GTM 149: How Meta Scaled Their Global Sales Team with Rick Kelley

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Rick Kelley is the former SVP of Gaming and App Monetization Solutions at Meta and Managing Director of Meta Ireland, where he led a $1B+ revenue organization and played a pivotal role in building out Meta’s go-to-market teams across North America and EMEA. Over his 15-year career at Meta, Rick was instrumental in driving international expansion, especially across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa—helping to localize strategy, scale high-performing sales teams, and bring new ad products to market. Today, he advises founders on global GTM execution, sales hiring, and how AI is reshaping the future of commercial organizations.

Discussed in this Episode:

• The operational playbooks that scaled Meta’s ad sales
• Why AI will shift how sales orgs think about headcount and human capital
• The three traits Rick looks for in great sales leaders—and how to spot them early
• Why early-stage companies should prioritize hiring builders, not closers
• How to segment go-to-market motions by customer journey, not just ACV
• The hidden risks in over-hiring and misaligned sales capacity
• Why “coachable, humble, gritty” still wins—even in an AI-powered GTM world

If you missed GTM 148, check it out here: Winning Every Tech Shift from a 3X Founder (From Internet to AI)

Highlights:

6:30 How Meta scaled repeatable playbooks across SMB, Mid-Market, and Enterprise

10:00 The role of humility and coachability in building scalable teams

13:00 Why top sales leaders are systems thinkers—not just great closers

16:00 AI’s impact on headcount and how to scale without over-hiring

21:00 Advice for founders: how to make your first 5 sales hires count

25:30 Early-stage mistake: over-complicating GTM before validating demand

30:30 Why product and GTM must be tied at the hip—especially in AI-first companies

34:00 From Facebook to Meta: what changed and what didn’t in sales strategy

37:00 Final thoughts: GTM myths, leadership advice, and staying grounded

Guest Speaker Links (Rick Kelley):

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rickkelley

Host Speaker Links (Sophie Buonassisi):

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi

• Newsletter: substack.com/@sophiebuonassisi

Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):

• Website: https://gtmnow.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow/
• Twitter/X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
• YouTube: /@gtm_now
• The GTM Podcast (on all major directories): https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/

Sponsors: UserEvidence

UserEvidence is the Customer Evidence Platform that lets you collect feedback, curate success stories, and create content that credibly proves the value of your product.

Sponsor Link: https://userevidence.com/gtmnow

The GTM Podcast

The GTM Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

GTM 149 Episode Transcript

Welcome back to the GTM Podcast is your host Sophie Buonassisi, and I am joined today by Rick Kelley. Rick is the former managing director of Meta Ireland. He spent over 15 years building and scaling sales and business operations. He launched Meta’s EMEA business from scratch, eventually growing it to a $900 million plus operation, and later took that playbook global, actually helping to scale Meta’s gaming and monetization business to over 11 billion.

Rick, welcome to the podcast.

Rick Kelley: Thanks Sophie. Good to be here and excited to talk to your audience. Thanks for having me.

Sophie Buonassisi: Appreciate you joining us and you know, you’ve got an incredible story, which we’re gonna jump into around, you know, growing and scaling organizations in EMEA and globally. But to kick us off, I almost wanna start at the beginning because you’re initially from Boston, you know, if you take us back, what was that moment and opportunity that set you on this path to building Meta’s EMEA sales organization?

Rick Kelley: You’re right. I am from Boston. I had spent some time in high school and college down in Pennsylvania. I came back to the Boston area after I had graduated from school.I started in a sales career at FedEx, you know, the shipping company. And I was going on to shipping docks and talking about how many packages they ship every day and things like that.

I did pretty well at that for a couple years, but also recognized that that might not have been the most exciting thing for me, the things that I was interested in. You know, it was probably around 2000 when I saw the internet just absolutely blowing up. And, Boston’s a tech capital, it’s a tech hub. Maybe not as big as San Francisco, but there’s a lot of tech companies there. And Lycos, which was one of the first search engines had, was located outside the Boston area. And I went to sell advertising solutions for them and I really enjoyed, you know, matching. audiences that were on Lycos, platforms to what an advertiser was looking to do sell their products. So I enjoyed the job, but Lycos was struggling and it was, the internet bubble had just burst. , and I was thankful to have Yahoo actually come to the Boston area and set up their national sales team for mid-market. It was tier two brands, agencies and things of that nature. So, in 2002, I went to go and work at Yahoo.

I had a little bit of experience, obviously in the internet advertising world from my time at Lycos. so quickly, you know, did pretty well, became a manager. After a couple years, you know, you gotta find that thing that you can gravitate to and that you can own. And one of the things that I, you know, had responsibility for was all the hiring, onboarding, training of new sales reps that came in through the door, and then we would deploy them onto different teams. And so I gained a reputation for being able to build organizations, find talent, develop talent pretty well. And so when they were looking to build something like that in Europe, I was on the short list of, names within the company to go and do that. So you ask, how does a guy from Boston get to. You know, Meta in Europe?

