Guest · Programmatic, ad tech and supply quality
Michael Lehman
President, Americas, Equativ
Fifteen years in ad tech, scaling venture-backed and private equity-owned companies, now leading the Americas for Equativ.
About
Michael Lehman is President, Americas at Equativ, where he leads the ad tech company's business across the region. He is known for scaling venture-backed and private equity-owned companies and for resetting businesses at their inflection points, with a conviction that clear strategy, not restructure, is what turns plateau into growth.
Lehman entered ad tech by accident. Planning to attend business school during the tech boom of the 2000s, he took a yield manager role at Rubicon Project, since rebranded through acquisitions to Magnite, at a company whose business he did not understand when he first read the website. He fell in love with the pace and culture of the space and stayed, going on to hold commercial and operational roles at venture-backed companies including TripleLift.
At Nativo, Lehman led what he describes as a reset into record performance, achieved, he says, through a resource shift and a simplified story rather than a wholesale restructure. He now leads the Americas for Equativ, and his argument centres on strategy: define a confident view of where the market is going, and make sure every team can recite it. He is bullish on a market moving towards fewer, deeper partnerships and optimistic that premium publishers can win back ground in the age of AI.
Career11 years
- 2026 to now Equativ President, Americas
- 2024 to 2026 Nativo Inc President
- 2021 to 2023 Techstars Mentor/ Advisor
- 2019 to 2023 TripleLift SVP, Revenue
Show earlier roles: RevCascade, TripleLift
- 2016 to 2023 RevCascade Investor
- 2017 to 2018 TripleLift VP, Marketplace Development
- 2015 to 2016 TripleLift Head of Platform Sales
How Michael thinks3 convictions
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Data over blueprint
Lehman rejects the idea of a growth template and looks to internal evidence first. He argues a healthy company has sales velocity and KPIs that reveal why it wins and loses, and that missing data is itself an execution failure. For him, diagnosis before drama is the discipline that separates a real reset from a guess.
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Authentic leadership
Lehman believes teams can sense a manufactured vision and will disengage from it. He holds that under shared pressure the only durable advantage is a leader telling a real story they believe in, one people want to build a career around. Motivation, he argues, follows authenticity and clarity, not slogans.
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Do the job well
Lehman's counsel to newcomers strips away the noise of promotions, raises and face time with leadership. Having been preoccupied with the wrong things himself early on, he argues that doing the work well gets noticed and compounds. His advice is deliberately simple, and he stands by that simplicity.
