Michael Ostrovsky

Michael Ostrovsky is a Stanford professor, an accomplished economist, academic, and co-founder of Topsort. As a leading researcher in the fields of game theory, marketplace design, and auction theory, Michael spent 15+ years advising to develop auction-based advertising for Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and many other big tech companies.

Pioneers on Auction Theory and Marketplace Design

Mike, a math genius as the movie goes - a beautiful mind. He won the international math olympiad gold medal as a teenager with a perfect score and then gained his PHD at Harvard to quickly turn tenure as a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He did economic research with Nobel Prize Laureates such as Paul Milgrom and Alvin Roth, and wrote the paper that built the foundation for Internet Advertising and Generalized Second Price Auction. Over the past 2 decades he’s worked with the best names in advertising and tech, from Yahoo to Google, to Linkedin and Pinterest and he believes firmly in the power of simplification and how auction-based advertising can work in much simpler and long-tail marketplaces.

Mike and Topsort Technology

“Ad auctions have evolved substantially in terms of their complexity and effectiveness. Topsort’s auction engine is designed from the ground up to incorporate the cutting-edge advances of this evolution while keeping the system simple for advertisers to use and for marketplaces to deploy, without sacrificing the effectiveness.”