Lookery.com

When we receive comments like this one received via our support site,

I would like to commend Lookery on the stellar customer service. Currently I am running a very small application on facebook, with plans to launch a larger one later this month. I have shopped around other application friendly advertisement programs and decided to go with Lookery. I am glad I did. It is obvious that you (as a company) are growing and I want to reassure that I as a customer like what I have experienced. The new dashboard seems integrated nicely.

it makes me think about what great publishers we have here at Lookery.

Most of the time in this hurry up and make it work now world we live in today, people don’t have time to work through issues. While we are growing steadily every single day that passes, it does bring to light the great team we have assembled here at Lookery.

Since everyone is in a hurry these days, I thought it would be a good time to sit back and review how this team came together over the past year. It’s time we share the story of how we have gone from an idea to where we are today.

In the Beginning

It was a year ago now that the idea for Lookery came into Dave and Scott’s mind. While Scott was taking a well deserved vacation in Germany, Boston based Dave was busy making our lovely pink smiley logo and setting the stage for where we are today.

Where was I? I was still working full time consulting for another start up helping them while they were launching as a financial Facebook app, as well as helping them get their blog up and running. Once Dave and Scott had all the basics ready to roll, Scott asked me if I’d be interested in helping out. One thing led to another, and next thing I knew – I was full on Lookery.

In from rainy Seattle

These were some interesting times for team Lookery. Scott, Dave and I were in deep, but we knew after only a couple of weeks – we were in deep good. Real good stuff we were learning about this business we were in. The thing we were missing was someone that actually knew the ad biz!

That was about the same time that Todd contacted Scott, and well without Todd on board in those early days, I think we may have never gotten to where we are today. He brought along with him all the knowledge that you can only learn by doing this ad biz business in your past ventures.

There we were, the four of us, early team Lookery plugging away through the fall and winter of 2007.

Analyzing and Socializing

Daniel came along from his past gigs at Yahoo and Google, doing what he does best – analyzing and optimizing data! As we rolled into 2008 on a high note, we knew we needed someone that could make us a real player. Daniel found us by walking up to Scott at a conference one day and saying “Hey, I’d like to come work for Lookery!” or so the story goes. :)

Now we had grown to five people here, and we were about to be the first social ad network to announce a guarantee. Little did we know (well maybe Todd did), what type of response that would generate. While we were all struggling to keep things running as we went from an ad network that did just over a few 100 million to over 1 Billion in less than 30 days time, Scott was needing help with his part of the team.

Claire was that person. She came to us as a highly achieving and very social person that fit in well with the team. Within a few days, she became a cornerstone in our advertiser relations area, as well as the person that Scott was looking for. Without her taking over managing that area from Todd and myself, we might be still running the same two back fill ad networks we had been running since last November!

Bringing the Thunder

With an ad network company that went from 100’s of million to over a billion ads served, you may be thinking – what about the engineering side of the house? Well that was our CTO Dave. Dave and – well Dave. We are all glad that Dave knew some good people.

Jay came along to be the person to handle and organize all the great ideas we were coming up with. He brought his past experience at bringing the thunder and hit the ground running. Things haven’t been the same for Dave since he was brought on.

Programming and Web Designing

Now that Dave was getting more actual coding done due to Jay finding ways to organize and prioritize tasks, he was still only one person. You think the well that Dave found Jay is dry?

Not quite yet. Raj came on to code while Dave coded on other items. Once Raj walked in, I remember days where Dave only was able to smile and say (via twitter of course!) “I have been coding for 8 hours straight!” The team was in place, but – our web site was well – still back in July of 2007!

Chris came in and said, “I’ll have this re-done in a week!” or so the story goes. :)

Final Chapter?

Not even close! The team here at Lookery has been carefully assembled to be the strongest team possible. It’s a total credit to the team that people are now taking notice, with comments like the above, for the hard work we all have been doing here. There are two people on our team who often get no mention and they have been here since the beginning.

Kirsten who handles all of our back line human resource duties. She does a fantastic job making sure all our publishers are paid on time, every single month. And there is Oren who makes sure we have the money where it needs to be so that everything clears the bank when we pay out! :) I think these two are never given enough credit, but they are an integral part of team Lookery.

We hope that you have enjoyed a little bit of Lookery history since we are approaching the one year mark as a company.

Mainly we’d like to thank our great publishers who have been with us over the past year. We’d also like to thank all who have run advertising with us. The two go hand in hand in this business.

Thanks for reading, and time for me to go back to work doing what my main task is on this team, Publisher Relations Management.