I was with Yahoo and that brought me to Barcelona. I set up an international centralized sales team in Barcelona for, for Yahoo’s advertising services. And, um, it was interesting like, because. I was completely a different sales channel than anything in Europe, , was used to at Yahoo.

And so you have all these commercial directors in every country and they were responsible for every account in the country. And then here comes this American guy coming over to Barcelona saying, okay, now you guys are gonna only manage the top 200. manage all the SMBs in the mid-market. You need a named account list.

How Meta scaled repeatable playbooks across SMB, Mid-Market, and Enterprise

You know, all the things that we’re comfortable with in a Go-To-Market world around sales channels and efficiencies and so forth. And I was the young guy, 31 or 32 years old at the time, telling him, no, no longer are you gonna do that, it’s gonna go this way. And I had the backing of leadership, but I really had to become, you know, go from being a boy to a man pretty quickly. To have some of these pretty, pretty tough conversations and to really restructure how the sales organizations were being managed at the time. So, I guess, to get to the point of how I got to Meta, after a couple of years of doing that at Yahoo I was probably struggling a little bit more in Europe, probably than other parts of the world.

At that time, Google had its dominance, then there was this thing like social media was becoming a thing and I took the phone call about them wanting, it was a buddy of mine that was running, Europe for Facebook and said, Hey, Rick, we’re gonna put a team in Dublin. “Would you be interested in coming in?”

And basically building out a sales channel for EMEA, again, more on the mid-market segment, the tier two brands and so forth. I said look, two and a half years in Barcelona, I’ve had a great run there. My wife and I had a blast. We had our first child there. But let’s maybe move to a little bit closer to the Boston area, which is Dublin. You know, this is a five and a half hour flight for us to get home. My last name’s Kelley, I kind of already belong here. Facebook was again really starting to be a thing, and I said yeah, let’s, let’s get on this rocket ship.

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s incredible. And you currently reside in Ireland with the family, right?

Rick Kelley: You know, I’ve loved it so

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.

Rick Kelley: We’ve stayed, so I worked at Meta for a little over 14 years, or Facebook, I guess you could say. But now we’ve got two kids. They’re teenagers. They’re in high school. Our whole lives have been here for the last, we’ve been in Europe now for almost 20 years, and so this is home.

And while, we still have a place in Maine, so we go back and forth on a regular basis, for most of the summer and holidays and things like that. So we have a good connection between home and here. But truthfully, this feels more like home now than anything else.

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s beautiful. Well, incredible, incredible place and if anyone is gonna Ireland, Rick is the person for recommendations.

Rick Kelley: Look, you can golf all year round. There’s no snow. It’s a little bit of the escape from some of the craziness that you’re seeing in the states. It’s, uh, it’s a fun place to be and the people are friendly. Guinness is good. You can go skiing in the Alps two hours away. You can go to the beaches of Spain two and a half hours away. There’s so much culture and food in different communities. It’s a great place to live and to raise kids, and I feel really, really privileged to be able to have this experience in my life.

Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible. Incredible. And take me through the early days of building out the Meta sales organization. Like how did you think about sequencing for hires or what was that first step? Like when you got the phone call, you made the move, you’re in your seat. What does that look like now?

Rick Kelley: Well, I joined the company when there were 900 people.

Sophie Buonassisi: Wow.

The role of humility and coachability in building scalable teams

Rick Kelley: I left the company when there were 90,000 people. So there was no need to go by or it wasn’t like I was joining something and then having to refine it. It was, Hey, Rick, go figure it out. And you know, I had great people around me to help me do that.

I wasn’t here all by myself by any means, but the first thing you gotta do is figure out where are you gonna go, what markets are you gonna go after first? Should I hire five people for the UK or five people for France? Or how do I in a limited resource and limited headcount way, how do I go about choosing the allocation of different headcount? And so one of the things we did in the early days was creating economic study utilizing probably eight, seven to eight different characteristics. What is our user base? What’s the ad? Global total ad revenue, online ad revenue. How many users does Facebook have in those countries? And we kind of waited ’em all and came up with a score for every country. That meant that if I was given 150 heads, I would know the order of which I would go and hire them. You know, I’m gonna hire my fifth person in the UK, then my first person for the Nordics, and then my third person for France, whatever it is. So that If my boss had given me 18 new heads, 28 new heads, 38 new heads, I’m not saying, I don’t quite know how I’m gonna use them.

I’d say, this is exactly how I’m gonna use them and here’s how much revenue I can actually forecast as a result of this, you know, study that we did over a three month period. So I think the lesson in the early days is when you start to build a sales team you don’t just do the finger in the air and just start hiring willy-nilly based on where you currently have customers. You gotta figure out where your opportunity is and invest for that opportunity. I think the nice part about being in a centralized sales team, like in Dublin or Barcelona or London, wherever, is that you can also move headcount around based on where you see interaction and needs and things like that. And a good example of that is maybe we overinvested in account managers and we needed more sales people. Well then you can move some people around based on the skill sets that you need. In 2012, we started seeing gaming become this massive revenue stream for the company. It ended up being 15% of the company revenue back in 20 12, 20 13, when everybody was getting a smartphone and had an iPhone or an Android, and people were playing games and downloading games. It was a boom to the company. And so one of the things that my boss had decided to do was pull gaming out of the regional structure. And created a fifth region for the company, which was gaming. So you’ve got North America sales, Latin America, EMEA, APAC, and gaming. So it was treated as the fifth region. And because I had a pretty sizable portfolio of gaming companies in my EMEA mid-market team, she asked me to take that global role on and the next 10 years meant me growing that business out from Dublin.

