Build Your Own Desk and Get Scrappy with Jason Spero (VP @ Google, former AdMob GM)
Today on Meet The Operators: Jason Spero, who joined Google in May 2010 as part of the company’s $750M acquisition of AdMob. At AdMob he was VP and General Manager of North America responsible for all P&L and the sales, business development and marketing teams. Jason has a storied history in mobile even prior to AdMob: building some of the first mobile games at Digital Chocolate and the network infrastructure at Openwave.
3 Fun Facts About Jason Spero
- Favorite Comfort Food: A bowl of chili - just about anywhere, anytime.
- Favorite Recent Book: ‘That Used to Be Us’ by Thomas L. Friedman & Michael Mandelbaum
- Favorite Superhero? I was never this sort of mainstream superhero fan of Batman or Superman. I always liked Aquaman or Green Lantern!
Top 5 Questions #MTO Asked Jason
- Background: Can you tell us what it was like in the early days of AdMob (prior getting acquired by Google) What the company was like, what was happening? (5:40 min)
The best story I can tell you is my first day, less than 30 people at AdMob. I walked in thinking I’m the CMO of AdMob. It’s going to be cool. It’s a Sequoia company. This is going to be great. They handed me a box that had my desk in it. My first day I assembled my desk!
I think that was a metaphor for what AdMob was (at the time). We were reading the instructions…sometimes there weren’t any instructions. There wasn’t a playbook in mobile but that was fun. There was this huge opportunity opening up from the carrier centric world to a media business model away from the walled garden. Many companies were there, and we were lucky enough to be there at that moment and had the inventory and had a lot of people that were passionate about what you could get from a header and the information that you can use to try to help a marketer and understand what a user might respond to in that moment. So, we grew up really quickly. Remember, we’re talking about Motorola devices and a high-end device was a Blackberry! There were a lot of Razors, and experience was limited.
We all remember the sort of big bang moment when the iPhone launched and then the app store launched, etc. What I would say more than any technology was having a group of people that cared about the same problem, the same opportunity. We didn’t know what an ad looked like in mobile. We didn’t know how people wanted to buy, price, track, or target in mobile and we learned as we went, as did many others. I have a very warm place in my heart for the “figure it out” time from 2007-2009. After that, it became a scaling problem. There was still a lot to learn, but I have great memories of that time.
2. Culture: Looking back at AdMob, what allowed you guys to learn and scale? Was it something that was conscious at the time or was it just a confluence of things? (7:55 min)
For me, our CEO Omar Hamoui, was a very very humble guy. Curious human being, but very focused. The company was built in his image so I give him a lot of credit for that. We also had a head of sales who taught me the phrase, focus on the second sale. I think culturally at AdMob we weren’t about getting that big buy and convincing people that we thought we knew better. We wanted to be competitive, but we wanted to work with the customer to understand, as we shaped our product. We had a humble culture combined with curiosity, which led us to learn from other models. We were students of watching what had worked at DoubleClick, students of watching what had worked at any number of places. The leadership had come from a bunch of different places. We had minds from Google, Yahoo, a bunch of different places that came together and brought different perspectives on things and we all listened to each other really well.
2a. Culture (Zaw): How did you think about making sure that everyone, every employee felt his/her voice was heard? (9:38 min)
It got harder as we got bigger, but every Friday afternoon meeting we celebrated our wins and we had a gong that we would ring for engineering, shipping, or for customer service hitting a benchmark, or for sales hitting a big goal or a particular deal or something that was hard to crack, or even a big hire. There was a culture everyone wanted to stick around for on Friday evening, etc. Somebody would crank some music and we’d all gather before we took off for the weekend. That was the stand up where people would share and it was open ended. Omar would talk last in that meeting as I remember it, but everybody had an opportunity to stand up to any individual and talk.
3. Hiring: How do you think about building your team, what do you look for in individuals? What are some of the character traits that you tend to focus on more than others? (10:58 min)
I always want to see passion. I’m usually asking people about what gets them so psyched that they jump out of their chair. Or, what gets them angry? What I want to see is passion, I want to see fight and not the rhetorical overplayed question of, “tell me about a time you struggled.”
I want to see fight and I want to see struggle and I think that comes out in your posture. I think it comes out in your tone. I think it comes out in the way people answer other questions beyond their words and the way they answer a question. So, it’s an intangible.
I learned a lot from Cheryl Dalrymple (former AdMob CFO), who I thought had x-ray vision to people’s character, soul and all inner traits. I watched the way Cheryl interviewed and the feedback that she gave and I studied it. I had to practice as an interviewer. I used to want to just have a conversation with somebody and I wasn’t mentally evaluating. It’s a practice to interview and I had mentors, and I would encourage anybody who is managing for the first time, who have not had a lot of hiring experience to seek out people who are great interviewers. I’m looking for some fight and desire.
3a. What have you learned throughout the years of interviewing and hiring?
I’m evolving as I go, and I’m probably getting a little better at spotting it. I do think that I need to meet people when hiring. It’s hard to look at someone’s resume and be like, “That’s the person,” right? Contrary, it’s easy for someone to walk in and talk about the growth at a company that they worked at, etc. I try to get to people’s logic behind a decision. In an interview…
- I want to understand how you made a decision. I’m less interested that you grew something from “X” to “Y” (although that’s important to me).
- I want the anatomy of a big call you made. How did you make that call, what data did you seek out (whether or not you had to talk to experts), and how did you go about that. I want to get deep on the anatomy of that.
