He Built A $1.6 Billion Company Acquired By Microsoft And Has Now Created 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.

Known as one of the key architects of programmatic advertising, Brian’s story is an inspiration, demonstrating the power of resilience, vision, and a relentless drive to build. In this exciting chat, he talks about getting fired just before an acquisition, dealing with health issues, and fundraising.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

The Early Sparks: From Oregon to Princeton

Born in Atlanta and raised in Eugene, Oregon, Brian’s childhood was steeped in intellectual curiosity. The son of a law professor, his early years revolved around sports and academics. But it was his obsession with computers that set him apart.

As a teenager, Brian immersed himself in technology, fascinated by the potential to connect and create. His mother, trying to regulate his screen time, resorted to marbles in a jar to limit his hours on the computer.

Brian remembers being fascinated by the idea of connecting with the world and learning many new things. He even tried to program a game, which never worked. Yet, even as he struggled with early programming projects, his passion for technology never waned.

After earning a degree in computer science from Princeton, Brian embarked on his entrepreneurial journey. His first venture, LA2Nite.com, was an ambitious attempt to disrupt ticketing by selling tickets online—a radical idea in the late 1990s when Ticketmaster operated entirely via phone.

Brian and his co-founders considered it a huge opportunity and set up their headquarters in LA in a building right across from Ticketmaster. They even had a launch party in the plaza between the two buildings.

A Harsh Lesson in Humility

Brian’s first brush with failure came swiftly. LA2Nite.com faced fierce resistance from Ticketmaster, which strong-armed venues into withholding ticket inventory. When an acquisition offer for $7M emerged just weeks after graduating college, he was eager to accept.

But Brian’s co-founders, buoyed by the dot-com boom’s hype, refused and ultimately fired him.
“It was a brutal lesson,” Brian reflects. “I went from dreaming of becoming a billionaire to sleeping on my dad’s sofa in Georgia.”

The experience, however, planted seeds of growth. Brian had always been a computer geek and loved computers. Encouraged to explore emotional intelligence, he bought a book by Daniel Goleman and began studying leadership and interpersonal dynamics in the workplace.

After doing the EQ quiz at the back of the book, Brian realized his skills were nil. “Leadership is about people, not just technical brilliance.” This revelation would shape his approach to building teams and companies in the years to come.

Brian learned that to be an effective leader; he would have to be empathetic and connect with people by learning more about them. Knowing more about organizations and management is more crucial than the ability to sell something. Ultimately, it’s all about people.

Brian would use these lessons during his consultancy stint at an Amex project where, under his leadership, the company doubled its conversion rates and made a billion dollars worth of profits simply by mining data.

The Pivot to Ad Tech

After his firing, Brian found himself in consulting, where he stumbled into the world of real-time personalization—an early precursor to modern AI-driven insights. He trained for a time under his mentor, Alan Crowther, who taught him valuable lessons.

From him, Brian learned how to manage teams, set expectations and meet them, run a project, and hire people using consulting company techniques. He also learned how to understand, manage, hire, and execute.

Working with call centers and websites, Brian saw firsthand how data-driven algorithms could significantly boost profits. Here, they were mining data based on everything the company knew about the customer. Employees were given a script to tell them what to say, much like AI.

One day, while analyzing a client’s site, Brian noticed a small piece of HTML from a company called DoubleClick and was curious about how you could use it without first-party data.

Brian began exploring how real-time data could optimize advertising, laying the foundation for programmatic advertising. This insight ultimately led to his role as CTO of Right Media, a pioneering ad exchange platform.

Right Media was acquired by Yahoo for $850M in 2007.

Getting Fired from Right Media

But the journey wasn’t without turbulence—Brian was fired just three days before the acquisition for opposing the sale. He had just closed Yahoo to join the platform, and it was the biggest internet company in the world at that time–much bigger than Google.

Brian was convinced that real-time programmatic advertising would take over the entire internet, a $100B industry. Selling Right Media for less than $1B didn’t make sense. Later, he learned that two angel investors had pushed for the sale, making a considerable profit.

“I was devastated,” Brian admits. “But it turned out to be a blessing. That firing pushed me to chart my own course.” Although he had owned 9% of the company, getting fired cost him two-thirds of his equity. Even so, he recalls he had a great exit.

