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is defined. Let me explain my very specific setup here. I spend twenty per-
cent of my time on management, which is intellectual leadership and related
activities. I spend forty percent of my time contributing to our core business,
meaning I am building models and doing analysis. Lastly, I spend forty percent
of my time being an ambassador for the company.
Gutierrez:
What does a typical brand ambassador week look like?
Perlich:
This setup means that I am able to spend quite a notable amount on
giving talks. I would say on the order of maybe one per week. For example, I will
be going to Washington, DC, for an AAAI [Association for the Advancement
of Artificial Intelligence] event on Saturday. Next week, on Thursday, I am
going to speak at a panel on lawmaking in Georgetown in Washington, DC.
And then, the following day, I fly out to San Francisco, California, to give a
small presentation at Berkeley. That is kind of what my schedule looks like.
Further, I gave two talks at the O'Reilly Strata Conference, and then I went to
give a keynote at Data IO conference. I do a lot of speaking, primarily because
I enjoy it and am happy doing it, and because it is something that the company
appreciates me doing. I also go to many local meetups and get-togethers.
Gutierrez:
What does a typical intellectual leadership day look like?
Perlich:
On the actual in-house work, we have very informal meetings here,
so I will just connect to two or three of my colleagues and have conversa-
tions about what it is they are working on right now and what makes sense
in that context and just bounce a few ideas around. We are also currently
talking about what we want to publish, so we had a brainstorming session the
other day in terms of what are the nice things that we feel comfortable writ-
ing about and maybe submitting to KDD or some other event. This type of
teamwork is constantly going on here.
Gutierrez:
What does a typical modeling and analysis day look like?
Perlich:
My day-to-day is divided by routine tasks, special projects, and build-
ing new prototypes. As an example of what types of special projects I per-
sonally work on, recently I spent a couple of hours deep-diving on a specific
issue that our CTO brought to my attention. The issue was that something
was not working with the way we were crosswalking physical locations to
desktop identities. An example of this process is that if we see people show
up at airports, we then crosswalk them into “here is their desktop identity.”
Once we have done that, we can then try to target them for travel advertise-
ment to see how much we can deliver, and then measure whether that has
some value, meaning higher predictive power or getting higher conversion
rates. Our CTO asked me to make sure that the process of the translation
from some mobile advertisement bid request location was getting correctly
identified and translated through the IP into a cookie identity. And then to
