Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…And they were taking all that inventory effectively from Overture, who was AOL’s partner before this. That’s exactly right. This is also where Sheryl Sandberg really makes her Mark. She joined, David, as you mentioned, sometime in the last year, right around when Eric Schmidt joined or right after that. She was looking for the right job to do. She’s poking around the company. I think she’s a business unit manager or something like that, but Google didn’t really have business units. Omid sits down with her and says, you’re looking for a big job, right? and she says yes. He said, we have this huge AOL deal that we just signed. We have a ton of new advertisers and a bunch of categories that we have no idea how to service. We need an army of people to handle these thousands of new advertisers. They have to be smart and they have to be adaptable because we have no systems built for this yet. Then over time, they’re going to have to figure out how to scale themselves so that we’re not constantly hiring more people. They need to feed ideas into our technology organizations to make it so that we get more leverage off of the people that we hire. She basically hired all these great people, built out the entire AdWord sales function to service this monster AOL deal. That was what she did at Google before going and becoming COO at Facebook. We’ll talk about that on the next Google episode here. This also (I think) as Google’s digesting this deal and realizing the huge strategic value of it, this really gives them license to then go play offense on traffic acquisition everywhere. Basically the light bulb now goes off of if we can have Google search, paid and organic, be part of the user experience anywhere on the Internet, we should do everything possible to do that because it will build our liquidity pool and our business, and we will just monetize the Internet.…

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