We’re having you we’re in the VIP room. We’re having this great conversation. He goes, look, Brian, what can I do to help? I’m like, do you know Marissa Meyer?

Brian O’Kelley: like is it like I just I’m trying to meet with her and she just ran away he’s like oh I can’t stand that woman oh my gosh she drives me crazy she never like respects me she doesn’t get help it goes this whole diatribe like he does

Brian O’Kelley: And he goes, one sec. And he goes, Marissa. And she is right behind me. Like he’s saying all these things about her hair was probably about to touch my hair. And he goes, Marissa, I need you to meet with Brian. And so I’m like, oh my gosh, this is so awkward. And so I did finally sit down with her. And she basically said, like, I’m not gonna do a deal with you.

Brian O’Kelley: And so over the next year, I took every single customer from Yahoo, 100% of the customers, except for one, which was Yahoo Japan, which I had done a deal with, and they owned a third of YJ. And Marissa herself was on the board of YJ. So I flew to Japan four times over the course the next six months after that. And on April 1st, I think that was 2014,

Brian O’Kelley: I took YJ off of Yahoo, which was still one of the best sales of my career. And the funny part is, one of my college friends, Dan Shum, had been acquired by Yahoo. And at midnight, he called me and said, Brian, I got some bad news. I had to shut down the right media platform. I know you’re sad, but I just wanted you to know.

Brian O’Kelley: I was like, Dan, I took all the customers. You had to shut it down because I took every single customer and YJ migrated at midnight. He’s like, wait, what? I’m like, yeah, I did that.

Brian O’Kelley: So that was the end of my Marissa Meyer story. My my good friend Dan had to shut down my company.

Alejandro Cremades: Wow.

Alejandro Cremades: i think right um ah That’s incredible.

Brian O’Kelley: um But yeah, thanks thanks Marissa. I appreciate all the customers and that led to this massive outcome. So next time do a deal with me.

Alejandro Cremades: Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, no kidding. No kidding. now Now, for the people that are listening, what ended up being the business model of UpNexus? How are you guys making money there?

Brian O’Kelley: ah We were kind of a transactional platform. So we were a real time matching platform where publishers um like a Microsoft or Yahoo or New York Times could auction off all their ads in real time to advertisers. And advertisers could bid to try to make sure they got exactly the people on the placements they wanted to. And we took a little bit of ah a rev share. We took 5% or 6% or 10% or you know whatever we negotiated.

Brian O’Kelley: um as the fee for matching. And so we had probably $3 billion dollars of advertising on the platform when we sold. So I think we made $300 million dollars of fees connecting buyers and sellers.

Alejandro Cremades: So how much I mean you were talking about getting Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz same as investors. How much capital did you guys raise ah prior to the acquisition. And also what was the journey of going through raising the money to.

Brian O’Kelley: Well, first money was great. um Then it was 2008, the next year, and that was horrible. I pitched like 40 VCs and they all rejected me. Finally, Mike Terrell from Vinrock.

Brian O’Kelley: I’d say he took pity on me, but I think he saw the potential. And so Venrock led our Series B, which would today be called a Seed. um And then we raised from Microsoft was our next round, and then TCV. And by the time we got to 100 million in revenue or something, like it was a much bigger deal to go raise those rounds. And so we ended up with Fidelity as our last round pre-IPO.

Brian O’Kelley: um And then, and all of these people were like watching programmatic advertising explode like the industry was getting really really big, and we were the leader, other than Google. And so we were just the most prominent company in the space and that made it easier to raise, um but no one understands ad tech.

Brian O’Kelley: So every investor meeting was a challenge because they’re like, wait, how does this work? What are all these acronyms? you know What do you do? um So it’s it’s it’s it’s a tension between a great business and a great space, but super confusing.

Brian O’Kelley: ae And, you know, at the end, we’d actually filed our S1, we’d been through comments, we were about to go public when AT&T picked us off. And they picked us off because they had bought Time Warner and wanted to add an advertising component to the media business with the AT and&T data. And it didn’t work out, and they ended up selling that asset to Microsoft. So, like, my company powers the ads, or my old tech, I guess, powers the ads on Netflix.

Brian O’Kelley: It’s kind of cool. um But that whole process was, I don’t know, three, $400 million dollars of investment in acquisitions, because we did a couple of equity acquisitions along the way. So it was very capital intense to build a business that fast, that global, you know, at the cutting edge of a technology.

Alejandro Cremades: And that was a $1.6 billion dollars outcome, which is a remarkable. What is it like going through an acquisition process like that? And then also, what was that day when you finally inked the deal for for the exit?

Brian O’Kelley: Well, I was convinced Microsoft was going to buy us. um They had had a call option to buy us for a billion dollars, which they passed on. um And they were on the board, and we were such an obvious fit for Microsoft. So I’m not surprised that the asset is now at Microsoft.