- I am less interested in starting at the bottom of your resume. I want to understand how you make decisions.
4. Acquisition (to Google): After being acquired by Google, what are some of the changes you’ve had to make? (14:12 min)
Smaller companies are often command and control environment. By that I mean, if the most senior person makes a call, the team moves. But in a bigger org (like Google), there can be more discussion and people challenging your ideas. It is a very different model.
Personally, I was excited about coming to Google with all the products in Google’s portfolio. To be successful at Google you have to be able to work across organizational lines, to be able to work with product + marketing + regional organizations. For example, we’ve got more people in Indonesia than we ever would have had at AdMob. That was growth for me and I consciously chose that.
What I will also say is I think I’ve been very lucky with mobile in that I’ve caught the same wave multiple times. I got to Google at the right time all of Google’s consumer facing properties were starting to show the trend lines that said that this was a macro-trend.
We saw this in YouTube and Search and Maps and all the places Google engages the customer with the penetration of smartphones. We saw the curves that are part of the history lesson, but while we were in it, there weren’t that many people that came in and could speak about what you do about that. “How to take a customer base and educate them, how to take a product set and try to pivot it, and how to take an org that was built to scale desktop products, particularly Search.”
At that point in time, mobile wasn’t cross-functional across different products. Within the business org that I joined, I was asked to lead a mobile sales org. At first we sold search and display which were big enough businesses as you think about YouTube, eventually DoubleClick stacks and analytics. We grew as a mobile team within Google that was initially called in for “mobile-only conversations.” There was this ongoing dialog about how that balance with the larger sales org needed to get out of the specialist model and every single employee across sales, product, and marketing, etc. needed to have a cross-functional approach and ultimately needed to lead with mobile. That took multiple years…I’m not going to say we did that overnight.
4a. Staying Ahead: In terms of moving to mobile and cross functional products…was that due to customers or experimental budget?
(17:10 min)
We had gotten beyond an experimental budget, but we were ahead of our customers. It was a really hard pivot four plus years ago. We had gotten out of experimental budgets and display was a big business by that point, but it was a big business as an upsell on a desktop business. We had to make some tough calls, and I really give a lot of that credit to Sridhar Ramaswamy, Susan Wokjcicki, and others who made that call before we were seeing customers try to pull that through. Before that, we were seeing customers really try to understand what to do with a click. Pretty much all of our customers didn’t know what to do with that click, what to target, what to measure, etc.
The four to five years since has been building out mobile. The world knows App Install is mobile, but there’s so much more. Mobile is going to be this massive commerce platform. Mobile’s going to be this massive intersection with the physical world. It’s the place where the digital intersects the physical. We know that it’s a multi-device journey and, I’d say, we’re more than four years into building the products to help enable customers on that, but when we started, nobody was asking for them.
5. Scale: How do you compare scaling at AdMob (prior acquisition) vs Google? What are some key lessons you can share with us? (18:50 min)
If you’d taken me out of AdMob and dropped me in my current role (with Google), I would have failed. There is an approach and a process that you learn by working within Google that allowed me to grow as a person by observing different leaders who taught me about leading with influence as opposed to necessarily that command and control authority.
Google is a functional organization. One of the things that was a big transition for me in landing was I got here and all of a sudden I had functional pieces. I had a sales organization. I had a marketing organization that supported me, but they didn’t report to me. I had a comms organization that reported to the greater Google Comms org, and that is something you need in an org our size because you can’t have 19 different comms orgs. You need one comms org. The ability to pull people around the table who are buying into your ideas, but not telling them to do it because they work for you is a very different skill set.
That means (and this is central to the Google culture), you always have to bring data. You always have to state your assumptions. You always have to explain your logic as opposed to the “I told you so…” It doesn’t work here at Google. You’re leading here on the quality of your ideas and on your track record of being right or wrong. That was a skill that I first had to identify that I needed and then ultimately invest in. It comes back to where the good ideas come from. It doesn’t always come top down and you have to be able to recognize those and have a debate.
So, it takes some courage but junior people can call out the ideas if the assumptions are wrong here. I had to think about how to state my assumptions and try to get buy in. If I didn’t get buy in, work with the managers, the people I needed to. Ultimately, if they disagreed, I needed to get on board and move forward. That is a very different skill set than the entrepreneurial environment. It can take a bit longer, but in the end I think we make better decisions.
6. Start-up Advice: How does a founder apply “Google” type decision making? How do you recommend implementing a slimmed down version of the OKRs? (21:54 min)
Leading a team through influence is so much more powerful because if you can convince them with influence, you never have to use your authority and that is soft power. You can reserve that, “Hey, I made this call and we’re going to go,” but that will only take people so far. This should be a lesson to any small or large company. Invest that time to let your team know why you’re doing what you’re doing.
At AdMob, we did a six month check. But if I did it over, I would start from the top of the organization. Leaders need to state “This year is about X,” and everything should waterfall from the top objective. Everybody in the org down to the individual contributors should be able to relate what they are doing. All of that should relate back to the goal that the CEO is setting and the CEO should get the buy in from the Board and that should help with Board management as well.
Bonus: Words of wisdom to the young CEO, founder as they’re starting their company?
- Seek out people who have experience. Seek out people who’ve seen it before, but don’t assume that they know the answer.
- Seek out as much data as you can. You’re going to make better decisions.
- It’s a bit of a cliché, but truer than ever. It’s about the people you hire, the culture you build. You will learn from them.
