BrightRoll Snags Former Yahoo Treasurer And VP Of Finance As Its New CFO

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Monday, April 4th, 2011

Yahoo has apparently lost yet another executive with the departure of Ron Will, former treasurer and vice president of finance at the Internet company. The man has decided to join video advertising startup BrightRoll.

Will was an executive at Yahoo for quite a while, from 2004 until the end of March, 2011, to be exact. As CFO, Will will oversee BrightRoll’s finance, corporate development and HR operations and report directly to CEO Tod Sacerdoti.

Before becoming Yahoo’s treasurer, Will served as a senior member of the company’s corporate finance group, where he was the finance lead for a number of acquisitions, investments and joint ventures including Flickr, Rivals, Whereonearth, Yahoo!7 and Musicmatch.

On an interesting sidenote: BrightRoll co-founder and CTO Dru Nelson was once an executive at eGroups, and before that a software engineer at Four11. Both companies were sold to Yahoo.

Prior to joining Yahoo, Ron Will spent 12 years in investment banking working at Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bank of America.

BrightRoll is a privately held video advertising services company and headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company has raised $15 million from investors like Scale Venture Partners, True Ventures, Adams Street Partners and KPG Ventures.

Company: BrightRoll
Website: brightroll.com
Launch Date: 2006
Funding: $46M

With more than 70 million monthly unique viewers, BrightRoll is the world’s largest and most trusted video ad network and the leading provider of digital video advertising services. The BrightRoll Network has access to billions of video impressions per month enabling advertisers to execute smart digital video campaigns across a massive pool of web and mobile video inventory. BrightRoll’s proprietary buying technology, combined with its full site disclosure, detailed performance reports and flexible targeting provide brands and agencies with...

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Company: Yahoo!
Website: yahoo.com
Launch Date: January 1, 1994
IPO: December 4, 1996, Nasdaq:YHOO

Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It has since evolved into a major internet brand with search, content verticals, and other web services. Yahoo! Inc. (Yahoo!), incorporated in 1995, is a global Internet brand. To users, the Company provides owned and operated online properties and services (Yahoo! Properties, Offerings, or Owned and Operated sites). Yahoo! also extends its marketing platform and access to Internet users beyond Yahoo! Properties through its distribution network...

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