Matthew Novick traces one of his earliest business lessons not to a boardroom, but to a furniture store in Portland, Maine. Growing up in his family’s business, he learned how to read credit reports, price products, and assess who was “credit worthy,” skills that showed him how decisions affect a business long before he ever closed a set of books, Novick tells us.
That operational grounding followed him into finance. Early roles at IBM and AOL put him on both the expense and revenue sides of the P&L, including sales operations and compensation design. Those experiences shaped his belief that finance is not just about counting dollars, but understanding what the numbers actually mean, he tells us. “If you don’t understand what goes into closing those books… you’re never actually going to understand your business,” he says.
Read MoreHis path accelerated quickly. After leaving AOL, Novick joined Magnetic, where he became VP of Finance and then the company’s first CFO in his early 30s. Since then, he has moved through multiple CFO chapters across ad tech and data-driven businesses, refining how he partners with CEOs. That partnership, he explains, is central—so central that he once flew across the country to spend two days with a CEO before accepting a role, Novick tells us.
A defining strategic moment came at PlaceIQ, when the company received an unexpected inbound acquisition inquiry. Preparing to assess synergies, unit economics, and whether “one plus one really equals three” reshaped how he thinks about strategy and readiness, Novick tells us. Today, as CFO of TripleLift, that mindset carries forward—pairing operational fluency with disciplined decision-making in an increasingly complex, AI-influenced finance landscape.
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CFOTL: Matt, for those who may not know the company, can you walk us through what TripleLift does and how it makes money?
Novick: Sure. TripleLift is a creative supply-side platform. We’re helping redefine digital advertising for both publishers and advertisers by delivering high-quality, creative-first ad experiences. We connect the supply and demand sides and help publishers monetize their inventory—mostly through programmatic advertising. We’re not a managed media business or a direct-sold business; we focus on programmatic, brand-safe user experiences. We use creative formats like pause ads in CTV, native, and display to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time with the right message. We’ve also been early in supporting Amazon ads and responsive e-commerce units, which has been a differentiator as we’ve diversified into retail media. We were originally known for native, but we’ve expanded into CTV and high-impact display, while continuing to connect publishers, marketers, agencies, advertisers, and end users.
CFOTL: Which part of the model do you find yourself spending the most time explaining to stakeholders?
Novick: More than anything, it’s our creative units. You’re taking supply from publishers and connecting it to agencies that are buying that supply, but what sits in the middle—our “secret sauce”—is the creative. It’s about delivering better experiences for the end user, the person who may ultimately buy the product. So I spend time explaining how our creative units fit into a page, how they fit into the ecosystem, and how they get delivered.
CFOTL: How would you describe an abbreviated history of the capital structure?
Novick: We’re actually private equity-backed at this point. The company was founded about 13 or 14 years ago and was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2021. Before that, it was venture-backed, but since the acquisition we’ve been private equity-backed for the next stage of growth. We’ve moved from a “grow, grow, grow” mindset to more sustained growth, with a sharper focus on how profitability interacts with growth in a private equity context versus a venture context. I’ve worked in both venture and private equity, and today we’re thinking strategically about what the next stage looks like—whether that’s becoming a public company, bringing in a new sponsor, pursuing a strategic option, or doing inorganic growth alongside organic growth. It’s a really exciting time to be here.
CFOTL: When you think about the health of the business, what metrics matter most to you as CFO?
Novick: I think about it in two parts. Our “gasoline” is the supply side—what level of supply we have, who our publishers are, and whether they’re premium. Then on the buy side, we look at what we’re selling, which is often programmatic. For example, we sell our pause ads in the CTV ecosystem programmatically, and we were one of the first ad tech players to do that. From there, it’s about who’s buying, what they’re buying, and what that demand looks like—across clients, agencies, and sectors. We look at retention from both an agency and client perspective, growth by client and by agency, and penetration across both. We also focus on upsells and the difference between gross retention and net retention. Because we’re in an ad ecosystem, it’s less like traditional SaaS retention, but we adapt SaaS-style metrics so we can really understand our clients and our broader ecosystem.
TripleLift | www.triplelift.com | New York, NY