hi there. i'm aaron.
Hi there. I'm Aaron Sonnenberg. I work at Blip and live in Greenpoint. You can find me on flickr, twitter or e-mail me at: aaron/at/blip/dot/com
This is home, and this is everything.
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Q. Tell me about the culture of AdMob. What’s it like to work there?
A. We’ve been really fortunate in almost every point in our history, but we spend a great amount of time talking about everything that’s wrong. Not because we’re trying to be negative. You can only talk for so long about what’s going well and have it be useful. You can be a lot more productive if you spend time on the things that aren’t going well.
When we would have visitors come to our board meetings, I would have to spend time prepping them ahead of time, basically telling them: “Don’t worry. The company’s not falling apart. Everything’s going fine. This is just how we are.”
It just means that nobody at AdMob is shy to point out a problem or an issue with a product or service, even if it’s a product or service that they didn’t build or they don’t own or doesn’t fall within their domain. People aren’t shy about bringing up these issues and being fairly demanding that we solve them. I think that that’s led to us being very proactive. We’re just very, very upfront about those things.
Part of that has to do with what I talked about earlier in terms of insecurity. When people are insecure, they just tend to hide and bury those things. The bad news eventually comes out, but it comes out all at once, and in sort of catastrophic form. I’m just much more in favor of conveying all the bad news in real time. Because if you feel like you know everything that’s wrong and there’s nothing hidden there, there is a lot of comfort to that.
If everybody at the company can feel that they’re not putting their jobs in peril by relaying those kinds of things, then you really do get a pretty accurate picture.
It comes back to direct conversations. I think when people actually spend less time worrying about what this person said to this person, and you actually get them in a room and they talk to each other, in a lot of cases, you’re able to resolve those things and actually come to a solution that works for the entire company.
Corner Office - At AdMob, a CEO With a Portable Desk - Interview - NYTimes.com
Interesting to hear about the company culture at AdMob. Not sure about a culture of constant negativity - don’t think it’s the best way to motivate people - but somewhere in between, there has to be a happy medium…
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kenyatta reblogged this from asonnenberg and added:
As everybody who works with me knows, I’m critical because I care. -kc.
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