Brian O’Kelley: But it was weird because when AT and&T made an offer, I called Microsoft and said, so you’re going to match this, right? And if they just matched it, I would have gone with Microsoft because they were a major client and partner and friends. And I loved the team and Brad Smith and Satya Nadella, like the whole thing. I was like, I’m in. I want to work at Microsoft.

Brian O’Kelley: And as as AT and&T raised their offer, because they came up from like, 1.2 was their first offer, and I was like, no way. And they got to 1.5. And I actually had to fly to Dallas and sit down with their corp dev guy to look him in the eye and say, I’m not taking this offer. And they bumped it to 1.6, which by the way, is $100 million dollars for ah for a flight to Dallas. So I think that was a pretty good flight. um And they paid for lunch. So I mean, just total two-fer.

Brian O’Kelley: But I called Microsoft on the way back, and I was like, OK, look, I don’t think AT and&T is going to go any higher. Like, I think they’re done. So can you just make an offer for 1.601? You know, like, just 01. And they’re like, we’ll get back to you. And I was like, when? I can’t wait. I need to get back to them now. And my phone never rang until we had to sell to AT&T.

Brian O’Kelley: um And it was bittersweet because I didn’t really think AT and&T was a cultural fit for an ad tech company. like you know They wanted everyone to live in New York. But my team was all around the world. you know there They treat engineers like a factory. They literally called the technology process a factory. And I was like, that’s just not going to work for my crazy ass engineers. I was just and knew it. I knew they were going to screw it up.

Brian O’Kelley: And so yeah, it was a really weird feeling. I mean, maybe when my kids go to college and leave home, I’ll have that same pain in my heart of we’ve built an amazing organization. We have incredible people. We’ve done something meaningful. We’ve made the world better. And I’m selling it to AT and&T. I don’t know. So was it was weird. And i of course, life-changing wealth. But I’d already had a big exit. So it wasn’t totally life-changing, but definitely helped. Don’t get me wrong.

Brian O’Kelley: um I don’t know, it was a, it took me a really long time to get over it. Like even today, I still, I’m surprised I’m not wearing an AppNexus outfit. Like I have AppNexus stuff all over the place. so um By the way, sustainability companies are terrible at swag, because every time Scope 3 tries to print something, I was like, oh hey, is it worth the carbon? So I have like almost no Scope 3 swag, it’s so disappointing. I’m still wearing AppNexus stuff.

Alejandro Cremades: Well, you’re talking about it already, so let’s say get into it. Because as they say, once an entrepreneur, entrepreneur always an entrepreneur, no? And then in your case, i mean you you got going with Waybridge, and that ended up kind of like transforming itself as the next chapter being Scope 3. So walk us through you know what happened there.

Brian O’Kelley: Well, a good buddy of mine has been in the commodities industry his whole life. And after selling AppNexus, I was kind of depressed. And I was like, I got to do something. like I need to get back in the game. And he said, look, everything I know about what you’ve built seems like it would apply to real world supply chains. like Why don’t we build kind of AppNexus for supply chains?

Brian O’Kelley: And I said, that sounds amazing. I’m super fascinated with with supply chains, and I loved AppNexus. Let’s do it. So we spent two years building a commodities supply chain platform that actually ended up managing 25% of the copper coming into the United States, 10% of aluminum, and you know integrating into SAP. And like copper wire that was used in Tesla cars came through our software. It’s so cool.

Brian O’Kelley: um But I woke up one day and just realized that we weren’t gonna change the world doing what we were doing. I really wanted to do something in sustainability and I couldn’t convince myself that making logistics of copper and aluminum would do that. You’d have to actually go to mining and smelting and change how that happened. That’s like green hydrogen pipelines. That’s not gonna be something like logistics platform. It was kind of a crisis of faith. I just raised $30 million. dollars It was 2021.

Brian O’Kelley: And I just, one of those shower moments, I was like, you know what? We could do this on the internet. What if we actually took all those cloud computing facilities, all those data centers, they’re wasting electricity left and right because of the inefficiency of how things like ad tech work. I bet if we took this platform and applied it to the digital world, we could actually have a much bigger impact and actually probably save people a ton of money. And you know, it wasn’t my job. I just raised money for this company. i was like How can I have, I can’t do my job anymore. I’m obsessed with what became Scope 3, which was this idea of decarbonizing the digital world. um And so one day I just went to my board. I said, guys, I think we should sell the metals business, because I think this is a better idea. And they’re like, dude, you just raised 30 million bucks from us. Like, what are you talking about? And I was like, no, no, trust me. And I swear, it was just trust me. I was a paragraph of what I thought the opportunity was.

