Mr. O'Kelley.

For a city that has wears its ambition to become a technology hub on its sleeve, New York lacks those coveted billion dollar exits that lend credibility to the ecosystem and help buttress the ever-multiplying ranks of startups.

Sure, consumer-facing companies like Gilt Groupe, Foursquare and Tumblr have sucked up attention, not to mention venture funding in recent years, but none of those companies appears to be close to the type of major exit or sustained profitability it takes to be king of New York.

But maybe it's not going to be a consumer-facing company that rules the Silicon Alley roost: Maybe what the ecosystem needs is thriving pure play technology firm to serve as New York's totem. At least, that's what AppNexus CEO Brian O'Kelley told Betabeat over the telephone yesterday, fresh off his companies announcement that it had closed a $75 million Series D round.

"New York needs a real technology firm to be the heart of the community," Mr. O'Kelley said. "We want to be that, we want people to point to us and say, 'You can build an innovative tech firm in New York.'"

Of course, New York has long been an ad tech kind of town. Mr. O'Kelley himself helped pioneer the ad exchange as the CTO of Right Media, which sold to Yahoo for $870 million in 2007. Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of ad tech firm DoubleClick that same year remains the exit to beat for Silicon Alley firms—and in turn spawned a series of successful New York companies, including Kevin Ryan's Gilt-10gen-Business Insider empire.

But Mr. O'Kelley said that his company's role in the ecosystem wasn't tied to its particular corner of the industry.

"It's not because we’re an ad business, it's because we’re a real business," he told us. "Our revenue model is proven and understood."

To that end, he said the company was serving 13 billion ads a day, and managed more than $700 million of ad spending last year, with 40 percent of the business coming from abroad.

"Marketing money is really at the core of the Internet," Mr. O'Kelley said. "Is it crazy to say that New York is going to be the hub of the financial ecosystem for the Internet? No, New York is already the hub for the global financial system."

If the company is going to wear that mantle, AppNexus's Series D, which boosted the company's total raise to $140.5 million, won't hurt. Lead by Technology Crossover Ventures, a firm noted its experience helping Facebook, Groupon and Netflix go public, and may put the company on the path to an eventual IPO.

In the meantime, Mr. O'Kelley said he wants to be increasingly active in the tech community, building on past activities like the company's sponsorship of Girls Who Code, or a fireside chat with Fab CEO Jason Goldberg that Mr. O'Kelley hosted this week at company headquarters.

As for the Series D, Mr. O'Kelley said the funds will help AppNexus scale its operations, and hinted at a big announcement this spring, as the company works on what it has called the third generation ad network.

When Betabeat checked in on AppNexus last April, the company had just opened offices in London and Paris, and boasted a staff of 230 employees.

Nine months later, the company had more than 400 employees and says it's serving 16 billion ads a day. The next year could see the company double its head count again, a hiring spree that Mr. O'Kelley said would bring fresh waves of engineering talent to New York.

Some have speculated that a $75 million raise prices AppNexus out of reach potential acquirers. “You’re never too expensive for someone to acquire,” Mr. O’Kelley retorted. However, company’s mission is to “change the advertising world,” he added, and no amount of money would divert him from that path.

As far as an eventual exit goes, Mr. O'Kelley didn't scorn the idea of going public.

"It's just another financing round," Mr. O'Kelley said of the prospect. "We're not going to have pressing need for quite some time. But there's something very special about being public. The idea of being at the center of the ecosystem, and that New York could use a real solid innovative tech company that’s public. We'd love to be that company at the right time."

Why are you jogging in a polo, Mitt? (Photo: flickr.com/marcn)

As anyone who's paid any attention over the last six months will undoubtedly already know, Mitt Romney has about five dollars more than God. Consequently, the man does things like set up trust funds for his children and grandchildren, which has enabled the Romney clan, as a whole, to sidestep paying quite a lot of taxes. And that's why there are little Romneys scampering about who probably did better at Bubble 1.0 than many of you.

According to Bloomberg News:

"In January 1999, a trust set up by Mitt Romney for his children and grandchildren reaped a 1,000 percent return on the sale of shares in Internet advertising firm DoubleClick Inc."

Known as an "I Dig It" trust--proving that even accountants are not immune from cutesy dot-com-style naming practices--the structure allowed Mr. Romney to skip paying a gift tax rate as high as 55 percent. That adds up to quite a lot of money:

"Romney or his trust received shares in DoubleClick eight months before the company went public in 1998. The trust sold them less than a year after the IPO. The trust’s sale of the DoubleClick stake made it possible to save hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate and gift taxes."

And that is why you do not get to go to Tahoe.

Mr. Netzer

Looking back through the all-too-brief annals of New York tech history, DoubleClick is arguably the city's most successful exit. The company has always been less-famous for the unsexy business of what it does (dynamic ad serving) than for the fact that Google plunked down a jaw-dropping $3.1 billion for it in 2007. It was the spoils from Doubleclick that enabled Kevin Ryan to go on to launch Gilt Groupe, which begat GroupMe, and so on and so forth. Now, another New York City ad-tech startup is hoping to follow DoubleClick's lead.

Yesterday DoubleVerify announced that it picked up $33 million from the likes of First Round Capital and JMI Equity. As co-founder Oren Netzer told VentureBeat, "We had half a dozen offers, but JMI was the best choice for a new partner because they know the space so well. We want to be the next DoubleClick and JMI helped DoubleClick grow and eventually be sold to Google for $3.1 billion.”

