Oliver Roup, former Founder and CEO, Viglink (acquired by Sovrn)

Invented and delivered a set of "supply-side" tools enabling mainstream web publishers to participate in commerce revenue for the first time. VigLink was the first company to apply display advertising techniques including realtime bidding and historical purchase behavior to in-content commerce links. At sale, VigLink was breakeven, delivered $1B in annual GMV spend, $50M in commissions, and $10M in net revenue. Established demand-side partnerships with 75,000 advertisers including Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Nike and many others. Targetted the needs of the publisher side half of the commerce relationship. Used that strategy to build a proprietary network of 2 million publishers including partnerships with Yahoo, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Meredith and Vertical Scope. Elected board member of the Performance Marketing Association. Speaker at Advertising Week, Affiliate Summit and others. Personally led the product function of the business balancing the needs of advertisers and publishers (and by extension consumers) as well as regulators including navigating the launch of European GDPR regulations. Personally recruited and hired more than 100 candidates across every startup discipline. Acquired competitors: Driving Revenue, LinkSmart and Prosperent. Raised venture capital: First Round Capital (Josh Kopelman), Google Ventures (Rich Miner), Emergence Capital (Kevin Spain), RRE (Will Porteous) and others including Reid Hoffman and Deep Nishar investing personally.