In retrospect, as Brian sees it, had he been working for Yahoo, he wouldn’t have invented header bidding or real-time technologies that are now the foundation of the internet. Brian was also fascinated by cloud computing, which was in its nascent stages. AWS had yet to take off.

Building AppNexus: From Vision to Reality

Even when working at Right Media, Brian could see that they needed an exponential number of servers to keep up with their computing needs and power the internet. The tech they were creating would result in hundreds of companies bidding on every ad online.

They needed cloud computing to make that happen. This was the inspiration for AppNexus, which Brian founded in 2007. Initially envisioned as a high-performance cloud computing company, AppNexus pivoted to focus on programmatic advertising, capitalizing on Brian’s expertise in the space.

A pivotal moment came when Ron Conway, a renowned Silicon Valley investor, introduced him to Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Despite grilling Brian on the challenges of building a cloud company, they offered to invest, recognizing his tenacity and potential.

“They told me, ‘Even if you were selling lemonade, we’d back you,’” Brian recalls. He returned to New York with a term sheet from both investors. With their mentorship and financial support, he transitioned from a technical leader to a CEO capable of running a 1,000-person company.

Under Brian’s leadership, AppNexus grew into a global ad tech powerhouse. It wasn’t just about technology; it was about building a culture of excellence and resilience. However, he admits that transitioning from the tech to the business side came with its own challenges.

Letting go of the technical aspect was tough since Brian was an expert, and taking a step back took the longest time. Further, hiring and managing people in jobs that were unfamiliar to him was tougher. As a former CTO, he was managing a company far bigger than he had worked for.

Understanding the rhythm, cadence, and P&L statements were other challenges, as was motivating people. Brian also had to learn about sales comp plans, organizing sales, and more.

Partnering with Microsoft

As AppNexus continued to scale, it started drawing customers from Brian’s previous company, Right Media. By now, its new owners, Yahoo, had rebranded the company to Yahoo Ad Exchange. At one point, he started to think about purchasing it back instead of competing with Yahoo.

Brian was keenly interested in powering Yahoo. He recalls meeting Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, but that deal never materialized. Instead, he won over 100% of Yahoo’s customers on the Ad Exchange, resulting in Right Media shutting down.

Meanwhile, Brian pitched AOL and Microsoft, landing a $50M investment from the latter. He also connected with Sir Martin Sorrell from WPP, the largest advertising agent in the world, who was also an AppNexus client.

The AppNexus Business Model

Brian explains that AppNexus is a transaction or real-time matching platform where publishers like Microsoft, Yahoo, or the New York Times can auction off all their ads in real-time to advertisers.

These advertisers could bid and ensure they got the people on the placements they wanted to target. According to the negotiated rates, AppNexus took a small percentage of the revenue share of around 5%, 6%, or 10%. It also charged a fee for matching.

When AppNexus was sold, it had $3B worth of advertising and made $300M in fees for connecting buyers and sellers. Brian also talks about his fundraising challenges. After the initial check from Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, further funding was tough because of the 2008 financial crisis.

After facing rejection from around 40 VCs, Brian approached Mike Tyrrell from Venrock and convinced him of his company’s potential. Venrock led the Series B round, Microsoft led the next, and another from TCV.

After their $100M revenue milestone, AppNexus roped in Fidelity as the last funding round before going to IPO. During this time, programmatic advertising was exploding in the industry, and AppNexus was the most prominent company in the space, which should have made funding easy.

Brian reveals wryly that the opposite was true since investors did not understand tech, acronyms, and what the company did. At this point, he decided to take the company public and even filed the S1.

Brian recalls how they had completed $300M to $400M in equity and acquisitions since the company was global, capital-intensive, and delivering cutting-edge technology.

Negotiation Lessons and Bittersweet Endings

When AT&T began courting Brian with a $1.2B offer for his company, he knew it wasn’t enough. As the negotiations progressed to $1.5B, he flew to Dallas to deliver a bold “no” in person. That decision led to a $1.6B offer—a $100M increase for a single meeting.

As Brian quipped, “a pretty good flight” with a free lunch. Yet, despite his efforts to spark interest from Microsoft, the deal ultimately went to AT&T. Having purchased Time Warner, AT&T wanted to add an advertising component to the media business with the AT&T data.

The sale, while financially transformative, was bittersweet. Brian felt AT&T’s corporate culture clashed with his ad tech team’s innovative, global ethos. In any case, Microsoft finally bought out the asset since it was a better fit for the company.

