Fresh out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ryan Christensen did what many ambitious graduates do and accepted a position with a Silicon Valley consulting firm focused on helping leading technology companies successfully launch new products. Before too long, he moved to Rocket Network, this time as VP of product management. And then, he chose the road less taken: Together with a few friends and colleagues, he heeded his entrepreneurial urge and bootstrapped his own start-up, an enterprise security company.

It was a three-year experience that taught Ryan a lot, delivering new insights and lessons every day and proving, each day anew, just how important teamwork truly is to a company’s success. Ready to return to the corporate world, he joined Yahoo!, where he served as senior director of the company’s global advertising marketplace, and at Brand.net, where he was VP of Media Operations, and later, SVP of product marketing and business development.

In 2012, he joined the social gaming pioneer Zynga, where he led advertising product and engineering, successfully developing and deploying the company’s proprietary ad delivery and monetization platform that unified mobile, video, native, and reward ads into a seamless ad offering for the company’s global advertisers.

Since joining AppNexus in 2013, Ryan served as VP of product before becoming SVP and GM and assuming the responsibility for driving the development and introduction of the AppNexus Publisher Suite, helping digital publishers and app developers manage all aspects of their digital advertising and monetization. He became the company’s COO in 2016, and, now part of Xandr, looks forward to being intimately involved in helping to shape the exchange of value between content producers and consumers in years to come.

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