About

Willard Simmons is a highly experienced and accomplished VP at Roku, Ad Platform with over 23 years of relevant experience in the industry. As the VP Product Management, Ad Platform, he is responsible for driving the development and execution of Roku's advertising strategy, including product development, go-to-market, and partnerships. Prior to joining Roku, Willard co-founded and served as the CTO and EVP Product Development at dataxu, a global programmatic marketing software company. In this role, he was responsible for leading the company's product development and technology R&D efforts. Under his leadership, dataxu's patented Active Analytics® technology became the #1 rated platform, enabling marketers to better understand and engage customers and drive better ROI. With fifteen offices in eleven countries, dataxu is powering the digital transformation of the world's most valuable brands. Before dataxu, Willard was a Doctoral Research Associate at MIT, where he co-developed an algebraic approach to systems architecture and developed a computational framework for system design that models a design problem as a constrained multi-objective decision problem. With his extensive experience in senior software engineering, product management, big data, data science, and research science, Willard is a valuable asset to any organization he works for. He is a strategic thinker with a proven track record of delivering results and driving growth.