Tim Vanderhook

Tim Vanderhook is the founder-CEO at the center of one of independent ad-tech’s longest-running family stories. He started Specific Media in Irvine, California in 1999 with his brothers Chris and Russell, bought MySpace from News Corp in 2011 for roughly $35 million alongside Justin Timberlake, rebranded the holding company as Viant in 2015, and took Viant Technology public on Nasdaq under ticker DSP in February 2021 — a 22-year arc with the same two founders still at the wheel.

The 2026 thesis Vanderhook is executing against is identity-plus-context-plus-attention inside a single DSP. The November 2024 acquisition of IRIS.TV — Viant’s first deal as a public company — added the IRIS_ID contextual identifier alongside the Household ID Viant has run on since the Adelphic acquisition. The April 2026 agreement to acquire TVision Insights for $40 million pulls eyes-on-screen attention measurement inside the platform. As Vanderhook framed it on the deal call: “While our competitors measure themselves, Viant measures the market.”