Brian O’Kelley: And I don’t know, they let me do it. I took four people with me, or five people I think, sold the rest off, and we started scope three, and it’s been amazing. Like the impact you can make in the digital world, because people forget that the cloud is not a fluffy place in the sky. The cloud is a windowless building in Secaucus, New Jersey. You know, it is all energy. And we see this with AI now, like this is where the world is actually using energy the fastest now is data centers. And so the idea that I could decarbonize data centers or help people make good choices about where and how to use energy in the digital world for the most impact.

Brian O’Kelley: it might be the most important place we can go in this decade. Like if we have two decades, we can build nuclear, we can build hydrogen, but right now, pulling energy demand off the grid, especially low value demand.

Brian O’Kelley: That makes a change right now in this decade when we’re desperate for it. And so my passion for the mission, but also the business model where we can help the biggest companies in the world measure their digital emissions and do something about it that’s also good for business, like you you reduce waste, you save money.

Brian O’Kelley: I mean, it’s an incredibly exciting place to be and I didn’t expect AI to be so big. Now we’ve got an AI division and we’re actually working to help big companies understand the energy use of their AI.

Brian O’Kelley: you know jobs or you know how they’re deploying AI. I think it’s going to save them a ton of money as well. And it helps these big AI infrastructure companies connect green workloads with green demand. Because from their perspective, GPUs are so expensive and energy is so expensive. If we can create higher value use of AI, that’s exactly what these companies want. They want to find ways to get more from their GPUs and more from the energy.

Brian O’Kelley: It’s a really, really powerful idea. And it goes back to the very first things I was doing, right? Matching. The world is about matching. And if you could could find a guy who’s built cloud infrastructure, who’s built large scale, real time matching systems, and say, you should do climate, you’d have scope three.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s incredible. ah stnc cro Obviously, for Scope 3, you guys have a also raised them you know some money. So how much money have you guys raised? in you know they they the The thing here, or too, is that you also had your exits before. you know It’s not like you needed to raise money from anybody. So why did you raise money from the people that you did? And and what was the why did you do so?

Brian O’Kelley: Well, I think first of all, I’m a major investor in the company. I believe in it. I’m putting my own money where where I believe it has the most impact. But the scale of change we want to make in this time frame, like if we want to make an impact this decade, we’ve got to go really fast. And that means getting a lot of capital ah and deploying it really effectively. And so you know we’ve grown. We’ve almost tripled revenue this year. We’ve tripled headcount this year. um We’ve opened offices. and Germany and Singapore this year. We’re already in Australia, London, Paris, New York. We’re all distributed. So but capital lets us go faster and the world needs us to go faster right now. um We raised, I think we’ve raised 45 million

Brian O’Kelley: as an independent company at this point. um The first part was to accelerate the advertising business. This most recent round was to let us start the AI part of the business. So this AI product line that helps engineers and sustainability people and CTOs get the most from their AI investment. um And we’ll raise more because the business is great, because the market is massive, and because the world needs it to exist, which to me is The best part, because reality is, you know what, if advertising wasn’t targeted quite as well, I don’t think anyone would but call me up and be like, Brian, we better add targeting. um Now, journalism, like we do need to fund…

Brian O’Kelley: publishing, journalism, content. like I think there is a reason advertising matters and companies need to find customers. So it’s it’s important and will continue. But the urgency around climate and the urgency around getting our hands around AI feels existential, um which is both good and bad. To your point, I’m not doing this for the money. I’m doing this because of the impact and, you know,

Brian O’Kelley: and to make money, because I have a team that’s amazing. You know, they haven’t all sold multiple companies at this point. um My investors expect me to make big returns, and I think we will, but that’s how, not why.

Alejandro Cremades: I hear you. Now, part of raising money too, you know, the latest day around that day you guys did came from a realization that you had from a unfortunate event, which a you required heart surgery. But obviously that unfortunate event led to a fortunate event, which was a realization. So what was the realization that you had? And the well, I’m sure that that was crazy time for you as well.

Brian O’Kelley: Yeah, I mean, I found I had to have heart surgery. I had a leaky heart valve. um No, like, it’s not a big deal. And I’m like, it’s heart surgery. um So as part of the process, I like handed over my job to my team and said, guys, I’m supposed to be out for a few weeks, but I might be out longer. Who knows? You guys need to run the business.

Brian O’Kelley: And so I had the surgery and went great. And then I was recovering, first in the hospital and then in a hotel. And I didn’t have anything to do. I mean, for the first time in years, I didn’t have slacks to read. I wasn’t getting emails. And so my mind kind of wandered and I started just playing around. And I started seeing all these articles about AI and climate. And I just started doing math on like what the impact was going to be.

Brian O’Kelley: And it was not hard to realize that this was a huge opportunity and a huge problem. And I just started you know sketching out on a piece of paper like what it might be like to transition or to build a part of our business in AI. I was like, no, no, no, no, this is crazy. We can’t do this because the business is so important that we’re doing and it’s working. Why would you take a perfectly good business scaling like crazy and distract it with AI?

