Archive for December, 2011

Tapjoy Movers & Shakers: Promotions, New Hires and Even More Growth Ahead

Tapjoy has grown at an incredible clip in 2011, more than doubling our size through strategic hiring. We added industry heavyweights like Al Wood, the veteran CFO from PalmSource and Dialogic Corporation; Peter Dille, the former SVP at Sony who was an integral part of the team that launched the PlayStation and now serves as our CMO; Larry Berkin, our VP and GM of Asia-Pacific, who came to us from the Symbian Foundation; and, more recently, Jim Jones, who previously was Yahoo!’s America’s Regional VP and now serves as our VP and GM of Ad Sales.

Of course, our growth is not limited to the executive ranks. Throughout 2011 we’ve been hiring new people and opening new offices throughout the world, from New York and Los Angeles to Chicago and Atlanta and as far away as London, Tokyo and Seoul. We’ve added great new hires that touch every corner of the company – from sales and business development to marketing and analytics, product development and engineering, accounting, finance, legal and more – and it is these new hires that contribute just as much value (if not more!) than the top execs.

With all that growth comes the necessity to properly manage it, and so we’ve made several recent changes to our organizational structure that allow people to take on greater responsibility.

One particularly important change is the promotion of Linda Tong from VP of Products to Chief Product Officer. Linda is a wickedly smart and intensely focused product lead whose vision and passion have been a driving force behind many of Tapjoy’s product innovations since she joined the company more than a year ago. With a degree from Yale University and product marketing experience at Google working on Chrome and Android, Linda now takes the reigns of our product team to make sure they keep churning out the innovative tools and features that developers, advertisers and consumers have all come to expect from us.

In other developments, Paul Longhenry, our VP of Business Development, is now also responsible for Asia Pacific, managing each of the GM’s covering Asian countries. Al Wood, meanwhile, was given the responsibility of managing our growth in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, in addition to his CFO duties. Chris Akhavan, previously our VP of Developer Partnerships, has taken on the additional responsibility of overseeing all publishing programs and content partnerships and was given the new title of VP and GM, Partnerships and Strategic Operations. Similarly, Christine Lee was promoted from VP, Developer Relations, to VP and GM, Partner Relations.

Today, we are up to about 130 employees worldwide, but we’re not done yet—not even close. We are still hiring as quickly as we feasibly can, and we plan to again double the size of our team next year. We are currently looking for talented and passionate people in sales, marketing, product development, engineering, finance, customer service and other areas of the company. If you’re interested in joining us, check out our current job listings at JobScore.

Congrats to all of those who’ve been promoted and welcome aboard to all of those who have joined recently. We look forward to an exciting year ahead!

Tapjoy and the Tapjoy logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Tapjoy, Inc. All third party logos and trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

Tapjoy Hires Phil O’Neill as Head of Analytics

Albert Einstein once famously said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

In Tapjoy’s world, there’s no shortage of data to look at. We have access to a plethora of data on mobile app consumption and user behaviors that illuminate the trends driving the new mobile app economy. We know what apps people are downloading, which platforms they’re downloading them on, how they interact with those apps, and much more.

The challenge is splicing and dicing the data in the right way to gain valuable new insights.  To heed Einstein’s advice, we seek to count the things that count – the right KPIs and industry figures – while making sure to maintain good data integrity and count the numbers correctly.

That is why we recently hired Phil O’Neill as our new Head of Analytics. Phil comes to us having served as the lead analytics director at a number of advertising companies, including Advertising.com, where he managed a high-impact team of analysts engaged in the creation of next-generation algorithms for AdLearn 5.0, the company’s revenue maximizing, ad-selection, optimization software. He also served as Director of Network Analytics at Videoegg, the online ad network that rebranded itself as Say Media, where he helped develop an ad creative optimization process and establish a market research program.

A serious mathematician by training (he received his BS in Applied Mathematics from the University of Chicago and an MBA with a concentration in Quantitative Finance from the Walter A. Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley), Phil started his career as an actuary with Coopers & Lybrand in Chicago and later served as a math teacher in the United States Peace Corps, volunteering in Blantyre, Milawai.

We warmly welcome Phil to the Tapjoy team and look forward to having him build out his unit of business analysts. In the days ahead, you can look for special industry reports from Phil and his team sharing insights they glean from our wealth of consumer data. No doubt Phil will bring a deep level of analytical rigor that will help our overall business decision-making, but more importantly, he’ll make sure that we are counting what really counts.