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Anders Mortensen, who joined The Trade Desk as Chief Revenue Officer last October after a long run at Google, is gone. COO Vivek Kundra will absorb his responsibilities.
One can’t blame TTD for issuing an anodyne official statement - "leadership transitions are a natural part of scaling a global technology company". But it is interesting to speculate on the reasons why Anders may have left the company.
What probably happened
Mortensen walked into a job that sounds glamorous on paper but is genuinely challenging in practice. The Trade Desk is a company in transition - from open-internet insurgent to AI-powered programmatic platform - and that transition has hit some serious bumps in the road. The Kokai migration, which now powers virtually all client campaigns, caused friction during rollout. Q1 2026 came in at 12% growth, a number that feels modest when your revenue growth had been in the mid-20s percentages for five years straight. Add to that a high-turnover environment for executives. Over the past year, the stock shed close to 70% of its value. That's a difficult environment to face on day one.
The Google Mismatch
Here's the problem with hiring a CRO from Google: at Google, sales are a lot like gravity - they just happen. Advertisers come to you, no matter how poor the product is. The job is management, not selling. But at The Trade Desk, the CRO has to actually make the case for TTD - to agency holding companies that have grown more skeptical, to brands chasing the simplicity of walled gardens, to buyers wondering what will happen to the open internet when Amazon is emerging as a formidable new competitor. That requires different skills than anything one learns at Google.
The Jeff Green Factor
Jeff Green is one of the most compelling founders and CEOs in the industry - a genuine visionary with a specific worldview about where advertising is headed: the open Internet can absolutely compete with the Walled Gardens, let the open market decide the true value of advertising, let’s cut out any middleman that does not add value - and then let the dice fall where they may. He is a leader that holds the course based on these convictions no matter what.
Alas, visionaries make for a difficult environment for executives who want agency. Green doesn't hire people to redirect the mission. He hires people to execute it. If Mortensen arrived from Google with his own ideas about go-to-market, that friction would have surfaced fast.
Where is The Trade Desk at?
The revolving door at the executive level needs to be taken seriously. And yet, none of this means TTD is broken. The long-term thesis - that AI-powered, privacy-safe, open-internet advertising will ultimately be at least on par with closed ecosystems - is still valid. Kokai, Koa AI, and the agentic advertising opportunity are real. The fundamentals of the business remain intact. --
@AdWeek@KendraEBarnett
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