I still remember the immense pride I felt 15 years ago when I checked our log files and saw that we were serving 1,000 impressions per day. Today we’re serving more than 300 billion impressions every day.
This is a true testament to the phenomenal engineers with whom I have the pleasure of working. Our engineers have built our products, but they’ve also built a culture of curiosity, innovation, and teamwork. And this is the foundation of PubMatic’s success.
Lessons Learned
PubMatic started small – we started coding with a couple of laptops in my garage in Pune, India. Today we’re a 713-strong global company, building advertising with cutting-edge technology for our customers. The journey has been amazing, and we’ve learned some important things along the way, such as:
- Never lose sight of what’s important. For us this has meant being 100% customer focused. We have built great products for our customers, helped them use the products, and we have scaled these and our team.
- Take advice but trust your own judgement. When we first started out, we got a lot of advice from industry veterans which really amounted to, “this is hard, are you sure you’re up for the challenge?” We were told we’d never be able to achieve the technical capacity we were aiming for, that others with more experience had tried and failed. But we knew we could meet these challenges. At the end of some of those early meetings, my engineering co-founder and I would say, “we’re going to prove them wrong,” and we’d sit down and code for 18 hours a day. At the end we achieved what we were looking to achieve.
- Don’t be intimidated. When we started, we were going up against some industry heavyweights – who’d all been doing this longer than us, and who told us they’d squash us. But we knew, if we built the right team and stayed customer-focused, we’d thrive. And here we are, 15 years later – going strong.
Build the Right Team
Which leads me to the final, and most important, learning: Build the right team. Our engineering team is largely based out of Pune, and we’ve benefited from the top-quality engineering talent that this city produces. We were fortunate to hire some of the city’s best engineers in the early days, and many are still working with us now. Today we are focused on continuing to hire and retain the finest engineers in the field.
We promote a culture of learning – from hackathons and coding contests, to providing constant learning opportunities through training in cutting-edge technology. We promote a culture of collaboration; our engineers brainstorm together, and they enjoy being with other like-minded engineers. Very soon we will be opening a new engineering hub in Pune for our engineers to collaborate in person again.
Our teams work on emerging programmatic formats like CTV/OTT and mobile app, and they’re helping to architect the future of the open web by building cookieless solutions for audience targeting. Many industry-leading products – like our header bidding wrapper, OpenWrap, and our identity solution, Identity Hub, were born out of internal hackathons.
Our engineers are building our products, scaling those products, building our owned and operated infrastructure, and managing that infrastructure to ensure quality, stability, and performance. If you are an engineer who wants to work at the forefront of advertising technology innovation, there really is no better place to be. Our engineers are building the future of digital advertising every day.
I’m really excited about what 2022 will hold for us. I encourage you to come and be part of our journey.
Explore career opportunities at PubMatic here.
