Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Gutierrez:
What does your typical day-to-day work as an expert in the
geospatial analytics industry look like?
Lenaghan:
I would say my typical days in 2012 and in 2013 have been fairly
different. In 2012, we were a very small company. I was the seventh employee.
By the end of the year, we had doubled in size to fourteen employees. Even
though we were growing quickly, we were still a very small company and we
only had a few people who had experience in the ad-tech industry. In that
sense, my typical day-to-day was very much like any other startup story: I was
involved in doing and helping with everything.
I was building models and developing heuristics to build audiences in the cases
where we did not have data or we had very sparse data. In addition to that, I was
also doing a lot of the engineering and back-end work for our campaigns, check-
ing the health of our campaigns, doing ad operations, and developing some new
products. Everybody in the company was helping in all of those projects as well.
Gutierrez:
Were you on a particular team?
Lenaghan:
I was on a data science team, though it was a bit nebulous given
all the other work I was doing. Then we had explosive growth in 2013, start-
ing from the very beginning of the year to near the end of the year. We are
now almost seventy people. In 2012 we doubled in size, and then in 2013 we
quadrupled in size from where we ended in 2012.
Gutierrez:
Has your role become more defined as the company continues
to grow?
Lenaghan:
My role has now gotten much more codified. First, we can look at
it in terms of the data science team. In the first half of the year, the engineering
team and the data science team worked together extremely closely. On most
of the projects, you could not tell who was on the engineering team and who
was on data science team. As the company has grown, more distance between
the two teams has been established. That said, we are not completely split
because we still work on mixed functional teams, so we still work very closely
with engineering.
Second, we can look at it in terms of my personal work. In the beginning of
the year, I was still writing a lot of code and developing a lot of algorithms.
Now, as the team and company have been expanding, in addition to day-to-day
management, I have been moving more toward a lot of more of the thinking
behind the architecture and long-term planning.
Gutierrez:
Do you still get your hands dirty?
Lenaghan:
I like to be very hands-on, and I feel like the only time I can really
be hands-on is very early in the morning. Most days I get to the office before
anybody else to make sure I can get a few things done before the office fills
up. Whatever project I am working on, I do my best to get that done in the
early morning hours.
