About

The story of this blog begins when I came back to programmatic advertising after taking a brief stint in the worlds of entertainment and YouTube creators.

But before I tell the story, let me tell you a little about me. I have been a product owner, hands-on data scientist, and business leader in high tech for over 30 years, 15 of those in adTech. You use products developed by my teams multiple times a day and don't know it.

My earliest company built the site called Digital Chef, in conjunction with the California Culinary Academy, that took the first electronic B2B transaction on the web. I was also a member of the original Java product management team. My product, Java Card, now has sold over 40B units and is still going strong 30 years after its release. I developed one of the earliest mobile ad personalization systems in adTech in 2012. Today, I am the co-author of 14 patents, most of which are in adTech and AI- or machine-learning driven.

And as far as I am concerned, this is just the beginning of what I hope to contribute in tech. My favorite statement is "limits are only in your mind." But my second is "Don't think out of the box. There is no box."

Well, not quite true. There is the Google Privacy SandBox, and therein lies the story. As I came back into programmatic from the creator space I realized that, despite trying not to, I had fallen behind on programmatic tech. One of the biggest areas I needed to catch up on was the Sandbox. I had been on the W3C Sandbox committees early on, but in the early days things were a bit too amorphous for me to have a lot of need to focus. But with the advent of FLEDGE Origin Trial #1 on 1% of Chrome traffic, things had changed.

So I thought: "Heck, I'll take a weekend and catch up." Now I am a VERY technical product person, but when I got into the Sandbox I realized:

1. there was a HUGE amount of deeply technical content across 30+ specifications and browser technologies that I needed to wade through before I could fully understand the Sandbox
2. the documentation was either at the "30,000-foot level" and very vague, or down in the weeds in Github repositories.
3. the documentation was very stovepiped. None of it provided an overall architectural view of what was a brand new ad serving system and how the pieces fit together. And I am a very holistic thinker when it comes to software.

I also learn from writing. So the only way I could figure out how to understand all this was to write about it. But if someone like me, who is very technical, needed so much time and struggle to understand the Privacy Sandbox, then how hard was it for other adTech executives, many of whom had substantially less technical background than me, to groc this hugely complex system? My guess was very few, and thus was born this blog.

My goal is to be the businessperson's "eyes and ears" in the deep recesses of the processes that are creating the Privacy Sandbox. From there, my job, as I see it, will be to "uplevel" and frame the design and evolution of the Sandbox in terms that an adTech executive with some technical background in browsers can understand. If you know what a user agent header and a DOM are, if have a rudimentary background in OpenRTB or programmatic ad servers, then this blog is designed for you.

I have had fabulous feedback from numerous friends in the industry, so I now know my instincts were right. As a result, I will keep posting as I can, hopefully weekly, even as I manage my day job.

The Google Privacy Sandbox, for all its warts at this early stage and apart from industry politics, is an amazing piece of technology that some of the brightest minds in the industry have dedicated a goodly portion of their lives to designing, building and ultimately making successful. It is a joy for me to share with you my on-going discovery of the platform as I learn.

Please feel free to reach out and discuss issues with me. Definitely send me questions that you would like answered and I will try to cover them in a post or get back to you directly.

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