Sophie Buonassisi: And we wanna go down that route. I have so many questions about the gaming business itself, but even before we get there, you built out this plan very intentionally and that way you had a good idea of exactly which countries and who you would hire for, and that prioritization framework. If a startup, for example, or a company is looking to expand it to EMEA now, would you recommend that similar playbook or would you recommend any kind of adoptions to it?

Rick Kelley: So when I came to interview for the Yahoo role, and I’m gonna go back now a couple

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.

Why top sales leaders are systems thinkers—not just great closers

Rick Kelley: I wrote a 39-page PowerPoint presentation on how I would go and build the European mid-market sales team for Yahoo. I had been doing it. I didn’t need to do that. I thought that I had to woo the boss and make sure that I showed up prepared, not realizing that he was kind of trying to get to make the move across the pond. My point is, I had a plan and I created it, and everything from how we’re gonna recruit. The timeline of when we’re gonna have people at the desk, time to prospect, time to whatever activity we needed to do. And I absolutely think that if you’re a startup or you know, starting to think about what your Go-To-Market playbook looks like, you need to figure out who are the constituents that you wanna sell to.

Is it partners, is it agencies? Is it third parties? Is it direct customers? Big customers? Small customers. Lay it all out. In a document of some sort, and then you start to put a plan around how you address them? What’s the timing to address ’em? What’s the priority of maybe one channel versus another? . And then, yeah, for Europe, I think you or any international team, you have to think about what markets you go after and you need a level of critical mass in those markets. ’cause if you’re only hiring one person to address Italy, if that person leaves is ineffective, goes on maternity or paternity leave, you gotta have a little bit of depth there in order to, , keep the market going. These are all things to be very, very thoughtful about, and I don’t think you always have to put people in the markets in order to be incubating a market. You might start that in a centralized team, , you know, get the activity moving, and after a year or two and the, you know, revenue starts to be meaningful, then you can deploy a local office because that creates a whole other. Set of, you know, dynamics. You’ve gotta have a legal entity. You’ve gotta understand local HR laws, which are very different from France to Italy, to Spain to Germany. And you can’t just say, Hey, we’re gonna hire in those markets and not have a good understanding of what that might mean if things don’t work out in that market or if that person doesn’t work out. So there’s lots to be thoughtful for and I think the more that you can get that on paper before you start to execute, you can see around corners better.

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s great advice. And like you said, there’s a lot of different nuances to every single different country and EMEA. How would you recommend startups think about? That distribution of sales reps, whether it’s centralized or deployed in countries themselves across EMEA, should it be a singular country focus?

So one country at a time should be distributed across a few different countries. When you’re looking to first come into EMEA.

Rick Kelley: It depends on the size of the startup. And a lot of what I do now, , post my Meta world is work with startups on their Go-To-Market. So this is a conversation that I feel like I have once a week, if not more. You know, there’s not a one size fits all, but I have a bias. And that bias is to how do you add optionality to your sales organization?

AI’s impact on headcount and how to scale without over-hiring

Meaning if you, if you only have four people to hire and you think that it’s one in the uk, one in France, one in Germany, I don’t know, add another country there. I would rather see you be a little bit more thoughtful and say, let’s put those first four people in a singular location. Whereas, they can learn from each other. B English is widely spoken across the business world. You know, in EMEA, you know, less so in certain countries, but you know, if you’re having, know, if things are, are not as busy in France as you might’ve expected, a big competitor or whatever reason, you know, you could always have that French person calling into Belgium. Where they speak French or Switzerland, where they speak French. You know, Spain for example, when we hired our first Spanish um, employees, they were also calling into Latin America because we didn’t have a Latin American team at the time. So if you have them in the country and it’s only one or two people, it’s harder to gain that optionality and be able to move people’s focus around. Another example in Southern Europe is everybody goes on holidays for all of August, but if your team isn’t going on holidays, you know, what more could you have them do so that they’re not ineffective for three weeks and sitting on their hands? And so anytime I talk to a startup, I try to say, look, you don’t have the resources to put in, you know, 35 people across the region.

Let’s be a little bit more thoughtful about how we can get more, um, you know, from a limited resource there.

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s excellent advice. Yeah. I really look for those overlap areas. So you took us through your market segmentation of EMEA and where to focus. First, take us through what happened after that. So you got your plan, you’ve got your plan approved. What do the early execution days look like?

