f**kedcompany.com lives up to its name - Anonymous employee Adbrite Employee Review

2.0
7 Sept 2012
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great analytics, laid back culture. Great location on Market Street in SF. As of 2011, was the largest independent advertising exchange -- i.e., not owned by Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. -- with a long tail that included 40K publisher sites and 100K pages. But that was then.

Cons

In December 2011, the board walked away from an acquisition in favor of a restart. Subsequently, the entire management team and most other key employees left. AdBrite is now on its 3rd CEO since December. The restart has not gone well. It's very unclear what the direction of the company is going forward, or whether there will be a long-term future. It appears to be in free fall.

Explore other reviews about Adbrite

4.0
13 Jun 2013
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great people, exposure to internet ad data mining.

Cons

They are out of business now!

2.0
26 Dec 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Downtown SF, (at the time) a possibility for a buyout, (at the time) free catered lunches, engineering team stuck together. AdBrite was a rising star - founded by a web celebrity in downtown SF with decent benefits, not the least of which was the free lunches they used to provide. AdBrite eventually moved locations to Market Street next to The Sports Club LA for which they provided a slightly discounted membership. And there was talent - so much talent. The talent that passed through the doors at AdBrite was unmatched. If only they could have retained that talent, they might have had a shot. But ...

Cons

Horrible management, disrespect from upper management towards employees, incompetent CEO, high turnover, technical leaders do not understand technology. The technology stack is a joke. Basically, instead of using proven open source solutions, AdBrite uses custom-rolled solutions for many of the layers in their stack which are far inferior to their open source equivalents. For the longest time, their search engine was running on something the CTO wrote. Iggy Fanlo (CEO) once sent out an email telling employees they needed to work 60 hour weeks. The problem is that there just wasn't enough work to do, nor was there motivation or any kind of guidance. The founders of the company frequently sent out disparaging emails telling employees that there were too many bugs in the site without setting clear goals as to how to solve the problem.

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