Scaling Google Ads: Lessons from an $80B Journey with Sanjay Datta

Apr 7, 2025

Sanjay Datta, CFO of Upstart and former Google finance executive, shares insights from his experience in scaling Google's $80B ad business. He discusses the importance of centralized analytics and operational efficiency in decision-making. Sanjay reflects on his journey scaling Upstart from $10M to $500M, emphasizing agility during economic shifts. He also explores the challenges in the lending landscape, advocating for AI-driven models to enhance credit assessment, ultimately making lending fairer and more efficient.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

ADVICE

Leadership Principles

Define clear priorities and communicate them effectively to your team.
Drive accountability to ensure everyone focuses on the common goals.

INSIGHT

Google Ads Revenue Distribution

A small fraction of Google's search queries generate most of its ad revenue.
Most searches are not commercially interesting, highlighting the power of a few key terms.

INSIGHT

Scaling Digital Businesses

Digital businesses can easily coast on scaling revenue, masking underlying issues.
Continuous improvement, automation, and waste reduction are crucial, even during high growth.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Sanjay Datta, CFO of Upstart and former senior finance exec at Google, joins CJ to discuss leadership, scaling, and the future of lending with AI. Sanjay spent 12 years at Google, helping grow it into an $80B global ads business. He sheds light on Google’s monetization model, the simplicity of its forecasting, and the power of centralized analytics. He also reflects on scaling Upstart from $10M to $500M, going public, managing investor and employee expectations, and staying agile through macroeconomic shifts.

If you're looking for an ERP head to NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/metrics and get the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning.

—

SPONSORS:

Planful is a financial performance management platform designed to streamline financial tasks for businesses. It helps with budgeting, closing the books, and financial reporting, all on a cloud-based platform. By improving the efficiency and accuracy of these processes, Planful allows businesses to make better financial decisions. Find out more at www.planful.com/metrics.

Subscript is a modern billing and revenue recognition platform designed for SaaS finance teams that need flexibility and accuracy. From automated invoicing and dunning to compliant, transparent revenue recognition and real-time analytics, Subscript eliminates manual work, reduces errors, and gives you a single source of truth for all your financial data. Book a free demo at subscript.com.

Rippling Spend is a spend management solution that handles your entire company’s spending in one unified system. It enables you to bring your corporate cards, expense management, bill pay, and more into one place to achieve real-time visibility and uniquely granular control with automated policy controls across every type of spend. Get a demo to see how much time your org would save at rippling.com/metrics.

MUFG is the largest bank in Japan and a global banking powerhouse with a focus on empowering Growth and Middle Market stage companies in North America and Europe. MUFG provides comprehensive banking services for VC-backed, PE-backed, and public companies with revenues starting at $40M. The bank combines its global capabilities with deep operational understanding to help companies accelerate their growth trajectory. Contact Bob Blee at bblee@us.mufg.jp to find out more.

Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Over 9000 businesses use it to automate compliance needs across over 35 frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Centralize security workflows, complete questionnaires up to five times faster, and proactively manage vendor risk. For a limited time, get $1,000 off of Vanta at vanta.com/metrics.

Tropic is an intelligent spend management solution that consolidates your spend data and processes into one unified offering, enabling insights and decisive action. From spotting hidden optimization opportunities to automating painful procurement workflows and giving you the best market data to turn vendor negotiations in your favor, Tropic combines smart insights with real human expertise to keep you ahead of the curve. Visit tropicapp.io/mostlymetrics to learn how.

NetSuite provides financial software for all your business needs. More than 40,000 companies have already upgraded to NetSuite, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅, head to NetSuite https://netsuite.com/metrics and get the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning.

—

@cjgustafson222 (CJ)

—

TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) Preview and Intro

(02:17) Sponsor – Planful | Subscript | Rippling Spend

(05:39) Sanjay’s Unconventional Career Path

(07:55) Lessons From Google on Being a Leader

(10:11) Managing an $80 Billion Revenue Ad Business

(12:24) The Evolution of Google’s Monetization Model

(15:06) Sponsor – MUFG | Vanta | Tropic | NetSuite

(21:04) Scaling Google Ads to $80 Billion

(23:18) Google’s Forecasting Model

(24:48) Complexity and Scale at Google

(28:03) The Science of Analytics in a Digital Company

(31:06) Upstart’s IPO

(33:00) Managing Internal Expectations in Good and Bad Times

(37:10) Why You Should Work Yourself Out of a Job Each Year

(41:23) Things That Get Easier As You Scale

(42:18) How Metrics Shift With Scale

(43:35) Contingency Planning at Upstart

(47:13) Why the Lending System Is Broken

(49:44) How Upstart Keeps Its Credit Models Accurate and Ethical

(54:31) Predictions on the Lending Market for the Next Year

(58:35) Long-Ass Lightning Round: Wine Corking Business

(1:01:17) Advice to Younger Self

(1:02:26) Finance Software Stack

(01:02:57) Craziest Expense Story

Get full access to Mostly metrics at www.mostlymetrics.com/subscribe