Willard Simmons

Simmons offers more than 14 years of advertising technology leadership experience to The Trade Desk. He was the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Dataxu, an early ad tech pioneer that developed new approaches in the application of data science and machine learning for digital advertising decisioning at scale. While at Dataxu, Simmons also founded the OpenRTB consortium to standardize real-time bidding protocols industrywide. Dataxu was acquired by Roku in 2019, and Simmons became the Vice President of Product Management of Roku’s ad platform. Prior to founding Dataxu, Simmons was a doctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Simmons has also held engineering positions at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems (formerly known as TRW) and Lockheed Martin Astronautics.

Simmons received a Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT. He also holds a master’s degree in aerospace engineering sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder and a master’s degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University.