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Summary of “The Elevation of ‘Trust’”
Talks about Artificial Intelligence, Meta and Google
RL
Rob Leathern
Founder of Trust2.ai
Austin, Texas
Overview
Rob Leathern is a tech consulting expert specializing in privacy, trust, identity, and safety issues, currently serving as the Founder of Trust2.ai. With a background as Vice President of Product Management at Google and Senior Director of Product Management at Facebook, Rob brings extensive experience in digital strategy and product management to his current role, where he focuses on advising and mentoring startups in the tech industry.
Notable highlights of Rob's career include founding Optimal.com and Optimal (later acquired by Brand Networks), as well as serving in key leadership roles at major tech companies like Google and Facebook, showcasing his expertise in digital marketing, product management, and strategic partnerships.
Work Experience
Board Member
2025 - Current
CollectiveMetrics builds and maintains free data dashboards and open-source measurement systems to track meaningful indicators of online trust, privacy and safety. Our mission is to transform complex data into free and accessible insights, empowering global communities to understand and improve the systems that shape their lives.
Advisory Board Member
2025
Founder
2023
Trust2 provides strategic advice on product management across ads & monetization, AI, privacy, trust and identity. Clients include large companies and startups alike.
Affiliate
2024
Affiliate at The Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School. The Center’s mission is to explore and understand cyberspace; to study its development, dynamics, norms, and standards; and to assess the need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.
Investor, Advisor, Mentor, Board Member
2005
Investor in or advisor to various startups, funds, or limited partnerships including Centigrade, NotCommon, Climate Draft, V1.VC, Teambuilder Ventures, Fakespot, Anonym, Abovo, Handipoints (acquired by Slide/Google), Spartan Beverages, Inadco, Alt12 Apps (acquired by The Honest Company), Chintano and others. Board member of Brand Networks after my startup's acquisition, and board member of 300 Days (a 501c3).
Vice President of Product Management
2021 - 2023
I led the product team for the company's Privacy and Data Protection Office and worked closely with engineering, legal, regulatory, design and product teams across the company on privacy and security issues - including Ads, Search, YouTube, Android/Play, DeepMind, Brain, Cloud/Workspace, etc.
Google is a multinational corporation that specializes in Internet-related services and organizes the world’s information.
Raised $26,100,000.00 from Angel Investors LP, Kleiner Perkins, Signatures Capital, Sequoia Capital, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Shaquille O'Neal, Henry Kissinger, Google and Tiger Woods.
Senior Director of Product Management
2017 - 2020
Helped start Business Integrity as its own organization at Facebook, splitting from the Ads Delivery team within the Ads and Business Platform/Products group. Grew the PM team from 3 to >40 and co-led our pillar as part of the Ads Leadership team. We worked to enforce ads and business policies across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other Facebook products. Business Integrity prevents abuse and removes bad actors from the platform, and provides ads- and data transparency tools and controls. I have frequently engaged with regulators, media and the public to provide context on these policies and programs.
Stay N' Alive Productions, LLC is a social media marketing firm that provides clients with measurable profits.
Mentor
2014 - 2017
Techstars is an accelerator that provides pre-seed investment and mentoring for various early stage startups.
Raised $108,919,999.00 from SVB Financial Group and Foundry Group.
Founder and CEO
2015 - 2017
Optimal.com made tools to help people filter advertising while still paying content creators. We sold the DNS and web proxy technology we had built to Sovrn
Founder and CEO
2008 - 2014
Optimal was an enterprise social media analytics and advertising software company and one of Facebook’s and Twitter’s top ads API partners by spend, running campaign optimization for many of their 20 largest advertisers. Optimal automated the process of helping Fortune 1000 advertisers make and execute better media buying and audience targeting decisions at scale. Optimal raised $5.1 million and was acquired by Brand Networks in October 2013 for $35 million. We pivoted from a real-time bidding DSP under our prior name XA.net in 2011.