MoPub Founder Jim Payne Joins Board Of Ad Analytics Company Metamarkets

Following last month’s announcement of $15 million in new funding, analytics company Metamarkets is bringing someone new onto its board of directors — Jim Payne, founder and former CEO of MoPub, the mobile ad company acquired by Twitter.

Payne left his full-time role at Twitter last fall, and since then, it sounds like he’s been focused on making angel investments and advising startups.

Payne joins Roger Ehrenberg of IA Ventures, Jeff Epstein of Bessemer Venture Partners, and Mike Kourey of Khosla Ventures on the Metamarkets board. CEO Mike Driscoll explained that Payne will be filling the board’s independent seat: “We were looking to bring someone in with real operational expertise.”

Payne added, “I never had really had an independent board director when I was building MoPub. There were plenty of times when I would have appreciated having someone who’d been through it before.” He also said this is his first independent board seat.

Payne actually became familiar with Metamarkets back in 2011, when MoPub was “just five people” and started using Metamarkets’ analytics. It soon became “an indispensable tool,” allowing the MoPub team to track traffic and revenue, and even to make broader policy decisions, like how to work with different ad platforms.

Other clients include Vungle, Millennial Media, and the Financial Times. Payne suggested that the company’s technology could actually apply to areas beyond ad tech.

“It seems to me like it would be relevant to any marketplace, anything with that same real-time dynamic and a lot of events happening in a short amount of time,” he said.

Driscoll agreed that Metamarkets might be useful for analyzing things like user engagement and mobile payments, and he said the company is looking at “adjacencies to type of data we’ve built today.”

“But we also know the value of focus,” he said. “We will continue to build out the business in the space that we’re in.”