James Heckman, Founder and CEO of Roundtable

James Heckman is the Founder and CEO of Roundtable (NASDAQ: RTB), an AI-powered, DeFi-enabled media platform designed to give professional media companies and creators greater control over their technology, economics, and distribution, including real-time USDC payments through Coinbase.

A 3+ decade media tech entrepreneur, Heckman has built and led a series of pioneering digital media platforms, taken three companies public and multiple acquisitions, including two ventures sold to Yahoo, and one to News Corp and created market changing innovations for multi-billion public media/tech companies. Roundtable is his tenth enterprise media platform.

Heckman founded Rivals.com, the first large-scale social, subscription, and creator-driven digital publishing platform, backed by SoftBank, Intel, and News Corp and ultimately acquired by Yahoo. He subsequently founded Scout.com, acquired by News Corp; 5to1, acquired by Yahoo; and Maven/Arena, trading on NYSE. Roundtable represents the latest evolution of his enterprise platform vision, deploring AI and DeFi efficiency, and is publicly traded on Nasdaq (RTB).

As head of Global Media Strategy and Innovation at Yahoo, Heckman architected the first global digital advertising alliance with Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft, the original model of the premium advertising marketplace (PMP). 

Previously, as Chief Strategy Officer of News Corp Digital (FIM), he architected the landmark $1 billion Google-MySpace advertising alliance, the first social-targeted ad platform. His strategy team also drafted the original business model for Hulu, the first premium OTT entertainment platform founded by News Corp, Disney, Hearst and NBC.

Since 1991, Heckman’s career has centered on a consistent mission: building single-platform coalition technology and marketplace models that empower professional media brands, to survive within an industry dominated by big tech.   

For Roundtable, that mission evolves to the next generation, combining AI, decentralized financial infrastructure, and enterprise media technology to reduce operating friction, accelerate payments, protect intellectual property, and restore economic sovereignty to professional media.