Rick Kelley: You’ve gotta get the piping right. So how are we reporting on sales? How are we forecasting, you know, goal setting in a world where you’re going zero to whatever, you know, these things are a little bit more challenging to, to get right. so you gotta set up a comp plan. You probably don’t wanna have an uncapped comp plan or because, you know, in the early days when your goal is a million bucks in the first quarter, you know it’s easy to come in at a million and a half, and now you’ve come in at 150% a goal, and you’re paying out ridiculous amounts of money to your sales team. Similarly, you might have over forecasted and you only come in at 75% to goal and you don’t want your whole team to be hurt. So let’s look at a comp plan that works for the company and a comp plan that works for the sales or the team itself. Then you’ve gotta figure out like operationally, sales ops, you know, how do we distribute the goal?

How do we forecast, how are we looking at the pipeline? So I think the most effective resource that any sales leader can have. Is a sales planning and operation person that is focused on that segment of the business. So, you know, as my career developed and, you know, became more influential with different cross-functional partners from marketing to sales engineering, , you know, so on and so forth, my number one partner has always been that sales planning and operations, , the CFO of my organization, if you would. Because they’re going to help you create investment cases. , figure out if your investments are working, how are they paying off? Because there’s nothing easier to go and ask for, you know, more money to, to go and grow the team when you can say, this is what you gave me six months ago. Here’s what I’ve done with that. Gimme this and then I can do this as well. Right? Like that’s, that’s the playbook where, know, while the team was probably 150 people large, give or take, you know, when I moved on to gaming in 2013, after four years. It didn’t get there on day one or day, you know, first, second year or third year. You know, that was an incremental growth along the way, and we needed to prove the value of every resource that we were given in order to get more. So that’s always the, to me it’s about, don’t just think about the salespeople or account managers that need to be at the desk. What other key roles or leaders do you need, , to help you tell the story and, and write the right story. The other thing I would say, I. as the guy coming in to start the team doesn’t mean that I was the manager of every person within it. So you’ve gotta hire good leaders and you’ve gotta invest in people that are going to be able to do the job in 18 months time when maybe the team goes from 10 to 30 people. Are they still capable of leading the 30 people that you know? So, so hire ahead of maybe where you think the team is gonna go, because the last thing you wanna do is layer somebody after, you know, a year or two because the job has just got too big for them. So how can you sell the vision to people that are like, yes, the team is maybe only 10 people now, but here’s what I need you to do over the next 18 months and that team’s gonna look like this. And if they can come on that journey, then, then that’s great.

Sophie Buonassisi: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you essentially, it’s almost like incubating a startup within a larger organization. You really built it from zero.

Rick Kelley: hundred percent. That’s a great way to describe it. It’s like nobody in Menlo Park back in the day, you know, or, or Sunnyvale, you know, in, in the Yahoo days, knew anything about the team that I was, you know, developing. But once you start to, you know, get the team in place at the desk and put numbers on the board, then all of a sudden they’re saying, whoa, let’s, uh, let’s have another look at this.

Sophie Buonassisi: And when building out that leadership team and being really thoughtful about those hires, were you prioritizing certain skill sets around expansion into EMEA? So people who had already run that playbook before, or did you find that wasn’t necessarily a characteristic or trait or experience area that you had to prioritize?

Advice for founders: how to make your first 5 sales hires count

Rick Kelley: I think back in the day, I tried to prioritize language skills, so I probably over pivoted to that. Um, and then rolled that back. I ended up rolling it back where, how can I get good managerial and leadership talent, even if they don’t speak the language to be the directors? And then maybe we could hire the, or, or develop the individual contributors to the point where they could be team leaders and, and you know, more junior managers and they speak the language. the local country, but that there’s still some pretty senior talent , above them to be able to, you know, build out a proper Go-To-Market plan for that particular sub region. , you know, and, and as you get bigger and as you get to be a certain level of scale, you need, you do need to go from AEA into Europe, Southern Europe, you know, , Eastern Europe, whatever the breakout might be, or vertical, you might say, you know what? Autos and travel and gaming, whatever, , you know, there’s benefits to doing that too. So you gotta sit down and you gotta be able to spar with some other senior leaders to say, well, here’s the pros and cons and maybe here’s why that wouldn’t work. And having the right people around you to do that, I think is one of the things that I was all I would always advocate for. Even if they were a little pricey to come in because they were at a more senior level, you know, in, in, in a year’s time, you’re gonna need that seniority.

Sophie Buonassisi: And how do you anticipate AI now impacting the potential global expansion and that emphasis on language abilities?

Rick Kelley: Yeah, I’m a big believer in AI making your, you know, the world more efficient. doubt about it. I think that there are tasks that take place within a sales unctionality that AI is great for, like helping prospect, helping surface the right, just got off a call today where, , you know, the tool itself, you know, creates emails for prospects that helps identify prospects.

It’s like Tinder for companies. They can swipe right, swipe left based on how good that prospect looks, you know, to be a fit for the product that they’re selling. There’s a lot of things that they will do in terms of business development, um, efficiency, and I’m a big believer in that. But I also don’t believe that it will replace building relationships, which I think is such a big part of sales. Probably get a sale over the line just with an AI type bot or, um, you know, utilizing some form of machine learning. But when things go wrong, people wanna talk to people.

Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. And you mentioned the number 150, so 150 people, when you left the organization to go build global, so you scaled, sounds like from zero to one 50. What kind of timeframe was that and what kind of revenue was reflective of that too?

Rick Kelley: So day one, I actually, there were two salespeople already at the desk before I came. So I was number three, coming in as the manager. And then, it was close to one 50 when I moved on. And that organization got moved into a different one. In the early days, there was no revenue. And then when I left, it was close to a billion for the year. And what was funny is that we were neck and neck with North America. That was similar, similarly built right mid-market. And I can remember my boss saying that has never happened before. Like how is EMEA the same revenue as North America? And I was pretty proud of that, and I told that to the team because then the team wore that as a badge of honor as well. But the truth of it matter is, gaming was a big part of that revenue piece of the pie. You know, you could have Candy Crush, which is by King, now owned by Activision. They’re sitting in London, but they wanna advertise to every person around the globe. That might be in your region in EMEA, but that’s a big advertiser.

And so that’s one of the ways that we got up to, you know, 900 million pretty quickly after, you know, it was about three and a half years when we got to that point. So that’s kind of part of the idea was, incredibly efficient when it came to. Cost of sales when it came to revenue per head. And I, I always really tried to, and kind of the, you know, maybe what makes me a little bit different than other sales leaders is I do have a focus on cost, the bottom line, not just top line. And I like to be a really efficient sales channel, and a really cost effective one. And that’s always been my story to grow the team.

Sophie Buonassisi: And gaming took off, and so you actually spun off and. Grew and scaled from regional to global, taking it to ultimately 11 billion or close to that, what did that transition period look like? Going from regional to global?

Early-stage mistake: over-complicating GTM before validating demand

Rick Kelley: I mean, it was a 10 year journey. So, I mean, when we first got started, I was, uh, we were a team of 36 people around the world, primarily Dublin. Singapore was a smaller team and then San Francisco, you know, and each of those hubs were for those, those regions. and much like I addressed the EMEA mid-market team, I started to think about, well, where do we want to have. People are located, what are the countries that we wanna prioritize? So similarly, we started to look at, you know, what are the biggest gaming markets in the world? Where are the biggest developers? , where do we need those language capabilities? Because while EMEA, you know, can traditionally speak English pretty well across the different countries, APAC is not necessarily that way. You know, a Korean person might find it very difficult to speak, uh, you know, Japanese or English or something like that.

Sophie Buonassisi: And that’s.

Rick Kelley: Even talking about China, which is a whole other animal for us because Facebook was not allowed to go into China. We weren’t allowed to have an office there.

We weren’t allowed to sell to Chinese developers directly. So we had to set up a third party channel that the sales would go through. And so how I built a team to service all of that was very different from any other market. And there was no playbook for that. We had to. We had to figure that out. Um, so I think we know in the early days, again, we went from 35 people.

We had a really good cost of revenue. We got 15 headcount or so in that first, uh, year or two. Which is still really small. I mean, we’re still, you know, at that point a team of 50 people, the numbers continued to grow and more people were playing

Sophie Buonassisi: On their phones

Rick Kelley: and then all of a sudden real money gambling like

Sophie Buonassisi: and.

Rick Kelley: drafts for Patty power and FanDuel and all those started becoming legal in the late, you know, 20 16, 17, 18.

And so that led to more investment. And the business just grew and grew wildly. And so from an ad perspective, we probably topped out, , in 2021 at around close to 6 billion. And then we ended up taking on in my group, , the whole ad network business for the company, which was putting third party ads inside other people’s apps. And that was, you know, an equivalent size team. So, you know, all in all, probably just under 12 billion between the two. And so that, that, you know, now you’re marrying two organizations, gaming and publisher sales and, and you know, a third party ad network. And how do you create synergies between them?

Because there’s a reason they’ve just put them all together as one. , how do you go from one plus one equals two to one plus one equals three by bringing those orgs together, you know.

Sophie Buonassisi: What playbooks do you think were the most transferable from more of the regional EM e sales or growth?

Rick Kelley: Culture, culture’s, everything. So, you know, who are the people that we wanna hire? Who are the ones that we want to be on the team? I don’t need the smartest people in the room ever. I want you to be hungry, have grit. You know, um, figure out what motivates you and, and what motivates this person versus this person.

Versus this can often be very, very different things. And you know, a good manager has to understand that and be able to play, you know, play into, you know, motivating, you know, through that. Regardless of what it is, where it is around the world, like my playbook is always to think about culture first and then, you know, uh, an old boss of mine used to say culture eats strategy for breakfast.

It’s true. It’s like if you have the right people there and they’re there for the right reason, then we can make pivots when it comes to new products or pivots when it comes to something not working or a competitor starting to rise up and, and, you know, become a threat.

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, I can imagine that would be particularly important as you’re trailblazing new areas and really building that out globally.

