Why I spent $150M on my own company???

Yesterday, I announced that this week I made the biggest purchase of my life. I purchased ~$150M of TTD stock. Some called it a record.

I said I’d explain why. In short, I’m putting my money where my mouth is.

At The Trade Desk, we have strong convictions about where value in digital marketing is shifting and why. We back that up with what we build, where we invest and how we go to market — all in service of our clients and partners.

I’ve never been more convinced that our approach is the right one, and that our people — our greatest asset — will deliver on that promise.

That conviction and that promise are what I’m investing in.

Let me go a click deeper on why I’m so convinced that future is bright:

1. The AI present. TTD has been building AI and machine learning tools for more than a decade — long before the recent AI hype phase. AI is across our platform — supercharging our bidder, our valuation engine, our SPO efforts, our predictive clearing product, our new Deal Desk. Kokai is able to analyze 20 million ad opportunities every second, each with thousands of variables, all in the context of first- and third-party data, in milliseconds — and find the right impression for any given advertiser. This is because we believe we have the industry’s most advanced AI and the industry’s richest, most refined, objective and trusted data platform.

Objectivity is key here. Already we’re seeing buyers recognize that data is more valuable in an AI world — and more and more are discovering that sharing that data with conflicted players is dangerous. Objectivity matters even more in an AI world.

AI + objectivity + 16 years of learning + massively undervalued data + complexity = a bigger TAM and bigger share for the objective leader.

2. The bigger TAM. I believe in 2026 and 2027 the advertising industry will think about inventory differently — we already do. In addition to CTV and audio (the most effective forms of advertising today), over time TTD will also have access to two new types of highly effective inventory — chatbot inventory and sponsored shopping listings. In the future, there will be more search-like inventory available to buy programmatically, significantly increasing our TAM. In the past, we have not had access to Google Search ad inventory because of their monopoly-like market share. With AI and e-commerce seeing the value from sponsored listings (including Walmart and Amazon), the “search” environment is evolving rapidly. It is becoming more fragmented and competitive. Things that once looked like search ad dollars will become inventory opportunities for us. And I believe the same healthy fragmentation that defines CTV today will also define this evolving search market.

3. Wall Street is wrong. Not about everything, but about one thing. Sometimes Wall Street momentum gets pushed by a currently unprovable thesis. Right now, Wall Street has an unprovable bear thesis — “software is dead.” There is fear that Claude and tools like it will enable developers to duplicate Salesforce or The Trade Desk. During a time when the market can’t prove that thesis wrong, the market and the sector go down. What I think they’re missing is that the best companies in the world work hard every day looking for an edge. We’re all looking for every possible practical application of AI, new tools and every other possible advantage. AI changed a lot, but it didn’t evaporate integrations, moats, trust, customers and tools — let alone people with esoteric expertise and obsessive passion to improve things.

Of course, there will be new companies and new innovation, but that will usher in new competition. Just as with the rise of the internet, not everything else went away. Yes, Netscape, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Excite, AOL, GoTo and many others died following the dot-com boom. But Google and Facebook and Amazon emerged from that time of unprecedented change, and their stories took over. The new Googles and Apples are already among us. But I think in all the numbers, sometimes Wall Street loses sight of what the strongest moats are often constructed from. Apple’s greatest moat is arguably its App Marketplace. They found a way to make millions of other people successful, creating a robust and unique marketplace around which Apple could build a sustainable hardware business.

4. The trade press is wrong. The programmatic trade press is currently doing a significant disservice to the industry. In industries like fashion, the trade press celebrates excellence and promotes the progress that the industry is making. The advertising trade press has more or less made clear to us in closed sessions that controversy is more profitable than truth and that The Trade Desk is a great source of “David vs. Goliath” or “he said, she said” drama. I believe in doing so, they’ve misled readers about what’s actually happening.

For example, one very odd article at the end of last year rated the top 10 stories of 2025. No. 4 was something like — “Google found guilty of anti-trust laws.” No. 1 was “TTD’s scuffle with SSPs.” Google’s loss to the Department of Justice will change the landscape forever. It was the biggest legal case for the open internet and digital advertising in the last decade, let alone year. One Wall Street fund manager recently told me that he won’t even read Adweek because it’s more National Enquirer than news.

By the way, a $150M founder stock buyback is unprecedented in the ad tech industry. Strangely, I’ve not seen anything yet from the trade press. Instead, Adweek ran another hit piece on us about fees. Not covering this story is telling. I wonder who Adweek’s biggest sponsors are?

Some journalists in our industry are unfortunately trying to monetize struggling businesses — and in that environment, clicks are perhaps more important than a deep understanding of our admittedly esoteric industry.

