Teamwork, trust and collaboration are key to helping a startup grow in a constantly changing marketplace, Advertising.com chief executive Lynda Clarizio '82 said at a Feb. 7 talk.February 8, 2008 by Hilary Parker (permalink) (watch the video)
Teamwork, trust and collaboration are key to helping a startup grow in a constantly changing marketplace, Advertising.com chief executive Lynda Clarizio '82 said at a Feb. 7 talk.
"It's not about individual contribution," Clarizio said. "You can't make anything successful unless you have teamwork."
In her talk, "Advancing a Startup: Becoming a Big Business," Clarizio shared insights from her experiences at Advertising.com since joining the company as CEO in 2006 with a mandate to grow the organization.
"How do you achieve great results?" she asked. "You have to make sure everyone understands how their work contributes to the success of the business."
The talk was part of the "Leadership in a Technological World" lecture series, sponsored by Princeton's Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. The annual series is underwritten by the William Pierson Field Lectureship fund.
Prior to joining the Baltimore-based Advertising.com, Clarizio spent seven years at AOL, holding a variety of senior positions, including executive vice president of AOL's audience business and senior vice president for corporate strategic and financial planning. Before joining AOL, she was a partner in the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Arnold & Porter. She is on the board of Human Rights First and the Princeton University Women in Leadership Steering Committee.
Advertisting.com is the largest online display advertising marketplace in the United States and Europe, supplying more than 2.5 billion ad impressions from 1,000 advertisers to some 8,000 websites every day. The technology at the core of the company's success is a complicated computer system, called Adlearn, which optimizes ad placement to produce the advertisers' desired results.
Designing computer systems to keep pace with the ever-changing Internet is a never-ending task, said Clarizio, noting that Advertising.com, Google and eBay have all had to overcome challenges during growth when existing systems couldn't handle the additional demand.
"Scale is really, really important," she said, emphasizing that start-ups should start preparing early on for a time when they'll be running billions of transactions every day. "It's all about scale and planning for future growth."
As important as growth is to a venture's success, Clarizio said managers must be prepared to navigate potential problems wrought by a changing company. One of the biggest challenges is to preserve the entrepreneurial spirit and avoid developing a bureaucratic corporate culture.
"Always keep small teams. And empower them," Clarizio said, discussing the importance of ensuring that employees can accomplish tasks without becoming entangled in bureaucratic red tape.
An inclusive environment is another "must," she said, referring to Advertising.com's practice of giving out silly awards to build team spirit as well as the company's daily morning meeting, which is led by the most junior people in the company.
But at the end of the day, and regardless of any past or current success, a company's continued progress in today's technological marketplace is never a foregone conclusion, Clarizio concluded.
"There is nothing more dynamic than the Internet, nothing changing as quickly as Internet advertising," she said. "You never can rest, you have to constantly be thinking about what you can do next. You have to be able to respond to changes in this industry every day."