Pros
One of the primary reasons I first joined IAS was the size of the market opportunity and the position the company was in to address it. This continues to hold true today and new opportunities continue to develop. I find these challenges incredibly motivating and consider myself fortunate to have the organizational and industry support I've had in addressing them. Diversity and equal opportunity empowerment are strong-suits at IAS. The company makes it a point to hire and elevate high performers and leaders regardless of ethnicity or gender. Organizational and leadership changes in the last six months have been positive. Often the people and org structures that are best positioned to take a company from one stage to another aren't the same as those best suited for the development stages that follow. And that's ok. The significant majority of recent leadership hires and promotions have brought highly impressive people into key roles. From my interactions with them, including our new CEO, I am bullish on our leadership as we enter this next phase.
Cons
Given the size and scope of certain market problems that IAS typically focuses on solving, progress against them can seem to be made at a slow pace. When we take a step back and compare this progress against other large industry advancements, particularly with incumbent incentives against change, the steps IAS has taken forward for the industry--and for realizing value itself--have actually been taken rather quickly. When combining this with the fact that IAS has been a notable ad tech growth story, sometimes characterized with scaling fast at the cost of efficiency and tech debt, it's not unrealistic for people coming from early stage start-ups to find points of frustration at the 800-person company. Having spent many years in seed to growth stage start-ups, I can sympathize with this. But I've also found the respectively different priorities, trade-offs, and challenges to be exciting and developmentally important to my career. There were a handful of tenured high performers that chose to depart after a lucrative exit. That isn't really surprising, should be expected, and I'm really happy for them. This has created opportunities for IAS to elevate other high performers, which seems to have gone pretty well, but hiring in strong engineers, often with niche experience and at a quick pace, has sometimes been a challenge. We could probably do a better job investing in hiring and growing high-potential employees.