InMobi

How I landed in ad tech

After the University of Arizona, Eller College of Management, I spent the summer of 2011 looking for a way into the startup world. It came from InMobi, which hired me as a business-development contractor on its North America team in San Mateo. I moved to San Francisco about six days later (3 days to pack, a 10-hour drive, and a temporary place for the first few weeks that I found through my network).

At the time InMobi was the world's largest independent mobile ad network, serving over 50 billion impressions a month, with offices in Bangalore, London, Singapore, Tokyo and Johannesburg and its North America HQ in San Mateo. I joined the BD team (business development, which here meant signing up the apps and publishers that showed InMobi's ads) and reported to Archie O'Connor, who ran business development for North America.

The hiring moved fast. I interviewed with Archie and Peter Bassett, who ran sales and ad operations, on September 20, then had a follow-up with Tracie Tunnell the next day. I started on October 11, and Brittany Solomon, the sales coordinator, sent over my training packet that week.

What I walked into

The BD team was signing name-brand publishers like ABC News, CNN, Fox News, NY Post, Wall Street Journal, WebMD, CNBC, Warner Brothers/TMZ and Flixster, all of them making money from their mobile apps through InMobi's network. Deals were usually a revenue share (typically 60/40) with an eCPM minimum guarantee, a promised floor on what the publisher earned per 1,000 ad impressions.

The team was split into West and East regions, with daily stand-ups, weekly pipeline tracking and an RFP process for the bigger accounts. Our weekly BD meetings covered pipeline reviews, Q4 planning, org chart changes and prep for leadership visits, and when Amit, InMobi's founder, came to the office for Q4 planning week, we spent days getting the presentations ready.

My job was to find and close publishers, then help them through the SDK integration (the code that puts the ads in their app) and get the ad placements right. Most days were Salesforce, email sequences and client calls. I was adding 5 or 6 accounts a day to Salesforce, and since it was hard to tell which ones someone else was already working, I stepped on a few toes. So I learned fast how to pitch clearly, keep a pipeline clean and keep up with a team moving across a lot of time zones.

Beyond the desk

Outside the office I went to every event I could find: Mobile Mondays, startup crawls, industry meetups. At Mobile Monday on November 7 I was there representing InMobi, in a room about 10x bigger than the Portland version. In mid-November I went to a Start-up Crawl with Tim O'Neil from our BD team, and met Peter Conte from Grubb & Ellis, who followed up right after.

Tim ended up being one of the most important connections of my career. He referred me into Pocket Change, joined me there the next summer and stayed in my orbit for years after. That's how San Francisco worked for me. As I wrote a couple of years later, "The hardest, yet most important part of it all, is just showing up." Once you did, doors opened.

Why I left

What I really wanted was a seat at an early-stage startup, building my experience from the ground up. InMobi was a great crash course, but it was a global company with hundreds of employees. About two months in, I was recruited to Pocket Change, a tiny startup backed by Google Ventures and First Round Capital, where I would be the fifth hire. That was exactly the opportunity I came to SF for.

My Pocket Change account was created on December 15, my last day at InMobi was Friday, December 16, and I started at Pocket Change the Monday after.

What it meant

InMobi was only 2 months, but everything that followed started there. It was my first look at mobile advertising from the inside: how ad networks work, how publishers make money from their apps, how a revenue-share deal gets structured, and what it takes to keep up inside a fast-moving global company.

It's where I met Tim O'Neil, where I learned to build and manage a sales pipeline from scratch, and where I got comfortable pitching on client calls. It also got me into mobile ad tech, where I spent the next 6 years before co-founding Pixly.