Brian O’Kelley: So I put the piece of paper away. And then like a couple days later, I was like, man, that like this seems such a great idea. And so after a few weeks of this, I actually took a meeting with ah Eric Nordlander, who’s our our partner at GV and at Google Ventures.

Brian O’Kelley: And I said, Eric, I need to meet with you because I’m going kind of crazy. And he’s like, uh, OK. Like, are you fine after the heart surgery? I’m like, look, just meet with me. And so I go into the GV office here in New York, and they have these tiny little whiteboards. Like, why can you not get a bigger whiteboard? You’re freaking Google. Like, you can afford one. And on this tiny little whiteboard, I start explaining my thesis on how everything we’ve built applies to AI and how you know we could potentially make AI more efficient and more profitable.

Brian O’Kelley: And I said, look, just you you must see like a hundred deals like this, right? Like your GV, you see everything in climate. You see everything in AI. Like who else is doing this? And he said, honestly, Brian, nobody. And my heart sank. I thought he was going to talk me out of it. I was like there to be told to just do my damn job and go back to work. And he’s like, honestly, this is a brilliant idea. I want to fund it.

Brian O’Kelley: And I’m like, uh, that’s not what I came for. Like, you’re supposed to tell me not to do it. He’s like, no, honestly, like, you have to go do it. And so then how do I explain this to my team? No person on my team knows anything about this. I’ve been like in a hospital bed, in a hotel room, and now I come back and I’m like, guys, um, so we’re going into AI.

Brian O’Kelley: And they’re like, what? And I’m like, yeah. And I think we’re going to raise a lot of money to do it. and But by the way, don’t get distracted by this. Keep doing your jobs. Let’s keep scaling the business. We’ll figure it out. And so, yeah, since June, we’ve been like building a startup within a startup. like We have this team of folks working on the AI platform. you know We’ve been signing up pilots. We’ve been getting all the pieces ready. And I’m incredibly excited about it.

Brian O’Kelley: And at the same time, scaling up our core ad business as well. um Yeah, so I guess the advice here is, you know, beware founders with not enough stuff to do because next thing you know, you might be doing more things.

Alejandro Cremades: There you go. Now, that leads me to my my next question that just came to mind, and that is, if you were to go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision of scope three is fully realized, what does that world look like?

Brian O’Kelley: Well, I think that when you go to a webpage or an app, you are seeing extremely fast ads um because there’s not all of the inefficiency of all the supply chain stuff that we see. um You see the earnings of companies that are advertising going up. You see the New York Times and Hearst and dot dash Meredith and you know all these big publishers making more money because the advertising is working better. um You see articles saying that you know

Brian O’Kelley: Rumors of AI and data centers dominating the American energy grid were overstated because we found more efficient ways to deploy AI. You’re seeing big companies talking not about trying AI, but about making AI work profitably.

Brian O’Kelley: You see Nvidia and OpenAI and Andropic and Microsoft and Google and Meta talking about how their sustainable AI investments are paying off and more efficient AI, thanks to Scope 3, we hope. um And you start seeing policymakers saying, look, AI is not as bad as we thought. like We actually can change the world in all these positive ways. Now, there’s lots of questions about AI.

Brian O’Kelley: But like the worry that this was going to cause and accelerate climate change in the 2020s, thank goodness. we We got ahead of this. We started to put some metrics and instrumentation in process. And we made the right choices to deploy it efficiently and not just aggressively.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. So obviously we’re talking about the future, but I want to talk about the past with a lens of reflection. Imagine if I was to put you into a time machine and I bring you back to the moment where you were graduating from Princeton and you know, you’re are now thinking about starting something of your own. And let’s say you are able to, you know, basically stop that younger self and give that younger self one piece of advice for launching a company. What would that be and why given what you know now?

Brian O’Kelley: I would look at me, first of all, me then would never listen to anything anybody said. like Just to be clear, like there’s nothing I would have heard. I think I would have put my hand on my shoulder and I would have said, listen.

Brian O’Kelley: 30 years from now, you’re gonna know that people matter more than anything else in this world, and that if you can figure out how to be the kind of person that people trust to be the person that people can connect with, believe in, and you live up to those expectations, you can do anything you want in this world.

Alejandro Cremades: I love that. Brian, for the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say hi, what is the best way for them to do so?

Brian O’Kelley: Oh, LinkedIn’s easy, or I’m B-O-Kelly at scope3.com, that’s B-O-K-E-L-L-E-Y, don’t forget that E. um Yeah, I’d love to hear it from anybody, and especially if you’re curious about sustainable AI, looking for development partners, pilots, you know, criticism, would love to collaborate with anybody out there who’s interested.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, hey, Brian, thank you so much for being on The Deal Maker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Brian O’Kelley: Thank you so much for having me.

*****

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