Meet the Operators Building Ads for AI
Nic Baird
David Vespe, Jason Morse, and JR Santosdiaz join Koah
On April 9, 1959, after a three-month search through hundreds of military test pilots, NASA sat seven of them at a table in Washington and introduced them to the press as America’s first astronauts.
They had spent their careers flying unproven jets to the limits of their capacity. At the time, NASA was only six months old and no country had ever put a person in space before. There was no playbook for the machines or the operators who would fly them and survive. So NASA went looking for the few pilots alive who had already done the closest thing.
Advertising is a trillion-dollar industry, and it has reached a new frontier. For the last three decades, the internet’s ad business was built around four surfaces: the open web, the search box, the feed, and the app. Each one built its own ad system, and those systems have largely paid for the internet people use for free.
Now people are spending more and more time in conversation with AI, and nobody has built the ad system to pay for it yet. That’s what we’re building at Koah.
Because there’s no playbook for building ads for AI, we did what NASA did: we found the architects of the previous generations of ad tech. Today, three of them are joining us.
Between them, they have built and sold advertising at the category leaders of each era, including Google, AdMob, Criteo and Moloco. Together, these companies generate a quarter of all the ad revenue in the world.
David Vespe leads engineering
Few engineers have built the core of a major ad business and David is one of them.
He helped build Google’s early search ads. He then built Demand Gen, Google’s platform for social advertising, from zero into a multibillion-dollar product. Along the way he worked on YouTube’s ad business and built ad systems at Roblox. Across search, social, and entertainment, the systems he engineered reach over 3 billion people and generate tens of billions of dollars a year.
David has advised Koah since before the company was formally established, working alongside the team to tackle the hardest problems this surface poses: how an auction runs inside a conversation, what relevance means without a keyword, and how to deliver advertiser performance on a surface that traditional models weren’t built for. Now he’s leading our engineering team, building the systems that make conversational ads perform at scale.
Jason Morse leads operations and partnerships
In 2010, Google paid $750 million for AdMob, a mobile ad network built for apps that had barely saturated the market yet. At the time, the iPhone was only two years old. Jason was a founding member of the team, and over the following decade he helped grow Google’s network ad business, home to AdMob, into a $30 billion business.
His career reads like a history of mobile advertising: Yahoo, AdMob, Google, then Criteo through its IPO, then Button. He was in the room each time advertising moved to a new surface: from mobile and programmatic to retail media and the creator economy.
He comes to Koah with a conviction to build what comes next: advertising that moves past identity and runs on relevance, and ads that are useful to the person seeing them. As Head of Operations and Partnerships, Jason will carry that case to the publishers, advertisers, and partners building this market with us.
JR Santosdiaz builds the sales team
Throughout his career, JR has operated on both sides of the advertising ecosystem, building products for developers and driving performance for advertisers.
He began his career at Google before founding Tauk, a platform that helped app developers identify and resolve issues before release. Following Tauk’s acquisition by Moloco, he helped grow the company’s advertising business to multibillion-dollar scale with some of the world’s leading advertisers.
As Founding Head of Sales, JR will lead Koah’s commercial expansion, building a high-performing sales organization, developing strategy, and accelerating revenue growth as the company helps define the future of AI-native advertising.
All systems go
NASA chose the “Mercury Seven” because in 1959, operating experimental jets was the closest thing to space flight.
David, Jason and JR have built search ads, mobile ads, social ads, and the businesses around them. Each time, the surface was new and the playbook did not yet exist. Now they’re doing it again for the age of AI.
Welcome to the team.
