Jeff Green - Modernizing Advertising

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:07)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of Positive Sum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:39)
My guest today is Jeff Green, the CEO and co-founder of advertising platform, The Trade Desk. The Trade Desk is the second advertising exchange Jeff has built having sold his first venue to Microsoft in 2007
He started The Trade Desk in 2009 and has built it into a $30 billion public business. In our discussion, we talk about the parallels between The Trade Desk and an equity exchange, why Jeff chose to align with ad buyers and not sellers and how he shapes the culture of his firm. Please enjoy my conversation with Jeff Green.
So Jeff, in many ways, this conversation is like a bizarre, full circle one for me because as I was describing to you before we hit record, the very first conversation I ever had on the topic of pure technology investing was with Jerry Newman, one of your earliest investors and just a wonderful guy that I know you and I both think extremely highly of. And when I talked to him, the first case study he talked to me about was The Trade Desk. And I think that it's so cool that it was him back in 2009 or 2010 thinking through a specific problem in technology, hypothesizing what kind of company might solve this problem and arriving at an investment with you in you and in The Trade Desk. So I'm just really thankful that I get to bookend this seven years later, whatever it is, and have been really excited to talk to you. And because of the unique story here, I thought we'd begin somewhere totally away from The Trade Desk, which is on the topic of your interest in psychology, consumer psychology, economic psychology, we might call that macroeconomics, and how your learnings there govern your business life. Because I do think like at the end of the day, it's easy to forget, we're just serving people and people are complicated. So what have you learned about what drives people in psychology and how has it impacted your business?

**Jeff Green** (4:27)
First of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm honored and flattered and intimidated because of just so many of the amazing guests that you've had before. In a way, I think of myself as a people first kind of person or kind of leader, a kind of technologist where it's all about people. Companies are all about people. To me, life is all about people.