Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Insights and Opinions: Get Out Of The Office!
For our Insights and Opinions section today, we have a post from Frank Addante , CEO and founder of Rubicon Project, which provides online ad optimization technology to publishers. Frank is a successful, serial entrepreneur, and tells about his experience growing Rubicon from a small startup to a much larger team.
I run a very different company today than I did a year ago. Running a global company with multiple product lines, a much larger team (spread out in offices around the globe) and hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through our platform has completely changed the dynamics of the business and my role has needed to change in it, accordingly. Personally, this has been a big shift for me, and one that came quite rapidly. I could have never planned for Rubicon's rapid success and the last thing on my mind was how to plan for the evolution of my role within it. In short, I've had to go from playing "running back", to "quarterback" to now "coach." There is a big difference from "doing things" and "being responsible for things getting done" and it's a difficult switch for scrappy entrepreneurs (who are used to doing everything themselves in the beginning) to make. Two years ago, I was building desks along with my co-founder Craig to keep our engineers building, our sales people selling and our support team servicing. It was the right thing to do at the time. Today, the company footprint is very different, its goals are more complex, the risks in the business are intensified, the opportunities are greater and more plentiful and I have a lot more people to answer to as the overall equity value of the company has dramatically increased (investors, employees, shareholders, etc.) (More...)
Read the rest of Frank's post.