The Trade Desk’s Jeff Green Just Signed the Giving Pledge. What's Next for This Data-Driven Donor?

It’s always notable whenever a new billionaire signs the Giving Pledge, not because of any guarantee they’ll actually fulfill it, but because of what the pledges—and the pledge letters—contribute to the ongoing discourse around big philanthropy. And besides, it never hurts to know when someone with boatloads of money is taking a more intentional approach to giving.

In that spirit, here’s some background on Jeff T. Green, who just signed the Giving Pledge and is worth approximately $5.6 billion at time of writing. Green is the co-founder and CEO of The Trade Desk (TTD), which offers platforms for marketers to purchase targeted digital advertising. A Utah native, the 44-year-old Green now resides in Ventura, California, where TTD is headquartered.

Like so many tech billionaires these days, Green’s net worth has skyrocketed along with the value of his company, which went public in 2016 at just under $3 a share and has since risen to over $100 a share. As he racks up the billions, philanthropy appears to be on Green’s mind—in addition to pledging to give away “more than 90%” of his wealth before or at his death, he created the Jeff T. Green Family Foundation in June 2020 and an associated vehicle called Dataphilanthropy, which Green describes as the family foundation’s “giving arm” and appears to be an LLC.

Not much in the way of funding is flowing quite yet, and it may be a decade or more until Green dials back his work at TTD and focuses more of his attention on philanthropy. Nonetheless, the CEO seems to have big plans and describes the collective Giving Pledge endeavor in grandiose terms.

“I believe that if I and the 224 pledgers before me live up to our pledges, this movement may be the most important philanthropic endeavor to this point in world history,” Green wrote in his Pledge letter. “I’m inspired. I want to do my part to keep this effort moving.”

The Trade Desk

Jeff Green wasn’t born into anything like the kind of wealth he now enjoys. Raised in a Mormon family, Green wrote in his pledge letter that he “grew up worrying about money” and recalls waiting in line for government aid with his mother. Despite those hardships, Green went to college at Brigham Young University and got another degree in marketing communications from the University of Southern California.

Green’s career in tech began with a role at Microsoft, and his career as an entrepreneur began when he founded the digital advertising platform AdECN, which he then sold to his former employer in 2007. The Trade Desk traces its history to 2009, when Green founded the company alongside another Microsoft alum, Dave Pickles.

TTD’s business model is somewhat arcane to the uninitiated, but it essentially boils down to providing digital marketers with ways to reach targeted audiences. As such, the company plays in the same sandbox as behemoths like Google and Facebook, which are so dominant that relatively smaller firms like TTD must carve out niches and stay on the cutting edge to compete. For TTD, that has recently involved leaning into digital marketing models pertaining to television streaming, as opposed to the old “linear” TV model.

Regardless of its small size next to the Googles of the world, TTD is becoming a force to be reckoned with. Its market capitalization has reached nearly $50 billion and some stock watchdogs are bullish about its continued growth. Meanwhile, as the firm competes with the biggest fish of digital advertising, it’ll likely stand to gain from any antitrust legislation targeting those companies.

First moves

Even though he’s signed the Giving Pledge and is building out his philanthropic apparatus, Green probably won’t engage in any truly massive giving anytime soon. He has stated that he intends to devote at least another 10 years to TTD, an activity he describes in his letter as “doing good for profit.” After that, his plan is “to point all my drive and ambition at venture philanthropy.”

That’s a fairly unsurprising route for a super-rich tech mogul to take, especially a younger one still very much engaged in business. As for the actual causes Green’s interested in, they’re also pretty standard fare for data-driven techies.

Education is a big one. As Green writes in his pledge letter, “I think we’ve lost sight of the foundational role that education plays in creating opportunity, and improving the odds, for everyone.” In 2019, Green began a philanthropic collaboration with California State University Channel Islands to develop a peer mentoring program to reduce drop-out rates.

It’s all very data-centric—according to Green’s foundation, “Data suggested that a single drop/fail/withdrawal grade as a freshman dropped the graduation odds to 60%. Two such grades dropped the odds to 40%.” As the mentoring program got underway, “the school has seen a double-digit increase in graduation rates among mentors and mentees.”

For far, Green has given $500,000 to the university for both the mentoring program and a scholarship program. He plans to ramp that up to over $1 million to further grow the mentoring program and potentially implement it at other Cal State campuses.

Green’s other giving includes scholarship support for youth with cancer through funding for a program at the Ruth Cheatham Foundation. He’s also backing data collection around deescalating tense situations, including by deploying mental health workers.

The data-driven spirit of this initial giving from Green also shows up in his Giving Pledge letter and is certainly on-brand for a CEO who made his fortune in a data- and metrics-driven business. It’s also right there in the name of one of his giving vehicles, Dataphilanthropy. “I’m interested in all philanthropy and venture philanthropy where data can validate a thesis, followed by testing, then scale and growth,” Green wrote.

Circa 2010 vibes

Even so, Green leads into his pledge letter on a less rigorous note—when he was 17 years old, Green got to know a homeless man in Denver, Colorado, named James. Affected by the man’s story, Green wrote, “I found myself dwelling on it a great deal over the following months, unable to shake one core question that was taking root in my mind—Why is he out there on the streets in the December cold while I am living a more comfortable life?”

The answer Green gives is a deeply individualistic one, rooted in the fortune and misfortune of individual life stories, in opportunities extended or denied by effort or circumstance. His first forays into giving reflect that mindset. They do not, as yet, reflect much attention to the systemic and structural factors underlying the gulf between James’ story and Green’s.

Even as some of us wax lyrical about cutting-edge approaches to nonprofit work, it’s good to remember that many billionaire givers still ensconced in the business world tend to gravitate toward funding avenues that may have been exciting 10 or 15 years ago, but feel kind of played out today. Take Green’s data-driven venture philanthropy framing, which is still alive and well in the sector, but represents a top-down approach that has been experiencing pushback in the past couple of years. There’s also the homage to Gates’ Giving Pledge, a philanthropic tradition that itself is gathering dust and losing some of its luster, along with its founder. There’s a definite 2010 vibe to all of this.

At the same time, Green’s philanthropy is still in its infancy. If his goal truly is to give away 90% of his fortune, there’s a whole lot of money—and time—left for this billionaire to go through.

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