TripleLift Reviews

It's been a distinct pleasure working alongside some of the best talent in the industry. Before the Vista acquisition, TripleLift stood as a unicorn company, charting the course for programmatic native advertising while collaborating with the largest advertisers and media companies across industries. We boasted incredible leadership and a culture that fostered lifelong friendships, and in some cases, even marriages. We outpaced our competition by carving out our own market, delivering differentiated value, and managing our commodity products more effectively and efficiently than other SSPs. Experiencing a banner year felt routine, and we all anticipated a strategic acquisition on the horizon. TripleLift was engineered for rapid scalability, and it delivered. It was an exhilarating time, but exiting at the peak of the Covid era M&A frenzy was a significant factor in our $1.4B acquisition by Vista Equity. Following the acquisition, employees were compensated for vested shares, with some receiving substantial payouts, while the vesting schedule for remaining shares was upheld, ensuring decent retention. However, the first notable setback was the lack of transparency or foresight regarding future equity. Some were offered obscure retention plans, featuring trivial payouts and a lofty 3X evaluation goal unlikely to be achieved in our lifetime. Flush with cash post-acquisition, we acquired 1plusX, a Swiss-based DMP. Although we eventually integrated their teams into ours, the legacy DMP product remains challenging to support and integrate into our programmatic offerings. Over time, nearly all of our C-suite departed, with some departing more swiftly than others, but none of the original founders or team members remain today. From 2021 onward, TripleLift witnessed significant declines in year-over-year revenue, disjointed and ill-prepared product and GTM initiatives, several large-scale layoffs, a burgeoning competitive market, and the erosion of our competitive edge due to subpar hiring decisions and, in some cases, retaining underperforming talent. Meanwhile, the pressures of private equity intensified with each passing month. We appointed a CEO who seems more like a ghost, tasked solely with reporting to Vista while ensuring our interest payments on the debt we incurred are met. It's noteworthy that Vista applies a playbook to its portfolio companies, and we're no exception. Examples include doubling or even tripling EBITDA within five years, enabling Vista to recapitalize, increase debt, and pay dividends to investors. This often involves significant cost-cutting measures, from employee compensation to outsourcing talent to cheaper markets like India, and extracting time from critical employees to provide updates and analyses to Vista managers rather than advancing our business. Our relatively new Chief Revenue Officer is like a bull in a china shop—an ex-Amazon employee who may fancy himself the Ted Lasso of TripleLift, though no one else shares that sentiment. Since his arrival, TripleLift has undergone a massive upheaval, some of which was necessary, but much of it detrimental to our culture and business. His arrival triggered a large-scale reorganization, leaving many without clear direction or purpose. The supply and demand teams were merged into a single Services and Revenue organization, with demand-side leadership assuming control over all aspects of our business, despite lacking background in certain areas. The teams that were instrumental in TripleLift's success are now severely resource-constrained, leading to the cessation of services for hundreds of clients. There's a palpable disconnect between our core customer and what leadership perceives it to be, with little interest in rectifying anything unrelated to our Amazon partnership. More recently, there's been a mass exodus of top talent, and it's only just beginning. 2024 is shaping up to be a make-or-break year, with the guiding lights either departed or planning to leave. We're withering on the vine, and the 2024 Operating Plan fails to consider the full extent of talent drain. Morale is at an all-time low, exacerbated by micro-managing tactics such as enforcing mandatory weekly client calls, constant internal reporting updates for ELT, implementing a three-day return-to-office policy, adopting a "do more with less" mantra, and constant reminders of how things were done at Amazon. At the very least, the Executive Leadership Team has acknowledged that TripleLift is no longer the same company it once was, and legacy employees are urged to either adapt or depart. It's become clear to me that we're no longer the company poised for greatness. We've devolved into a company rife with internal conflicts among executives and lackluster leadership, perpetuating a culture of pettiness and distrust. We're grappling with incompetence at the highest levels, battling the adverse effects of private equity ownership, and reeling from a fractured culture. It's a somber time to be at TripleLift, and I advise anyone considering joining to conduct thorough due diligence before accepting any offers.

