Professional Gratitude & Learning — PubMatic 🙏

The Chinese proverb, “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now” reminds me of the importance of investing in the future by being grateful today.

The 7th edition of my career gratitude & learning series covers PubMatic, a SaaS leader in the programmatic advertising industry. Today they’re a public company but I joined when there were 10 people working out of an old victorian home basement near downtown Palo Alto in 2009. The bathroom often didn’t work, we were so cramped I took all touch bases in local coffee shops. We had zero ARR.

I learned and grew a ton in the four years on the PubMatic team. We scaled in the US, Europe & Asia. I remember two red-eye flights in the same week pitching major clients, securing our first NY office space subletting a desk from a NY founder friend. When you’re building a product having a global impact, anything is possible and with the right persistence, teamwork, and luck, you can achieve so much. This was my first “basement to scale” experience — the thrill of growth, especially the first $50 million was intoxicating.

There were so many great people I worked with Anand Das, Tom Lorek, Jeanne Houlewing, Bill Nolte, Mukul Kumar, Amar Goel, Eric Klotz, Paulina Klimenko, and many more. The following stood out for outsized contributors to my journey.

• Rajeev Goel — I spent more time on this in a separate post. I learned the value of steady leadership and focused execution.
• Paul Chu — Meticulous business leader, I got a crash course in operational efficiency, and later crypto (BTC in particular). Whenever I need a bit of professional levity, I think about our “Bob & Bob” moment onboarding an acquisition.
• Kevin Weatherman — I inherited Kevin when I joined, he showed me another level of passion, a relentless leader who demonstrated an insatiable intellectual curiosity and capacity to be successful.
• Rajesh Jaisingh — He led our India GTM team, his ability to understand people’s motivations and build a scalable development process was impressive.

The science around the power of gratitude is well known. I just want to thank those people who have helped me on my career journey. 🙏 Thank you all.

I started this series as a roundup.