DoubleVerify, whose total funding is now $46.5 million, is trying to beat out competitors like fellow New York City startup AdSafe or Seattle's AdXpose in the growing market for ad verification. As the online advertising business booms, publishers, marketers and ad networks are placing increasing importance on keeping track of individual ads. "We can tell you 96 percent of the time where an ad was served. Our closest competitors only have see-through rates between 30 and 70 percent," Mr. Netzer claims. Working in its favor is the fact that its locked down Fortune 500 customers like American Express, Bank of America, Walmart, Wells Fargo, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.

Mr. Netzer's company also happens to be one of the growing number of hybrid start-ups we told you about with its business arm in New York City and its engineering offices in Tel Aviv. So, it looks like it has that "friendly" Israeli mafia thing going for it as well.

Image via Marvel Comics

It was 1995 and Kevin O'Connor was sitting in a basement in suburban Atlanta with Dwight Merriman trying to figure out how to build a business on this new thing called the internet.

"We thought maybe car sales would be big. We figured porn would be huge, but we didn't want to get into that. Eventually we settled on ad sales," says Mr. O'Connor, who along with Dwight Merriman and Kevin Ryan, would go on to build the DoubleClick dynamic ad serving technology that became Silicon Alley's biggest exit and the engine behind Google's profits.

But it almost didn't happen that way, says Mr. O'Connor, who is currently hard at work on FindTheBest, a comparison engine that hopes to combine his deep experience with algorithms and the strength of the social web to provide a service that can help users pick the best private school, find the right netbook and avoid a nasty hotel on vacation.

Mr. O'Connor and his partner Mr. Merriman built the technology for a dynamic ad serving platform in Atlanta, but in 1996 they moved to New York to be close to the action and merged with a local agency called DoubleClick. "We were called the Internet Advertising Network, so clearly they had the better name."

At first times were tough. "At a lot of meetings with ad folks from traditional industries, if you told them the internet was a big opportunity, they just didn't believe you. They thought it was a fad."

By 1997, however, the tide was turning. "Greg Koerner, one of our early sales guys at DoubleClick came to me, he was just shocked. He said, 'Clients are calling me asking to buy ads. That has never happened to me before. I call them, and most of the time they say no.'"

At this point, a large portion of DoubleClick was owned by monster ad agency Bozell, who had cut the young company what was essentially a blank check to scale their technology as quickly as possible. Bozell was interested in selling while the market for dot-com related firms was hot. A number of firms were interested in purchasing DoubleClick. One of the most serious bidders was Yahoo.

"It would have changed the course of internet history," says Mr. O'Connor. At the time Yahoo was still king of search, with its curated portal of links. "They were a top dog then, not an ailing firm. But we were having too much fun and didn't want to sell out." Eventually DoubleClick obtained $80 million funding from Greylock and Bain, allowing the founders to continue running the company and giving them the capital to win in what Mr. O'Connor describes as, "One of the biggest land grabs in history."

As Yahoo struggles to redefine itself as a media company and Google continues to expand its advertising empire into the mobile sector, it's fascinating to look back and imagine what would have happened had thing played out differently. Let us know your thoughts for how this episode of "What If?" would end had Yahoo bought DoubleClick in the comments.

AdMeld CEO Michael Barrett

Last month, the news that Google wanted to acquire New York-based AdMeld, a platform that helps publishers sell display advertising inventory, for $400 million felt a little like deja-vu. After all, it was another local acquisition, Google's $3.2 billion purchase of ad exchange company DoubleClick back in 2007, that helped define Google's dominance in online advertising. Apparently, the Department of Justice felt similar rumblings.

Via its public policy blog, Google reported that the DOJ has issued a "second request" for more information before they sign off. Regulators could be concerned about whether AdMeld (which helps publishers find the best deal on unsold advertising inventory across various ad networks) + DoubleClick = monopoly. On its blog, Google quoted other companies waving their pom-poms at the deal, and ran down a four-point list of why display advertising will still remain competitive, such as:

"In fact, since we announced this acquisition about a month ago, at least three new and expanded platforms for buyers and publishers have been launched. Others continue to grow."

Apparently Google thought it might help to take a jab at AdMeld's business model:

"Analysts have noted that switching suppliers is relatively easy and that this isn’t a 'sticky' business."

Google also tried to couch the request for more information as par for the course of the complex world of display advertising. However, Business Insider notes:

But according to Law.com, only three past Google acquisitions have been subject to this kind of oversight. Two of them, the company's $3.2 billion acquisition of DoubleClick in 2007 and $750 million buy of travel service ITA went through. Both took more than six months to close.

The third case, Google's ad deal with Yahoo in 2008, was abandoned under regulatory scrutiny.

Now Mike Arrington is reporting that Google has plunked down $400 million for New York based AdMeld, which helps publishers to sell their excess inventory across multiple ad networks.

"It's going to be tricky," says ENIAC Venture's Nihal Mehta. "Because now Google will own the platform for helping publishers find the best ad network, while themselves owning one of the major ad networks." 

Google is making a major push beyond the keyword driven advertising into display advertising, recently passing long time leader Yahoo on this front. AdMeld offers to help companies shop the most competitive bids and also sells private advisory service on the side.

According to a few sources AdMeld has some seriously impressive growth over the past year. As long as they can avoid any appearance of impropriety they can now rely on Google's deep pockets to become an even more dominant force.

The company has raised a total of $30 million, so this exit would be a nice win for for the companies venture backers. Again we are told that AdMeld's great growth numbers was the reason Google was willing to pay such a premium.