Our next speaker, Antonio Garcia, founded a company, sold it to Twitter, built part of Facebook's monetization system, and made a mountain of mistakes along the way. Antonio will tell us the painful lessons from his five years in the San Francisco startup scene. His pain is our gain!
Enters Antonio:
"Most recently, I was VP of Product at Nanigans, Facebook’s largest ads partner, where I built their programmatic ad-buying platform.
Before Nanigans, I designed, built, and managed Facebook Exchange (FBX), Facebook’s real-time ad exchange.
Prior to FBX, I was Facebook’s first ads targeting product manager, responsible for all Facebook ads targeting, as well as product manager for Custom Audiences, Facebook’s offline data-matching targeting service.
Before going ‘big company’, I founded AdGrok, a search marketing startup backed by Y Combinator, Chris Sacca and others, which was acquired by Twitter in 2011. Speaking of boom and bust, my first real job was pricing credit derivatives as a financial quant on Goldman Sachs’ trading desk during the credit crisis. I’m still on leave from the physics Ph.D. program at University of California-Berkeley.
I’m based either in Barcelona or wherever my 32-foot sailboat Ayala is moored.
Follow me at: @antoniogm."
For more, check out his website: http://pseudorandomly.com/