Read this knowing that I am over 90% more tenured than the rest of TripleLift. I was inspired to write this after reading some of the passionate reviews about TripleLift earlier this year. Based on their reviews, I know I am not in their department, but I want all readers to know that what they wrote about is true, and it’s clear to me that they all truly care(d) about this company's success. When I first joined TripleLift, we felt like a real Ad "Tech" company. One that had unique products that no competitor could replicate at scale, and one that was seen as a leader in Native advertising. Over the years, the company has evolved into a sales-driven organization, led by the loudest, most pretentious people in the room, who make false promises and are not held accountable for their failures. This problem is not only prevalent in every internal organization but also in the executive suite. We are no longer at the forefront of the Lumascape that we once dominated, due in part to failed investments and our inability to hire and retain good people. Enough negative comments have been made about our CEO — the 20% approval rating at the time of this review already proves the point. To offer my thoughts, he embodies the sales-driven culture that TripleLift has developed; he is very talented at saying a lot of words that sound nice but have no meaning or value when you put them all together. When answering tough questions at company all-hands meetings — like how the culture will improve despite mass layoffs and hiring/promotional freezes — his responses are obvious filibusters that do not answer the questions directly. He promises us that positive action is happening behind the scenes, but these promises fall flat over time. After many months, the remaining employees who weren’t laid off are left wondering whether the execs really did anything or cared to begin with. From my corner of the company, this kind of culture all started when TripleLift decided to invest in CTV. Pre-pandemic, CTV was the new hot space that we were trying to innovate in, with our amazing new VFX tech that allowed us to put product placements in videos. A huge financial and time investment was made into building the whole CTV organization. The team was eventually able to manually create fascinating demos with the tech, which brought a lot of enthusiasm and optimism to the company, leading to the eventual acquisition by Vista. While the CTV sales team was misusing and blowing through huge sums of money to desperately find clients willing to try this tech with us, their R&D team realized it was not possible to scale the tech in a true programmatic fashion. However, the wider company was not made aware of this situation, and many of them operated under the assumption that CTV was doing great because their exposure to CTV was "look at this fancy new demo video we just made!" The CTV organization ran on lies and corruption, much of which was swept under the rug, resulting in massive attrition within their org, and a culture of distrust and abuse. It was only in 2023, when Vista finally accepted that CTV was a failed investment, did the CTV organization start shrinking. To this day, the CTV org is a shell of its former self, operating on "advanced formats" that do not offer or promise innovation like the name CTV once did in our company. Another miss from TripleLift was the acquisition of OnePlus X. The problem-driver for this acquisition was the impending deprecation of third-party cookies announced by Google in 2022. The wrong people were involved in the decision to make the acquisition, and it felt like a rushed decision driven by our leadership's fear of the deprecation and the newly acquired cash flow from Vista. The acquisition still has not paid off, despite the immense amount of time and effort spent by many teams to integrate their platform with ours. To this day in 2024, third-party cookies are still not deprecated. There was a time in the earlier days when the company was smaller, when I genuinely felt like everyone around me was smarter than me, and I loved learning from them. However, as some of those people left over the years due to unfair treatment, mismanagement, and layoffs, their skill sets and domain expertise were not aptly replaced. I am now surrounded by unmotivated, soulless ghosts who are doing the bare minimum and won't attempt to innovate or learn anything unless forced to. The institutional knowledge of TripleLift's products and offerings, as well as deep knowledge of AdTech, has not transferred well to the newer generation of employees. When we do end up hiring AdTech "experts" into leadership roles, it is clear they are only trying to emulate how things used to work in their old companies without learning how TripleLift's own systems and products work, or what made us successful to begin with. They become leaders of teams that prioritize and inflict unimportant work upon other teams — work that does not provide a ROI. Accountability is hard to come by in the AdTech industry, and this has transferred to how the company operates as well. Over many years, I have witnessed much incompetence, failures, and deceit from employees, with no repercussions. Some of these employees are still here. Some are in positions of power where they are shielded from any blame and refuse to take responsibility for their failures. There are also others, who took advantage of my time, generosity, and knowledge, and who took credit for my work in front of their superiors. Selfish people like this still exist in the company and continue to "excel" and get promoted because they are very vocal about "their achievements" to the right people. There are people at TripleLift who are genuinely kind, smart, and know their piece of the puzzle inside and out. If you're lucky enough to work with one of these rockstars, you know very well who I'm talking about. The ones who everyone has to go to for help. The ones seemingly involved in every big project. The ones who have to be pulled into every big problem your team or other teams have. The ones who you can't imagine this company functioning without. During our unicorn era, there were more rockstars like these at TripleLift, to the point where one leaving didn't matter as much. I don't know why the remaining rockstars are still here, but they are the few remaining pillars carrying their teams and this company on their shoulders. A domino effect has already been occurring, and it will only get worse when more of these pillars are knocked over.