Why leave Google? Beeswax founders and former Google execs explain

Beeswax’s founders, from left, Shamim Samadi, Ari
Paparo, and Ram Rengaswamy.
Courtesy
of Beeswax

• Google
  often makes the list of best places to work in the US.
• The three founders of ad tech startup Beeswax are all former
  Google executives who made the tough decision to leave.
• They each explained to Business Insider why they decided to
  leave the company. Among the reasons that helped them decide:
  finding more room to work, getting the space to have unlimited
  impact, and operating in an environment not ruled by engineers.

Employees routinely rank Google as one of the
best workplaces in America, and deciding whether to leave the
company is never an easy decision.

The three founders of the startup Beeswax, all of whom are former
Google ad executives, recently explained to Business Insider how
they each knew it was the right time to quit.

The trio founded Beeswax, which makes software that helps
companies bid for ads online in real time, in 2015, and have
since
expanded to 55 employees and are outgrowing their Manhattan
office. Their revenue last year was estimated at $25 million.

Before leaving to start Beeswax, chief technical officer
Ram Rengaswamy worked at Google for seven years as a tech
lead and software engineer on high-profile projects like Gmail.

But at Google, he said, he wasn’t able to build projects from the
ground up like he wanted to.

“I kind of knew that I wasn’t growing much at Google,” he told
Business Insider. “I mean, yes, there were challenging problems
to solve, but there are so many smart people there who’ve done
all the heavy lifting that honestly, what I felt like I was doing
was taking the Lego bricks and just building stuff on top. So
someone had already had done the hard work and for me I was just
putting things together.”

It was a matter of “I’m inquisitive, I’m curious, and I’m not
learning enough on my job,” he said.

On top of that, he said at Google it can be hard for your
accomplishments to stand out, and it’s unlikely you’d get
attention from higher-ups like founders Larry Page or Sergey
Brin.

“It’s a big organization and there’s just so much impact a single
person can have,” Rengaswamy said. “So that was another thing
that would always bother me, that yeah, sure if I left Google, I
don’t think Larry or Sergey would know or care or would even be
aware.”

“That part always was a thing on my mind. So I think it was a
combination of those two things.”

Meanwhile, Ari Paparo, Beeswax’s CEO, left Google in 2010 after
two years as a director of product management. More recently, he
was a product management executive at AppNexus and Bazaarvoice.

He said his decision to leave Google was more based on finding a
company culture that would allow him to succeed.

“For me it was a little different,” he said. “It was that I saw
myself as more of a businessperson than a technologist. And
Google is very much an engineering culture, so there’s a limit to
what you can get done as a businessperson.”

Beeswax’s chief product officer, Shamim Samadi, worked at Google
for nine years, the longest-tenured Googler of the three. His two
stints at the company included six years as a lead product
manager for advertising.

Samadi said Paparo approached him with the idea for Beeswax and
immediately became excited at the thought of developing the new
ad technology. But more importantly, he realized he’d have to
leave Google to develop it.

“I’d been feeling it in my current role and felt very much that
the incumbents would have a hard time pulling it off, and for
structural and infrastructure and philosophical reasons just
didn’t see it as a real opportunity,” he told Business
Insider. “I got really excited about the idea and then more
importantly, about the team to do it with.”

Already having a strong relationship with Paparo and Rengaswamy,
Samadi said he felt comfortable making his exit at Google.

“We all probably had it in the back of our heads, we want to
start something at some point,” he said. “But then it comes down
to, what is the idea or the area, and what is the team that you
do it with? And when those two things are there, you make the
leap.”

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