Rick Kelley: Well, and you know, I think what was really cool about gaming is we were our own team on the side. So you might be sitting in the Singapore office, but you weren’t a part of the APAC team, you were part of the gaming team. You know, there was, we didn’t have as many resources as maybe they did when it comes to cross-functional team members. even things like t and e, but we, we wore that, you know, pride on our sleeves and we were, we prioritized fun. How can we have it be fun? I’ve got a colleague in Singapore, I’ve got a colleague in Tel Aviv. ’cause there’s a whole team there. And I’ve got a colleague in New York City. No real other teams across the company had something like that. And so one of the things that I started doing in 2015 was bringing anybody that touched gaming in the company to someplace around the world. have a massive summit where we went through, you know, the whole priorities for the next coming year, how the business results looked, where our investments were gonna be, and it got everybody on the same page. whether you were directly part of my team or a cross function, you all felt like you were part of something bigger. Again, that’s kind of what I, you know, come back to when I talk about culture is how you’re on different comp plans or what have you, but how do I really make you feel invested in what we’re trying to do in gaming? So one year, a couple years, we did Dublin, did Austin, Texas. ’cause we had a decent sized team there. We did Singapore. Um, yeah, like we just picked a different place where we had a, a, you know, a fairly sizable presence and we brought everybody, like up to 450 people. on a plane and, and spending three days at a summit.

And it really helped connect people, and helped, you know, create a community, really a community.

Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. And how did you, how did you test for culture? It’s something that I think everybody’s always trying to figure out different ways of doing so, and you’ve obviously done an incredible job of hiring for culture fit.

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Rick Kelley: I mean, you have cultural health surveys and indexes, and it tells you where you’re doing well, and it tells you the things that you know. You gotta get better. So we’d listen to the feedback, we’d put plans in place to hopefully close the gap. Some things we could never really close the gap on, whether it’s compensation where people are underwhelmed by or, Hey, I want to be, you know, a VP in the next six months.

How do I get there? And it’s like, well, you’re two years outta school. That’s probably not realistic. Um, so, you know, there’s all these expectations that people have that maybe you can’t match. You can listen, you can address them and you can, you know, hopefully incrementally improve, even if it doesn’t get the people you know, all the way where they are. But at the same time, it’s like, are they staying within the team or are they looking to transfer out to a different organization? You know, you are looking to go from gaming to entertainment, which will put you back in the North America team or back in the APAC team. If people were still coming to us from those teams as opposed to our team going to those teams, then I knew we had a pretty good thing. When things weren’t right. Look, it’s not all roses. Over a 10 year period, you had some leaders that, you know, rubbed people the wrong way or were ineffective. You know, you don’t get every hire right. I think one of the things that maybe makes me a little bit different is that I too tend to give a little bit longer leash and help in trying and developing my senior leadership team. Even the next level beneath them, give them a chance to improve if things aren’t working right, you know, right off the bat. Um, you know, sometimes you’ve gotta cut the date and know when to call it a day. But I think other leaders maybe would do that a little bit more quickly. And I try to develop these people and care about their careers, you know.

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s fantastic and I mean, you’ve grown regionally, the business, you expanded globally. What are, if you could kinda look back in that reflective mirror, what are some of the things that you think you did really well? What did you do right?

Rick Kelley: We hired great people that knew the industry that still today are phenomenal at their jobs. The average sales rep in our organization managed about $40 to $50 million a quarter, that might be 10 what the FMCG team or a different team would manage. So the scale of the revenue that our men and women were managing was significant. So hiring, I’m very proud of that. I’m also proud of how we did it with diversity as a priority. One of the things about gaming is it’s a very male dominated industry. Only 23% of industry professionals are female. so, you know, we were looking at ways how we can build diverse teams, and part of that was driving more women into looking at the careers that the gaming organization could provide to them. That was not an overnight thing. We had to put a lot of work into that between my marketing counterparts, to really put a plan to every industry function, we would have a woman in gaming leadership luncheon or breakfast, have the right guest speakers come in, have women tell their story. 

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We had a whole presence on Facebook where a hundred women told their story of how they got into the gaming industry and the, the pros, the cons, some of the challenges they’ve had, because it was a learning opportunity and more women would, look to us as a place to grow their career. And I was really proud that at the end of the day when I left, more than 50% of my organization were female, and more than 50 of my leadership team were female. And so years ago, I don’t think that I probably would’ve envisioned that.

And I. it took a lot of hard work, but it meant like more than half the games out there now are being played by women, games are being developed with women in mind. And so we need women to be able to talk to them about how you market to those folks, you know? , and be compassionate about even the characters that are being depicted within the games and how that might make a woman feel. That’s not even to say that we had the whole trans community that also were, you know, big, , employment, opportunities to, to drive into our team. And so I was really proud of a lot of the pride efforts that we had, because diversity comes in many different forms. It’s not male female, it’s not, you know, particularly when you have a global team, it’s not necessarily about hiring one underrepresented person, race or creed because all these countries present different things.

And so how can we really impact diversity? And that would be male, female, Sexual orientation, things of that nature. So I’m proud at the end of the day that that’s where we ended up.

