David Buonasera on building and scaling platforms
Mike and Ian sit down with David Buonasera, CTO of Magnite, to unpack what it really takes to build and scale complex systems in ad tech.
David shares his path from finance to becoming an early engineer at AppNexus, where he helped shape foundational infrastructure, to later building and scaling products like SpringServe.
The conversation goes deep on one of the most misunderstood challenges in ad tech: why budget pacing and spend control are so hard in distributed systems. What sounds simple “just stop at $100” quickly becomes a problem of delayed signals, fragmented state, and cascading system failures.
The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc. Sincera was acquired by The Trade Desk, Inc.