Ask TIA: What is the biggest mistake made by Google?

As of 2014 Dec. the biggest mistake Google is making – IMHO – their bread and butter, Ad Tech unsexy and quite possibly the least desirable org to move into.

As a simple social test, if you ask any aspiring product manager (PM) or engineer or BD guy/gal in Google if they want to go into the exciting world of bidder optimization on top of the DSP stack Google runs off, I’m pretty sure you’d get a resounding ‘meh’.

They most likely want to work on something ‘sexy’ and ‘cool’ like Google X’s driverless cars and drones; you know, shit that doesn’t make any money.

This issue was pretty endemic among not only sales people but that of PMs + engineers who I worked with in Google; the external branding for the greatest and the best of the future permeated and inspired people to not sell keywords or display campaigns but try to participate in said products as quickly as possible.

By the time I left and what I’m hearing more and more these days is a consistent unmanaged internal hemorrhaging of talent seeping out of the Advertising org  into other more brainy and cool products.

It’s interesting as you can actually see the side-effects manifest. If you knew how many engineers were supporting all of Ad Mob, as an institutional investor, one would pause and question the long term competitiveness of the company.

Many of the key topics in Ad Tech – 2014 -below have either not been even touched or have launched half baked, late or as a sub-par product.

• mobile based retargeting (Criteo)
• mobile cross-device tracking (Crosswise)
• mobile advanced correlative attribution (Engage Eyeota)
• mobile native advertising SSP/DSP 1:1 integration (Yieldmo)
• mobile advanced conversion tracking (Atlas Solutions)
• social media, media buys (Nanigans – Advertising Automation Software)

So in the mid-term you have an Ad Tech offering that relies all too much on scale and a sub-par talent pool who has to go against Ad Tech mega monsters like AppNexus to agile ninjas like PocketMath taking larger and larger bites of the pie.

As a VC, I’m not complaining as I see another acquisition cycle coming in for Google soon as it did for Admob, Invite, Admeld and so on…:)

So what do you think is the biggest mistake made by Google? Happy to hear from you guys.

Note from Huiyi, TIA’s community manager:FYI TIA Community! 🙂 Saemin is the Managing Partner at Rakuten Ventures. Prior to Rakuten Ventures, Sae was at Google for 5 years from 2008 to 2013 managing Sales and Business Development for Asia. You can find his Ask Me Anything (AMA) session with the TIA community here.)