Why I joined Facet Data
I could not be more excited about the opportunity that we have here at Facet. It is a rare moment in your career when what you are good at, what you are passionate about, and what you want to work on can all line up in a single opportunity. Facet was the perfect next opportunity for me. Facet presented the opportunity to work closely with Jim and the team to build a great company using our shared playbook, ship an amazing product that I love, and build that product on top of companies like Snowflake.
Jim Payne <> Kevin Weatherman
We built the MoPub business together, leveraging the tech that became Facet to build the world’s largest mobile ad exchange to hundreds of millions of annual revenue in less than 30 months. Scaling the team from five when I joined to over one hundred at the time of the acquisition. More important than the outcome was the process. Jim fostered a company culture inspired by his experience at Google, leveraging the OKR framework, Good to Great lessons about getting the right people in the right seats, High Output Management for becoming great managers, and then improved as we built MoPub, MAX, and OneSignal. Tactically we focus on building a great team, leveraging company executive offsites to set the vision, quarterly OKRs to execute near-term plans, and allow individuals to opt into how they can contribute to our success. Radical transparency across the organization helps to hold everyone accountable. We share everything from individual OKRs to the board deck with the entire team, sharing what we present to our investors. Facet is the next iteration of our partnership to build great companies.
The Facet Product
Prior to MoPub, whenever I wanted business data about our advertisers, publishers, or ad networks at AdBrite or PubMatic we had to make a specific request to the data team to get answers like ‘how much money did my client make yesterday?’ Inevitably the team would find hacks like logging into the customer's account or using internal tools to answer that data. The business teams did not want to ask engineers to pull data and it was not a good use of the data team to answer simple SQL requests. When I joined MoPub, we selected a tool that became Facet, which would ingest via s3 all of our exchange data, move it to their infrastructure and present back to us all the business data for our mobile ad exchange. Suddenly the entire team had access to the data and we used that as a secret weapon at MoPub. It ran our decisions internally, our team used it daily to answer questions, and most importantly, when things broke we had answered in minutes vs days. From 2011 until 2014 I was the top individual user of the tool and I firmly believe that it helped contribute to driving more spend via our DSP partners and thus making us the top mobile exchange. We didn’t need a separate team to run SQL queries of our data because the entire company had data superpowers to enable data-based decisions to be made across our org and with our partners.
Snowflake and the Modern CDW
There is a lot of information about how amazing Snowflake is. From Facet’s perspective, we see the migration to tools like Snowflake changing how businesses are built and run. For the first time, companies can build a pipeline into Snowflake that allows all their business data to existing in a single dataset. From my perspective Snowflake has the potential to have a similar impact that Salesforce did in the 2000s by enabling an entire ecosystem of billion-dollar companies that were built on top of the Salesforce ecosystem. From a product standpoint, much like the iPhone took existing parts and brought them together to create a 10x better product, Snowflake redesigned the cloud data warehouse from the ground up to be cloud-only and built it to scale.