Of course, there is great journalism and there are great journalists in our industry, even at some of the outlets I just mentioned, but they are sometimes surrounded by other writers who can’t let truth get in the way of perceived drama.

5. Open will make a comeback. Much has been written about the open internet vs. walled gardens. I think the conversation is evolving and elevating to “open vs. closed” systems. The chatbots and operating systems of the future will be more open than closed — in large part because of the innovation that AI ushers in.

6. Our innovation in OpenTTD and agentic. This week we launched OpenTTD. It is a platform to enable others in the ad tech ecosystem to innovate and build their businesses, leveraging our platform and tools. Increasingly, this will be done using agentic AI. Agentic AI can add meaningful value, not by replacing platforms, but by enhancing decision-making within them. What used to be exposed through static APIs can now be expressed through systems that can reason, adapt and optimize toward outcomes. We’re convinced that agentic AI will ultimately accrete the most value to companies that already have deep customer trust, that have scaled, refined and objective datasets, and that prioritize objectivity — not by companies with limited data hoping an AI framework becomes their business model. In that sense, agentic AI is an evolution of outcome-based platforms, such as Kokai, not a shortcut around them.

7. Measurement. Measurement is the most important unsolved problem in advertising. And it’s about to change.

Ask most CMOs today why they overinvest in linear TV and Big Tech platforms — it’s often because their CEOs and CFOs are familiar with those channels and they are easy. But most CMOs also acknowledge that this approach — based on cheap reach and last-touch attribution — is not the optimal way to drive growth and differentiation for their brands. It’s not where their consumers are most leaned in and engaged. But by comparison, the open internet is more complex, and full-funnel measurement is more challenging. But increasingly, those CMOs are leaning in. They want to innovate the way we measure on the open internet, and 2026 will be a year of rapid measurement innovation. We’re already seeing it in retail. Anyone watching Walmart over the last few years has seen this happen. The data that retailers have represents one of the most powerful signals in advertising. It tells you who bought, when they bought and the why. But access to that data only happens through objective platforms that can truly partner with retailers. These retailers will not partner with a DSP that owns inventory and therefore has a conflict of interest. Over the last few months, we’ve been building a new measurement framework with some pioneering marketers and measurement companies. We’re already in private alpha with retail partners, and the early results are much better than we expected. As CMOs look for alternatives to the limitations of cheap reach, I truly believe this could become one of the most important things we have ever built.

8. Amazon DSP is overrated. Many people are conflating Amazon advertising success with Amazon DSP success. Sponsored listings are at the core of Amazon’s advertising future, not its DSP. Facebook gave us a case study on this, so did Google. I think if the C-suite of Amazon knew how aggressive the sales team had to be to get dollars into the DSP (their ad effort that has much smaller margins than their owned and operated (O&O) inventory), they would shut down the DSP. I don’t believe Amazon has a DSP in five years. I think O&O will be way bigger in their future. But having a DSP poses channel conflict and erosion problems for their core businesses, retail and cloud/AWS. In part because they compete with most of the Fortune 500 brands and they compete with the content companies they’re funding for content—especially sports rights. Interestingly, I suspect Amazon has made more profit from TTD in AWS over the last 16 years than they’ve made buying non-O&O using their DSP.

9. Our people. Every month, we host an onboarding session for new TTD employees. I start each session asking new recruits why they chose to join the company. The No. 1 answer to that question, every month, is because they believe in what we are trying to do. That sense of purpose enables us to attract the very highest level of talent in the industry. But also people who believe in the power of advertising to drive economic growth and how it can create an internet that’s better for everyone — advertisers, publishers and consumers. I feel that sense of urgency and purpose every day, which is perhaps the No. 1 reason I have such conviction in what we’re doing.

10. Clients and partners. As I said, CMOs are eager for alternatives to the limitations of Big Tech platforms. And they believe TTD is their leading innovation partner as they look to grow their brands in what are often very volatile markets. Our mission has always been to help brands bring as much decisioning, performance and value to their ad campaigns — in service of their growth. To help accomplish that, we need a healthy and thriving ecosystem of publishers and partners. Yes, we will always be pushing for more competition, transparency and objectivity. Because over time, these are all hallmarks of a healthy marketplace that creates trust and opportunity for everyone. Our partner ecosystem has never been stronger, and it has grown significantly in recent years. This helps us bring more scaled opportunity to our clients than any other ad tech company in history.

We love our clients and partners and focus on win-wins, not “I win and you lose.” To me, that’s the foundation of economic sustainability.

To come back to where I started — I, and my TTD colleagues, have always shared strong convictions about where value in advertising is shifting. This drives our innovation investments as well as how we partner and go to market.

As a company, we put our resources behind our convictions. As a founder and CEO, I’m putting my money where my mouth is.

I want to own my future, and I want the biggest brands in the world to own their own future too.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.