7 Lessons from 7 Years

This month marks seven years since Tim Cadogan and I created OpenX as an enterprise ad tech company, bringing our collective experience in search and advertising at GoTo.com/Overture and Yahoo! to a new venture in the nascent, and at the time mostly uninvented, world of programmatic advertising. As I reflect on these last seven years there are several clear lessons that stand out and may be useful to any startup team, adtech or otherwise.

1. Have a very clear purpose and vision.  

The mission is vital. Strategy, plans and tactics inevitably evolve when they come into contact with reality. Clarity and repetition are key to staying on track. One of our simple yet most successful actions for ensuring that everyone at OpenX is crystal clear about the what and the why of OpenX is starting every single company meeting with a review of our mission and strategy. We exist to help publishers build their businesses by monetizing great content. We achieve this by building awesome programmatic marketplaces. It’s that simple.

2.  Build killer products.

Be relentless about bringing innovative, differentiated products to market.  Technology companies are only as good as what they build and what their customers buy. Period.

3.  Build a world-class team. 

This is one area where ‘good enough’ just doesn’t apply. Nothing happens without top talent, and it’s important to bring in the right types of people for the two main phases of an emerging company’s evolution, each requiring a different mix and profile of talented people:

            -  Startup.  Here’s where you want rule breakers, big company outcasts, creative innovators, wildcatters, in-the-trenches brawler types that start each day questioning the status quo and who personify grit and determination.  These people have something to prove and live for changing the world.  The startup environment is one place where they really thrive.  Find them. Hire them. Let them run. They’ll sniff out the high potential areas until they hit paydirt again and again and again.

            - Scale up.  Once your tenacious team has built a product, refined its value proposition and started to get real customer adoption and rapid growth, it is time to bring in the operators: the people who know how to set up a business to scale because they have done it before.

This part of a company’s evolution is vital, because usually the startup folks have never successfully scaled a business past a certain point, and they typically don’t have the operating skills, experience or orientation to navigate the company through deeper waters.

A corollary to this lesson: when you bring in the later stage team folks they tend to bring in more like them and soon, operators will outnumber the startup folks creating a potentially alienating culture shift. Startup folks don’t always fit into a company culture facilitated by operators—their PowerPoint’s aren’t as neat, they often don’t think in a traditional, structured way, and they might not always make it to meetings on time. 

However, by building an inclusive, listening, and collaborative culture from the beginning (not that hard, startup types generally don’t need an invitation to weigh in with their opinions) you terraform a team that values and embraces a diverse range of talent profiles. Together, the wild-eyed status quo questioners and excel wizards balance each other out, creating an environment where people “think different” and execute well, contributing the skills and attributes that often come from completely different types of people. This is an important aspect of workplace diversity--achieving a harmonic balance between the startup types and the operator types. At OpenX we’ve found that frequent happy hours help.

4.  Don’t be an asshole.  

Culture is driven from the top down, so if your company leadership is arrogant, there’s a good chance people under that leadership team will model that behavior. And who wants to work for or with a company led by, and full of, arrogant assholes? It’s a risk to recruiting and revenue; being an asshole is not only disrespectful, it’s destructive.

5.  Never, ever give up.

Businesses are damn hard to build.  There is no list of ‘must haves’ to ensure a company succeeds. You just have to have grit and indomitable perseverance. Because you can count on one thing, no matter what industry you’re in, no matter what stage of business your company is at:  Stuff will go wrong and there will be dark, make-or-break periods where you’ll have to derive strength from an unknowable source. Mostly that means that you’ll need to show up ever day no matter what, put one foot in front of the other, stay positive and keep moving forward until something breaks open.

But it’s important to note that grit is best applied with a cool head. Like Clint Eastwood, you can’t lose your cool, and you can never let ‘em see you sweat.

6.  Listen to your customers, and hire people who listen to your customers.  

The best BD and sales people in the world do a lot more listening than talking, and this simple yet critical skill can fundamentally change your company.  As I discussed in a previous post, Sales and the Art of Listening, the idea for our real-time bidded marketplace (now known as programmatic advertising, which is reinventing how display advertising is bought and sold on all connected screens worldwide) evolved from a conversation with a customer.

At OpenX, our brand and culture revolve around openness, listening and a non-salesy, collaborative relationship with our customers. While we insist that our sales and BD teams must always “be the expert,” we also drill on the ability to ask good questions and really listen and value what our customers and partners have to say.

7.  Be humble.  Have fun.

One of my mentors has a saying:  "ego kills.”  I’ve seen this truth play out more times than I can count, at every level.  But what does it really mean in the context of building or operating a startup?   More than anything, I think it means to be open and approachable, and to value what others have to say or contribute.  In the end, this ain’t a game of “I”, it’s a game of “we,” and true leaders don’t serve their own egos, they serve other people—employees, customers, shareholders and the industry and community.

And through the journey you have to remember to have some fun. In the first days at OpenX--our CEO, Tim Cadogan, brought in his ping-pong table to our modest office, which led to raucous company-wide trash talking tournaments (where, by the way, I kicked Tim’s ass on a regular basis—on his own table no less!). We’ve never lost that element of having fun at work; we like to laugh at ourselves and do fun things like the Icebucket Challenge on our president and CEO at company meetings, and we hold great events and retreats with our customers and partners.

Those are my 7 lessons of 7 wild years at an adtech startup: If you’re crystal clear about your company mission; if you can attract a world class team of creative, disciplined operators; if you can build great products and grit your way through the hard times, and then be humble on the other side while always listening to your customers and having fun along the way then you’ve got yourself a truly significant foundation upon which you can continue to create industry accelerating technology and services embraced by your colleagues, your customers, and your investors.