Fewer, Deeper Partners
Fifteen years in ad tech, scaling venture-backed and private equity-owned companies, now leading the Americas for Equativ.
"It's an organizational responsibility. It's not the CEO's responsibility specifically."
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.
If your teams don't understand the strategy, the market will never understand the strategy
"The data should tell you that where you wanna focus"
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.
"You need to figure out what your authentic voice is and what your authentic story is to the organization"
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.
"Keep it simple, get in, do your job well, and good things will happen."
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.
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