Article and picture courtesy of the NYT

Q. What were some important leadership lessons for you?

A. A few things were formative for me in terms of leadership. The first is probably my parents. My mother was a teacher and my father was a physician.

In the case of my father, it really was just understanding more about how you balance the need to really care for people and where they were headed with the need to sometimes provide them with either news that they’re not really interested in hearing or advice that they might not be interested in following.

My mother actually spent a lot of time teaching adults, not children. A lot of it was really about the interpersonal relationships, the interpersonal dynamics. When you’re younger, being around your parents, you pick up things that you don’t necessarily know you’re picking up.

Q. What else?

A. I also got my black belt in tae kwon do by my junior year of high school, and I started teaching classes. So I was put into an environment where I had to be in charge of a large group of people, most of whom were older than me. That was a pretty formative experience in terms of understanding the dynamics of being able to motivate and help guide people along.

I think martial arts are interesting in that a lot of the bluster and bravado isn’t really present, and actually looked down upon. It’s really more about your performance and what you’re able to do during a competition. I would say that leads to a more quiet, humble, but at the same time pretty aggressive way of competing.

Q. And what about the experience of teaching older students?

A. I became pretty comfortable with being in a situation that doesn’t, on the surface of it, look right. If you were to walk into the studio and see a 16-year-old kid teaching a class of 20- and 30-year-olds, as well as some younger students, it really didn’t appear on the surface to make that much sense. But I got comfortable with the notion that you can be an effective leader without necessarily having the gray hairs.

Q. You’ve been involved mostly with start-ups, but you also spent some time working at Sony Pictures as a developer. What did you learn from that?

A. I feel like a lot of people who gravitate toward start-ups have this aversion to large companies. I really had a lot of fun there and learned a lot. I tried to remove myself from the big-company politics and learn about how large companies work.

Rather than be very stressed about some V.P. who was fighting with another V.P., or one group getting this product or service, I just felt like I was observing and learning and being more clinical about it.

This sounds sort of sinister, but it wasn’t. I got to the point where I tried to make things happen just to see if I could make them happen — as opposed to for any specific purpose — because I was just interested in the machinations of a larger company.

I learned a lot about politics in corporations. It served me well because when you get to the point where you’re not insecure and afraid about your job, and you’re not worried about every small detail, and you don’t really internalize everything that’s happening at work, you really can take a far more level-headed approach. I think people see that and appreciate it.

Q. So what did you learn about large corporations?

A. Two really key things. One was that insecurity is incredibly damaging in a corporate environment. You end up making really poor decisions, a lot of things you do are based on fear, and eventually it will fail. When people are playing defense and they’re primarily focused on their own jobs, it ultimately ends up being a sort of losing strategy.

The second thing is that there’s a lot of time wasted in conversations that don’t happen face-to-face. When there are backroom conversations and dealings — as opposed to direct conversations — it’s less efficient and you get poorer outcomes. People could spend weeks building these political coalitions rather than just having a direct conversation.

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.

Q. Your company is growing quickly. How do you stay in touch with what people are thinking and saying?

A. I think a lot of it is informal. If you make yourself available to people, they’ll tell you what they think. I hear a lot both from my direct reports as well as from people generally at AdMob about how things are going. That has to do with sort of making sure that people are comfortable talking.

I don’t have an office. We have an open office here. I also move my desk around. About every six weeks or so I just move to another part of the company that I feel I haven’t heard a lot about lately or don’t know the people that well in, and I just sort of sit there.

My whole desk construct is nomadic. I just pick up my computer and sit somewhere else. If people see you just sitting there and you’re not doing anything, they walk up to you and talk to you. It’s pretty effective in terms of hearing how things are going and how people are feeling about the company or how people are feeling about you.

Q. What feedback have you heard in your 360 reviews?

A. The most common feedback I got was that I needed to be more positive and praise people more when things are going well. It’s fine to make people comfortable with talking about what’s negative, but if you yourself aren’t really acknowledging the good things, that tends to eventually wear on people.

One of the other things we did based on that feedback was we got this giant gong. It ended up becoming a pretty important part of the culture for anything good that was happening. There’ll just be a note that goes out to the entire office.

We get everybody in the room, and then we will gong, and we’ll say, “We launched this new product,” “we did this big sale” or “we got this big deal.” It became a really, really important part of our culture. It definitely became a nice symbol of the things that were going well.

Q. How often would you gather for a gong?

A. It varied, but probably once or twice a month.

Q. Who decides what’s gong-worthy?

A. There’s just sort of a collective intelligence about what’s gong-worthy because you don’t want to assemble everybody to talk about something that was commonplace. We had a gong when we hit our 10 billionth ad, then we had another gong when we hit our 100 billionth ad. But we didn’t gong every 10 billion along the way. It has to be special.

We do have one epic gong, which is the triple gong, which is basically if something completely monumental happened, you would hit the gong three times in a row. It basically gets louder and louder each time. That we reserve for only very special occasions.

Q. How do you hire?

A. The types of people I ended up hiring myself are the kinds of people that I feel like I’ve known for a long time even when I’ve only just met them. It really has a lot to do with gut feel, and it really has to do with interpersonal dynamics.

I’m interested in somebody having the requisite experience, I’m interested in them having a background that reflects the fact that they’re aggressive and they want to get things done, but the thing I’m most interested in is how the interpersonal dynamics play out and whether I’m comfortable, and whether I feel like they would be a value-add to the culture and to the dynamics of the company.

You know how it is when you meet people and you feel like you’ve known them for 10 years? That’s not the case with most people, but it does happen with some people, and those are the kind of people that I hire.

Q. Is there anything unusual about the way you manage your time?

A. I like to have a lot of free time. I don’t mean free time like I sit at my desk and do nothing, but I don’t like days that are back-to-back meetings. I always leave time on the calendar to just walk around and bug people, and just ask them how things are going. Sort of, “Do you have a sec?” is kind of like the AdMob tagline. Everybody walks by everybody’s desk and like, “Hey, you have a sec?” I like to be able to participate in that. I literally just walk around and pick a person and talk to them about how things are going. I end up spending a decent portion of my day doing that.

Q. What’s your best career advice?

A. Don’t be afraid. What I mean by that is lots and lots of decisions are made by fear and they’re made by people who think they have more to lose than they actually have to lose.

When you’re just graduating from college, there are so many people who want to start something. They’re worried if I do this I can’t get a job, how will I live, this and that. They have very little at that point that is really going to be risked for them to sort of make a bold try.

I mean, ultimately, if it doesn’t work out, if they were employable in the first place, they’ll still be employable afterward, and they’ll be able to do something. They aren’t going to live in a cardboard box in the street.

I think business school students are comical in this area. If you go to business school or probably law school or any professional school with these highly motivated people, they are stressed out of their minds. Like, they’re going to be homeless if they don’t get an internship in the summer.

You’re going to be O.K. But everybody just has a very hard time calculating the actual risk. People just greatly miscalculate risk, in my opinion. They are too afraid of things.

Or even when they’re at a job, they might have a controversial point of view or a controversial decision, and they’re so scared of getting fired that they don’t actually try and act on that.

I think that’s harder to say in this environment, given the economy and where unemployment is. Perhaps that needs to factor into people’s risk assessment. But on the whole, many professional people are more worried and more afraid than they should be.