Reflecting on the experience, he likened it to a profound sense of loss, describing it as the pain of parting with something meaningful he’d built.

The Birth of a New Vision–Scope3

After selling AppNexus, Brian faced a void. A conversation with Scott Evans, a good friend, inspired him to dive into supply chains, creating the Waybridge platform that managed substantial portions of copper and aluminum logistics in the U.S.

The venture was impressive—impacting industries like electric vehicles—and the duo spent the next two years building a commodities supply chain platform that ended up managing 25% of the copper and 10% of aluminum coming into the United States.

Brian realized it wasn’t fulfilling his mission to make a lasting, positive impact on sustainability. Despite having just raised $30M for the company, he was ready to move on. That epiphany led to Scope3, a venture aiming to decarbonize the digital world.

Recognizing the energy waste in cloud computing, data centers, and ad tech, Brian proposed a bold pivot to his board: sell the metals business and focus on sustainability in digital ecosystems. Despite initial skepticism, the board trusted his vision.

Brian recalls taking four to five people with him and selling the rest of the company off to start Scope3. As he points out, people tend to forget that the cloud is not a fluffy place in the sky. It is, in fact, a windowless building in Secaucus, New Jersey, using up lots of energy.

Brian was ready with an idea to decarbonize data centers and enable better decisions about where and how to use energy in the digital world for the most impact. He wanted present-day solutions to pull low-value energy demand off the grid.

Scope3’s business model is to help the biggest companies in the world measure their digital emissions and work out solutions to lower waste, save money, and run more efficiently. Scope3 now has an AI division that enables companies to deploy AI sustainably.

Scaling for Impact

Under Brian’s leadership, Scope3 has grown rapidly, tripling revenue and headcount in a year while expanding globally in Singapore, Germany, Australia, London, Paris, New York, and various others. A significant portion of their success stems from aligning sustainability with business efficiency.

Brian’s team ventured into AI, developing tools to optimize energy use in AI applications and ensure sustainable infrastructure growth. Talking about funding the company, he reveals that they have to move really fast to make the most impact within a short time frame.

To make that happen, Brian is a major investor in Scope3. He has been using a large chunk of his own capital and deploying it rapidly and effectively. His objective behind raising $45M in capital was primarily to pick up the pace of the impact he wanted to make.

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The most recent funding round enabled them to start the AI aspect of Scope3. They have created an AI product line to help engineers and CTOs with sustainability and get the most from their AI investment.

Moving forward, Brian anticipates that they’ll raise more since the market and problem is massive. They have also invested in advertising to raise awareness for the products they’re developing and get customers.

Brian underscores the urgency of addressing climate change, which makes AI existential. He also stresses that Scope3’s mission is not to make money but to create the maximum impact for the good of humanity.

Health Challenges and the New Realization

Brian’s personal journey further fueled his passion for the mission. Looking back, he recalls the heart surgery recovery that gave him time to reflect and sketch out ideas for integrating AI and sustainability.

A meeting with a key investor, Erik Nordlander, at Google Ventures confirmed the potential of his vision, setting the stage for what Brian calls a “startup within a startup.” Brian recalls working on a little whiteboard at the Google office, explaining his thesis on applying their products to AI.

Brian also explained how they could make AI more efficient and more profitable. The idea took off from there. They have a separate team working on the AI platform and signing up pilots. At the same time, they have been scaling up the core business.

A Vision for the Future

Brian imagines a future where Scope3’s impact reshapes industries. Ads load faster, publishers thrive, and AI’s energy footprint diminishes—reducing inefficiencies and boosting profitability.

Policymakers and companies view AI’s role in climate change with optimism, thanks to actionable insights and tools like Scope3. Rumors of AI and data centers dominating the American energy grid were overstated, and Scope3 has found more efficient ways to deploy AI.

Using metrics and instrumentation, Scope3’s goal is to enable businesses to deploy AI efficiently.

The Bigger Picture

Today, Brian’s contributions to programmatic advertising have reshaped the internet, enabling a $100B industry. Yet, he remains humble about his journey, acknowledging the failures that paved the way for success.

From sleeping on a sofa after his first firing to building and exiting billion-dollar companies, Brian’s story is a powerful reminder: setbacks can be catalysts for growth, and resilience is the ultimate entrepreneurial superpower.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• 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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