Our Team

Rob Leathern, Founder and CEO

This is Rob’s third startup, after he spent the last 6 years working for Google and Facebook/Meta.

From 2021 to 2023 Rob led product management for privacy and security at Google as a Vice President of Product, protecting billions of users across all its products, and supporting every product group at the Company including Ads, Android, Brain, Chrome, Cloud, DeepMind, Play, Search, Workspace, YouTube and others. His team also built privacy tools and end-to-end experiences including an innovative private VPN service bundled with the Google Pixel 7 phone.

Prior to that, Rob led Facebook's (now Meta's) Business Integrity product team, protecting over $80 billion in annual advertising revenue and safeguarding the people and businesses using its commercial products. His team built and operated mega-scale AI/machine learning tools that prevented abuse across millions of active advertisers operating from every country in the world. The team built personal and business identity and authenticity systems, and launched industry-first transparency tools. The Facebook Ad Library made millions of ads publicly visible across Facebook and Instagram, and ads and data controls like "Why Am I Seeing This Ad" helped people understand how their data was being used. As one of the spokespeople for the company on commercial policy and product issues, he was passionate about sharing his team’s progress with media and press globally to build trust with its global advertiser base and users alike.

Rob sold his second startup in 2016, a proof-of-concept consumer subscription/ad-replacement platform for iOS. Before that, he was CEO and Founder of Optimal, Inc. which was acquired in 2013 for $35mm (raised $5mm). Optimal was an early pioneer in the programmatic ad buying space, operating one of the largest social ad optimization platforms at the time of its sale in 2013, as a key partner to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.

Rob has had other interesting roles, as detailed on his LinkedIn page. He holds a chartered financial analyst (CFA) designation and has a computer science and economics degree from Dartmouth College.