um, Rubicon Project, interesting enough is now called mag nights. Um, in earlier this year, the company acquired another company. There's also a public company, A to that time actually transitioned out of the chairman role. Um, so you're currently just kind of looking back on the past 13 years of achievements that the team has made. Um, it's been just a really wild ride, and I'm so proud of the team and what they've accomplished. Um, So I guess you'd answer the question of how do we get to where we are today? It's been quite a roller coaster ride. You know, we started the company early on with with nothing, um, group through multiple rounds of financing. We acquired a whole bunch of companies along the way. Private companies, public companies. We took the company public back in 2014 on DSI. It's been interesting to see all the different changes that have happened, not only in the advertising market, um, in the technology market, but also just around the world. Right. So we founded the company in 2007. 2000 and eight, if you recall, was the financial crisis. You have a banking crisis. Um you know, obviously today we're dealing with co vid and all the implications of that eso it's what of the things I think that's been really important for the company of the team is to really just be adaptive. And back in 2007 when we started the company, um, one thing that we kind of instilled in the DNA of the company was that we're gonna march 10 yards of the time in good times and also in times of struggle. And it sounds obvious to do in times of struggle, right to say, Hey, let's just keep moving forward. But really, that discipline comes in when markets are growing really fast. When there's a lot of opportunity around you to maintain the discipline to not go too fast. It's easy to get excited to say, Hey, let's grow faster. Let's hire another 100 people. Hey, let's go acquire this company, but you really got to maintain that discipline. You're both in good times and bad, and I think the companies maintain that in their DNA since 2007. And I think that's part of the reason the company's been able. Thio continue to grow and do so well and, you know, in the ups of the markets in the world and also the down paths as well.

the elevator pitch was that we created in exchange toe automate the buying and selling of advertising to basically do exactly what NASDAQ did to bring efficiencies to the financial service stock trading market. But to bring that to the advertising market, eso the problem that we become projects now magnet solves is that we're bringing efficiency into a market that used to be very manual. So advertising has been around for, you know, over 100 years and the way it was operating before waas by people picking up the phone, having meetings, everything just a very manual process. Eso Imagine what it was like. Thio Book a flight or reserve a hotel room before that process was automated. You have to pick up the phone, call American Airlines. You wait on hold for a really long time, you'd speak to an agent. You'd say, Hey, look, I'm looking to go from from Chicago to Salt Lake City and um, you know how much is it? They say, Well, it's $800. It's a middle seat, and the only thing that's available is a red eye flight, you say. Well, no, thank you. You hang up the phone you called Delta go through that same process, hang up the phone call United. That's what advertising was like before Rubicon Project's you Now bag nights, um, came in to automate that process. So just like you could go online, you click a button book, a flight. You could go online through services like you trade and powered by NASDAQ in the back end exchange Andi by sheriff stock. That's what the company did before the advertising market. You could go on. You figure out the advertising you wanna buy, and you just It's a completely automated process now.

so interesting enough that we started the company and probably a very non standardized way. Um, one thing that we knew and, you know, ironically enough looking at all the changes have happened the mark in the world over the past 13 years. Um, we said, Look, there's a lot of things that are going to change. The product's gonna change. The market's gonna change, The economy is going to change, the customer needs are going to change. The business plan will need to change. We know these things will have to happen over over the years. Uh, and those things are all your relatively easy to change. But the most difficult thing to change is your team. And to change the culture of a company. Thio, change the DNA of the way that company operates. Eso the very, very first thing we worked on was not a business plan was not a product plan. The very first thing that we worked on was a culture plan. We talked about What kind of culture do we want this company? Thio have What kind of people will be the right fit for for this type of endeavor? How do we want those people to work together and behave, um, in in the good times. How do we want them to behave in the in the challenging times and eso? The very first thing that we put together was was a cultural plan. And one thing that we did early on is we managed culture like a product. We had a roadmap for the culture. We measured it. We talked about how we wanted to to grow and how we wanted it to develop. We got feedback from the team. We got feedback from our customers. We got feedback from our board, and we continually tried to adapt and grow that culture and had that same discipline that we had Aziz you would with a business plan, a financial plan or a product plan. Um, and for a while, we haven't had a product manager whose sole job is culture. There were the product manager of culture. It was pretty interesting and unique thing to do, but But I'll say this forever. It was really the key to our success, especially when you're looking at way acquired a bunch of companies bringing in the DNA of those those new companies into that culture and also being willing to adapt that culture and come up with the universe in to version three, opening up offices around the world, 28 offices around the world, you're being able Thio, adapt the culture of the company to regional cultures. It was really, really critical thing that we did early on, and I think is you contributed greatly to the success of the company.so way literally had a roadmap for it. Right? So we have, like, version one, version 1.1 and the things that it focused on, where things like productivity, for example Um, yeah, we did some of the things like, uh, we provided free lunch to the team. And ah, lot of people like that is just a nice perk or benefit. We measure that in terms of productivity. Eso, for example. One thing that we did was one time way told the whole company. Hey, look on this particular Thursday, we're gonna donate the food that we're gonna provide for lunch to the team. We're going to donate that. So we're not gonna provide lunch. And, you know, the team, of course, was supportive of that because it was for a good cause. But what we did was we measured the productivity productivity of the tape. So we saw when people were leaving that day for lunch when they came back. Um, and when they left for the day, And interestingly enough, what we found is that a lot of people just didn't take lunch. Yeah, they may be took some small snacks, but what they did was they left early that day because they were tired. Um, they were not as energized s. So we took that. You multiply that by the number of days the number of hours the amount of productivity team had. And we found that the 4 to $5 that we spent on lunch was actually benefiting the company. You know, in terms of productivity of 40 to $50 and eso productivity was one of those things. Certainly the happiness of the team. Um, the growth of the team. Like how How quickly could we hire people? How many of those people came from referrals with within the company? We looked at things like retention. We also looked at things like like meeting productivity. One of our engineers, we have this focus on trying to get people to meetings on time and, uh, easier said than done. And we did a study on it. And part of our cultural roadmap became that if you have a meeting scheduled at nine AM and that meeting scheduled to go till 10 a.m. and then you have another meeting scheduled at 10 a.m. And it's on the other side of the building. How are you possibly going to get to that meeting on time? Right? It's It's not possible to have a teleporter, right? So it might might take five minutes, seven minutes. You know, people might stop and grab a cup of coffee or some water or go to the bathroom. If you look at that seven minutes for every single meeting, times 78 meetings, whatever it is per day times 1000 people. That was a very expensive problem, right? So what we started saying is that we shipped shifted the focus in our culture product roadmap to say, Look, uh, what we really need to do is we need to end meetings on time, right? In fact, we need to end them five minutes early. So we change the calendar and say, Look, you can't schedule one hour getting you could schedule a 55 minute meeting right over a 25 minute meeting. Eso we measure things like that. We put that into the roadmap and sometimes you involves training. Sometimes it involves updating technology. You know, sometimes it was just stating a goal that everybody gonna rallied around. But we found that those things really increase productivity and they sound like small things. Right, But, um, we said, Look, if we can increase our productivity by 1% right, Uh, the company was doing a billion dollars a time. A billion dollars of sales, right? 1% of a billion dollars is a pretty big number, right? So if you could do that, you could continue to improve your 1% every month, every quarter. That really can make a huge, huge difference in the success of the company.