Russell Beattie

There's a t-shirt that the guys at AdMob have which says on the front something like "1) Build a Mobile Site. 2) ??? 3) Profit!!" and on the back it says, "We're step 2". But actually, step number two is a little known secret by the name of Mike Rowehl, who joined AdMob so early on, the word "mobile" to most of Silicon Valley still meant something to do with 802.11b, an advertising network that wasn't run by one of the big four portals was considered lunacy and (worst of all) Omar Hamoui was still writing code.

Miker came in, and (after banning Omar from touching the servers ever again), rewrote the back end of the site enabling it to handle the traffic to scale to whatever bazillions of impressions a month they have now (apparently using little more than some paper clips, a couple old 486 computers and a gerbil named Ralph). All of this while keeping Mobile Monday running single handedly and helping produce a couple Mobile 2.0 conferences as well. The man is a Mobile Dynamo...

I mention this as Miker has decided to leave AdMob and is now embarking on another epic quest to find adventure on the cutting edge of mobility. If you were smart, you'd get your bid in soon (here's his contact info), as not only is his experience at AdMob invaluable, but like I said the man is a living Step Number Two! Very large percentages of a small mobile startup you may have read about here have already been offered (along with some pitiful groveling and begging you probably don't want to read about), and I've heard of six figure salaries and quantities of stock on the table from other companies as well. It won't be long before Miker finds the next big thing, believe me.

Good luck in your next endeavor Miker!

:-)

-Russ