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How did your team kick Googles ass at advertising. Any lessons you can share ?

• benreesman 4y ago
  There’s a bunch of technical auction theory and ML stuff that’s semi-germane, but mostly it was Sheryl breaking ranks with a wage-fixing cartel. Google and Apple and Pixar and a dozen other companies have been found guilty in court of various “no poach” arrangements and other wage suppression collusion, and so here comes Sheryl offering twice the TC and raising the hiring bar accordingly. FB in 2008-2012 was harder to get into than Harvard and paid better. So we were better, and the novelty of the situation created a camaraderie that had everyone sleeping at the office with the singular focus of putting Vic G out of a job. There’s a lot of structural nuance and important details but it was an absurdly elite group of people who hadn’t been disillusioned yet and we forced Google’s jaws open wide enough that there are now 2 panopticon ads businesses instead of 1. Antonio García Martínez wrote a great book about it called “Chaos Monkeys” if you’re a long-form reader.