Life
My Google Journey
After Uber, I was ready for something different. I'd done the early-stage startup at Opendoor and the scale-up at Uber. Google was the other end of the spectrum — truly massive scale, and some of the brightest people in the industry.
The Transition to Google
I joined Google in September 2017 as a tech lead/manager on the Reporting and Insights team. I took over a team of one and grew it to six engineers. It was my first formal management position, though I'd led technically before.
The transition was fascinating. The talent was as advertised — everywhere you turned, someone world-class in their domain. But the culture and the decision-making were nothing like the startup world, and I had to adjust.
At Google, I quickly learned that technical excellence alone wasn't enough. You needed consensus, you needed to navigate the org, and you needed to communicate clearly to move anything.
Moving to YouTube
In 2019 I moved to YouTube, focusing on the YouTube Select product. YouTube was a strange and appealing animal — it operated like a startup inside Google, but with the resources and reach of a tech giant. Brand advertising there was in the middle of a transformation, and I saw a chance to make a real dent. I worked with teams across YouTube Organic, Ad Serving, Premium Ads Experience, Google Ads Frontend, RevShare, Finance, and Global Sales.
The first few months were a steep climb. I had to learn not just the technical landscape but the business relationships and revenue models underneath it, so I spent hours with product managers, engineers, and sales teams just trying to see the whole picture.
YouTube Select
As I settled in, I became the technical lead for YouTube Select, the premium advertising product for brand marketers — a $5B+ ARR business whose technical foundation was mine to keep solid.
One of the first big projects I led was rebuilding the delivery and reporting systems. The existing infrastructure was straining under demand, so I pulled together a team of engineers, worked closely with product, and we redesigned it from the ground up. That project taught me what leading at Google's scale actually means: balancing technical decisions against business needs, managing competing priorities, and keeping a lot of teams pointed in the same direction.
Shorts
In 2021, with TikTok surging, YouTube was investing heavily in Shorts. That raised an obvious question for my corner of the world: how do you bring brand advertising to short-form video?
I initiated and led YouTube Select for Shorts, pulling together a cross-functional team to build a brand advertising product designed specifically for the format. We were competing directly with TikTok Pulse and Instagram's contextual ads, so it had to lean on YouTube's actual strengths while still delivering the performance brand advertisers expected.
We launched in 2022, and it became a significant revenue driver — hundreds of millions in incremental ARR.
Flash
Then came the most ambitious project of my Google years: YouTube Flash. The starting insight was that auction-based advertising is excellent at performance metrics but bad at building brand identity. Brands wanted to show up in moments that aligned with who they were — and we could use ML to find the emotionally resonant moments inside videos where that connection actually happens.
The project pushed the edge of what Google's models could do at the time. We worked closely with Google DeepMind, using multimodal models like Gemini and PaLI to understand video content at a depth that hadn't been possible before. The technical problems were immense — processing millions of videos, building sentiment graph taxonomies, serving high-throughput video metadata efficiently. But it worked: significant new revenue, and brand partners who were genuinely excited about it.
The moment-level video understanding we built didn't stay internal, either. YouTube later launched it publicly as Peak Points, in May 2025.
Growing as a Leader
I grew up as a leader at Google. I learned to balance technical depth with strategic thinking, to build teams worth being on, and to navigate organizational dynamics that would have eaten me alive earlier in my career.
The thing I'm proudest of is the mentoring — watching engineers I coached take on bigger challenges and succeed. I also interviewed over 300 candidates along the way, which turned out to be its own education in what makes engineers succeed at that scale.
Closing the Chapter
The Google chapter wound down in 2024. By then the advertising landscape was shifting again, and I'd become convinced that generative AI was going to transform it — making it more relevant and more effective for both brands and viewers — and that the most interesting work would happen wherever cutting-edge models met a real understanding of people.
That conviction is what I carried into what came next. Google taught me that the most impactful innovations happen at the intersection of new technology and deep human insight — and Flash was the proof I got to build myself.