#271 - Andrew Yates, CEO of Promoted AI - on leveraging Open Source principles to grow Commercially

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to +10% revenue from better search, feed, and ads ranking. My guest is Andrew Yates, Co-founder and CEO of Promoted.

Andrew Yates formerly led ads ranking, auction, and marketplace engineering and research teams at Facebook and Pinterest. He specializes in designing billion-dollar content marketplaces that maximize long-term revenue while protecting both seller and user experiences. Andrew has published over a dozen patents in online advertising optimization.

Andrew met his co-founder at Pinterest. That's where they built Pinterest ads together and realized they could unify ideas from ads and search engineering to make all commercial media better. This became the founding idea behind Promoted, which they started in April 2020

Their mission: to match every buyer with every seller across every app.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Andrew to my podcast. We explore Andrews's entrepreneurial journey and ideas and what challenges he had to overcome around go-to-market, winning over the biggest skeptics, and creating a revenue flywheel. He explains how breaking away from existing structures and established norms has helped them to break through. Last but not least, his lessons learned around product strategy - and how he arrived at his first principles to drive remarkable value in the shortest amount of time.

Here's one of his quotes:

We didn't have an open-source philosophy when we first started. Our original philosophy was: Make sure it works. Make sure you build something valuable, put it into production, and make sure that it works and test it against good engineering teams that have the resources, time, and attention to build a similar system and it needs to outperform them.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How to break into an industry by introducing a business model that emphasizes customer collaboration and ownership
2. How to create a shift in value by applying a proven model that's remarkable in one category on a different problem in a different category.
3. How a development team of <10 FTE can consistently outperform teams of +100 FTE
4. How going against the common notion of comprehensive and fully-featured product launches has helped them in surprising ways.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Andrew Yates
• Website Promoted