Sophie Buonassisi: You really built a ton of intentionality, Rick. And what would you say would be the things now looking back that maybe you would’ve done differently or good lessons learned along the way?

Rick Kelley: Well this is rather specific to me.What happened in gaming tends to happen in other categories and other verticals tend. 18, 24 months down the line, we were the beachhead when it came to advertising. Gaming. Advertisers are nimble. They are quick to find something that is effective when it comes to advertising, and so they were pushing us as a company to build products in the direction that we ended up doing that. But it also meant that, you know, a big part of my job was being product literate and working with the engineering team to develop ad products that suited what our clients were looking for. That meant sometimes I’d get things really quickly because it sounded like a real, you know, quick win.But it also meant some bigger things really got put on the back burner because I was the only one asking for ’em. So the learning that I probably have would be how do I get other verticals into my request, into my product roadmap faster than maybe what I did. Over time that I shouldn’t be the only one shouting for these things because if I’m asking for it now, travel, e-commerce entertainment might be asking for it in 12 months time. So let’s build it before it’s, uh, build it and they’ll come.

Sophie Buonassisi: Makes sense?

Rick Kelley: I dunno, I probably made a million different mistakes here or there, but. You know, that’s always one that I, I reflect on to say, bring more people into your request and then you’re not alone

Sophie Buonassisi: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I mean, that’s phenomenal advice too to anyone leading to building in general.

Rick Kelley: Yeah.

Sophie Buonassisi: And I always think failure’s a data point, mistakes are a data point

Rick Kelley: even the best baseball players fail 70% of the time. Right. It’s like, you know, how do you have an impact, you know, with the wins and learn from the other areas and move forward.

Sophie Buonassisi: You got it. Now you’ve scaled gaming globally. What happens after that?

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Rick Kelley: Well, in 2021, the investments that the company was making was starting to get pretty big in virtual reality.

You know, the glasses, um, the Oculus devices now called the Quest. And so gaming was becoming a really big part of, you know, the, we, we rebranded from Facebook to Meta, but that was very much a separate division, that whole virtual reality. And then my organization was on, um, you know, uh, on the side. Part of that though was, you know, the desire to, um, you know, I was at that point a senior vice president and they wanted to put more things underneath my responsibility that had a tie in with gaming.

And so they moved the ad network piece, uh, you know, uh, and they combined that organization, uh, the audience network with our gaming piece. Um, and we created some real efficiencies around that and created some new Go-To-Market, because we were basically. Selling advertising. But then we were also paying those same companies because they were allowing us to put other ads within their gaming apps and, and non-gaming too.

Weather apps and utility apps, travel apps, whatever. So that was going well. And then, you know, as if I didn’t have enough to do at that point, um, my good pal who was the head of Ireland, which is our international headquarters, decided to leave the company. And so I was asked to take on that responsibility, which is now.

You know, supposed to be 25% of my job, but of course it was a lot more than that. And so I still had gaming. I had the ad network piece, which was relatively new. And now this third component, which is leading the country, um, in front of policy makers, in front of politicians, you know, uh, we’re just trying to get people back in the office post COVID d So we were actually consolidating a couple of offices into one new, bigger office.

Um. Trying to get people to come in, you know, on their own accord as opposed to being forced to come in at the time. So a lot of it was about culture development and sitting on the boards of these, you know, nine or 10 different, uh, Meta, um, corporations that were international. So, you know, as you get into a role and you, you don’t feel like maybe you’re learning as much.

What new responsibilities can you take on for the company, um, where you can leverage what you’ve learned and try to develop your own, I guess, experiences even more. And I’m really thankful that I did that. Um, because one of the things with my role over the years, I was always, I was sitting in Dublin, but I was either Pania or Pan Global and my Irish contacts and my Irish.

The network probably suffered because I was everywhere else. I was never really focused here. And so by taking on that role over the last 18 months, I was really able to, um, you know, create more of a community for myself locally. And that’s now served me well. You know, post, post leaving.

Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible. And that whole journey at Meta has been over 14 years and now you are advising a lot of and supporting a lot of startups. Is there a certain focal point, any specific vertical region that you’re working with startups on?

Rick Kelley: I’m not exclusive to any one geographic area. I’ve decided that I don’t want to go back to work full-time in an operational role, but at the same time, I’m young enough that I don’t want to, you know, twiddle my thumbs and cut the lawn every day. Uh, and how can I give back a little bit to the companies that are now starting to create themselves?

And, um, you know, are looking to be the next billion dollar companies. Uh, so at first I started working with partners of Meta that were, you know, building businesses on the back of it, either on the back of WhatsApp or on the back of being able to build creative, um, that would be used on Meta for advertising purposes.

’cause that’s the world that I knew and I knew, you know, it was kind of a, a, an easy extension to start getting involved with those. But that led to becoming, you know, a, a part of, uh, a group called Tech Operators here in Ireland which is 30X senior level executives from the tech industry that invest in, and mentor and coach different startups.

