Our Team
Rob Leathern, Product Management
Rob spent the last 6 years working for Google and Facebook/Meta, and loves helping companies scale.
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.
Will Wallis, Software Engineering
Will has spent the last few decades immersed in technology and providing solutions for early stage companies and startups in the San Francisco Bay Area. He enjoys beginnings most when the market has more degrees of freedom and the problems are more difficult, numerous, and varied. Fortunately we are entering into an era where rather than 10% better we may have 1000x in most industries and verticals. Which side of this omni-directional tsunami-impact event should one be on? Perhaps ride in a SAE level 4 robotaxi to find out.
Over the years Will has worked in many verticals including sales/marketing, social/digital advertising, video infrastructure, education, banking/finance, retail/commerce, and online sports but more recently has been polymath consulting/contracting in climate tech, intelligent document processing, professional networking, agentic AI, and hedge-fund data collection. One model-based tech and many nuanced understandings applied to a plethora of new perspectives, use cases, and scalable paths to new business and existing monetization.
Will is a relentless and curious knowledge seeker who loves GPT because it never grows tired of his incessant question asking, anything from how you might combine DNA and XNA to strengthen neural connections to how might this type of language be used to quantify the outcome of a specific political event. If you are looking for opportunity, always look for change first, then follow-up on most pain, highest value, narrow focus, unique perspective, seeking proof, and initial traction.
Will graduated from MIT with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering, has held many product and engineering roles that can be viewed on his LinkedIn Page, and enjoys trail running/hiking (20+mi), playing piano, firewalking, and risk management. He values autonomy, persistence, tenacity, ambiguity, systems thinking, analogies, clarity, focus, and open-mindedness. He generally prefers technical systems in Javascript/Python but mastered chain of thought (CoT) and in-context learning (ICL) long before they were acronyms.
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