Slade Smith (B’06)

CSO, DRIVEPG; CMO, PRYORHEALTH; ADJUNCT PROFESSOR, USC ANNENBERG SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATIONS

Slade has spent the last 15 years in ad tech and startups, after participating in Teach for America following his graduation from Georgetown.

Currently, Slade is on the Board of Directors and serves as the CMO of PryorHealth, an expanding healthcare platform in aesthetics & plastic surgery; serves as the Chief Strategy Officer of DrivePG, an Amazon advertising partner and retail media agency; and is an Adjunct Professor in the Masters in Digital Media Management at USC's Annenberg School of Communication.

Slade loves to help build the startup ecosystem by angel investing, advising startups, mentoring in accelerators, and helping facilitate a founder community called Chicken or the Egg. Slade has also lived and participated in the startup & tech ecosystems of San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Austin, & now Los Angeles and is happy to share his experiences and connections.

Most recently, Slade served as managing partner at Stackmatix, a digital growth agency focused on helping startups to grow through advertising, marketing, sales, and engineering. Stackmatix works with companies from pre-seed to pre-IPO.

Prior to Stackmatix, Slade’s experience involved both big tech and startups with stints at Yahoo! and Amazon in sales & account management, business development & strategy, and helping to roll out new ad products & operations.

Slade was also the first employee at two prior startups. MightyHive was an ad tech company focused on programmatic advertising, where he led the revenue side of the company and helped it to expand to 500 clients, 10,000 advertisers, and a presence on every continent except Antarctica. MightyHive had a very successful exit to Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital, which rebranded to Monks this year and is quickly changing the agency world.

At the second, FreemarketsAI, Slade was the COO of an AI-enhanced investing platform that unfortunately tried to start raising new funds the same week that New York shut down due to COVID. So, Slade has been on both sides of startup success and failure and can relate to many of both the joys and difficulties of being an entrepreneur.

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