Um, most of them are Irish based, and so that means, you know, a little bit more concentration there. But yeah, like I, now I just try and, you know, I’ve written a thesis of where, where I do want to get involved. I don’t think I can add a lot of value, and I try and choose projects that will allow me to, uh, to lean into those things

Sophie Buonassisi: But that leads us into actually our last two questions, which are always the same, Rick, and what is one tactic or strategy that’s working for the companies that you’re advising right now?

Rick Kelley: Well, they’re very early stage, you know, all of them, like seed capital range. You know, they’re hiring their first 20, you know, maybe their first 10 or 20 employees. And so, you know, I think that I can add a lot of value when it comes to the Go-To-Market conversation, but it’s also around. Culture, you know, and that’s, I think a big part of what has made my career prosper is that I’ve focused, as we’ve been talking about, over indexed on the culture piece.

And so I’ve tried to really impart that with anybody that I’m speaking to. Around. Do not underestimate how important those first hires are in your company. ’cause they are gonna be the ones that set the tone for everybody else that comes along the way. And they need to be able to share your vision and share your hard work and energy.

Or else it’s gonna be a house of cards that’s gonna fall down. So that’s, I think one of the things that I really is, we could do different things with the Go-To-Market plan and some need to look different than the others. But what’s really important in every company is, you know, how people feel about where they work and who they work for.

Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely, and they’re all nodes of impact, nodes of brand to find every touch point, every person’s reflection of that. Super valuable. And if I flip that on its head a little bit, you know, what’s one widely held belief that you’d say revenue leaders hold that you kind of think is bullshit or no longer serving us?

Rick Kelley: I think a lot of people, when they’re a sales leader, they say, I’ve gotta have people in the market. You know, I’ve gotta have, if I’m the French country leader, I need to have everybody in France or you know, the UK or wherever. It’s, and you know, as we’ve talked about, I think that there’s a real advantage for having people be centralized.

On behalf of the French market, but working alongside their German counterparts, their Spanish counterparts, because the knowledge learning that takes place is so much faster than if you are in an isolated, you know, remote office where you’re not as connected to headquarters. ’cause everybody wants to come to a major headquarters like a Dublin or a London, you know, from corporate headquarters and tell about their new product or tell about the new marketing narrative.

And so quickly you get feedback and you get learning taking place throughout the team. If you’re just in an office of seven or eight people in Madrid, you’re gonna miss so much of that. And so one of the things that I really believe is that you can have a hub and smoke model where you might sit in Dublin for three weeks and then you go into the market for a week and you hit all your customers and you do a trade show, whatever it is.

And then you take those learnings back to Dublin and then you head back into the market a couple weeks later. So I think that’s one of the things. There’s this old adage that is. Don’t take no for an answer, right? That’s sales. You know, be persistent, keep banging on the door.

And I don’t believe that that’s true. I think that there’s good business and bad business. A couple of examples, like if it’s gonna take you eight months to close the deal and you know, a ton of cross-functional man hours and this and that, but you finally get it over the line. Could you have gotten three other deals over the line if you didn’t put all that time and effort into that one?

Make sure that the prize, the juice is worth the squeeze, that the prize is big enough to allocate all those resources and effort and time. Alternatively, you’ve got pieces of business that may not be great pieces of business for your brand. You know, an example from the gaming industry is that there were a lot of misleading gaming ads back in like 2018, and it was big revenue.

It was almost like that. Yeah, it was like more than 400 million in ads that probably didn’t depict gameplay, like the actual game. The ads showed one type of game, and you weren’t actually playing that game when you got to the game. I made the decision to shoot all that, get rid of it.

Create policies that don’t allow that anymore because of the reputation that our users had with, oh man, you know, I can’t trust a gaming ad because I’m not really gonna be playing a game like that. So people stop responding to gaming ads. Um, and it hurt the entire, you know, category. So by basically saying, I don’t want your money, if that’s the only way you’re gonna spend it, you know, it hurts for probably six months until we kind of cycled through it.

But it improved the ad quality and our reputation with all of our users, and it was the right thing to do.

Sophie Buonassisi: Sounds like you’re really bringing that long-term mindset to everything like that. Like the culture hires really looking at that long-term build strategy as opposed to the short-term revenue hits or hires.

Rick Kelley: I suppose. Yeah. I didn’t, I’ve never probably looked at it that way, but I. Again, it’s not about chasing every last all mighty dollar. It’s about doing what’s right for the company, doing what’s right for the team, and so.

Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. Well, Rick, this has been fantastic. Really appreciate the time, and how can people find you if they wanna get in touch or follow along your journey in content?

Rick Kelley: I’m on LinkedIn, Rick Kelley with an EY os my LinkedIn address. I’m sure you’ll put it in the show notes or in the um,

Sophie Buonassisi: sure will.

Rick Kelley: wherever. Um, you could obviously find me on Facebook if need be. And, um, yeah, I don’t know. I’m around, I’m not tough, tough to track down, that’s for sure.

Sophie Buonassisi: Perfect. Well thank you Rick. I really appreciate the time. To all the listeners,

Rick Kelley: I hope this was

Sophie Buonassisi: It was super helpful. I appreciate it. Thank you everyone for hanging with us and we’ll see you next week.