CEO World Magazine’s “Executive Spotlight: Greg Blatt”, discussed how Blatt was able to capitalize on a burgeoning industry and ensure its sustained relevance in the ever-changing tech world.
Greg Blatt is Google’s Vice President of Engineering. He is the company’s senior VP overseeing Android, Chrome, Google Play, and other major product initiatives. If it runs on a phone or uses an app to get things done, Blatt has had something to do with it.
Greg Blatt joined Google in 2003 when the company acquired the search engine he co-founded called “Bizrate.” The successful deal led to him taking over management of all of AdMob’s engineering efforts, making him responsible for some of the most crucial aspects of Google’s business at that time, such as YouTube and, more recently, a now-defunct service called Blockbuster, where users rented movies through their web browser from their local Blockbuster store.
“Domain names and web hosting,” Greg Blatt says. “These were businesses I had no experience in, and I didn’t have any background in engineering. I had a Ph.D. from MIT, which means the kind of things you do when you’re working on something like that are math and computer science related.”
Blatt’s experience working with the founders of AdMob, where they developed the very first ad network for mobile devices and YouTube on Google TV, helped him adjust to his role at Google. “I learned a tremendous amount over there,” he says, “and Google has a huge mission–there’s an awesome group there who want to make sure these products succeed–and they’re doing great things. And I learned how to work in a team and with people.”
Greg Blatt brings an unusual background to his role as Google’s VP of Engineering, which is uncommon for a level-Five executive at a publicly-traded company. His credentials include:
A Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT, where he focused on numerical algorithms and computational geometry.
Five years at the New York Times.
Six years as CEO of Bizrate, leading it through significant growth and acquiring the company AltaVista where the roots of AdMob came from.
Nine years at Microsoft before coming back to Google.
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Visit his LinkedIn profile on https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-blatt-a795a35b