From October, 2007 to May, 2010 I was a Product Manager for YouTube.
I was attracted to YouTube because, like Google in 2001, it was
an extremely popular consumer destination but had not yet developed
a business model. I helped turn
YouTube into a business by establishing partnerships with the media industry and by building scalable
video-specific monetization programs.
I started at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno,
CA and then helped build the team in Google's
office in Zurich, Switzerland.
These are the major initiatives that I was responsible for:
Full-length TV Shows on YouTube
UK(note: this link only
displays TV shows if
you're located inside the UK)
I spent almost a year commuting between Zurich and London to
negotiate deals with the
major UK television broadcasters. This included partnerships
with Channel 4 and
Channel Five to
place their entire library of full-length UK television
programmes on YouTube UK. The biggest achievement here was
successfully running two negotiations in parallel: one with the
broadcasters in the UK and one with the Google/YouTube executives in California.
YouTube Promoted
Videos
This is our performance based video advertising product
("AdWords for YouTube"). I founded this project, but Matt Liu
and Jonathan Goldman deserve the credit for driving through all
the internal Google roadblocks to launch this product.
YouTube
Partner Program
This program enables independent video creators to earn a
revenue share from the advertising shown in conjuction with their
YouTube videos ("AdSense for YouTube"). We launched this
program in Dec 2007, and today hundreds of YouTube
users are earning six figure salaries entirely from their YouTube videos.
YouTube Click-to-Buy
This feature automatically identifies the song used within a YouTube
video and provides a link to buy the song on iTunes, Amazon, and
other music retailers. This helped
YouTube obtain more reasonable licensing deals with the major music labels.
From Sept 2004 to Sept 2007, I was a Product Manager at
Google. I was first responsible for Local Search (now part of
Google
Univesal Search) and then also became responsible for
Google Maps. Lars
Rasmussen and Bret Taylor deserve the credit for conceiving
Google Maps. I lead the product through its growth phase,
transforming it from a US-only Google Labs demo into the world's leading
platform for location based services.
Yahoo! (2000-2004)
•
At Yahoo!, I sucessfully integrated the VivaSmart team and
technology into Yahoo! Shopping,
and then went on to build
a new content management system for
Yahoo! Travel
and
launch the
Yahoo! Search Shortcuts.
The highlight of this experience was working with
Pasha Sadri,
who later went on to create Yahoo! Pipes and Polyvore.
VivaSmart (1999-2000)
•
I co-founded VivaSmart, Inc. with
Amr Awadallah in 1999.
We initially created a comparison shopping website for college
students and later
syndicated our e-commerce engine to customers
such as Epinions.com.
•
Running this company was an emotional roller coaster and we
experienced the dot com boom and bust first hand.
We raised a few hundred thousand dollars in angel
funding and were acquired by Yahoo! in June 2000 for $9M.
US Patent Application 20080275763: Thai Tran, Dean Yasuda, Shashi
Seth, Aaron Lee, Zheng Liu, Franck Chastagnol, George Strompolos. Monetization
of Digital Content Contributions. Filed on May 5, 2008.
Google Maps
US Patent Application 20080301643: Ben Appleton, Steffen Meschkat,
Thai Tran, Adam Sah, Zheng Wang, Adam Schuck, James Macgill. Map
Gadgets. Filed on May 28, 2007.
US Patent 7,747,598: Florian Buron, Ramesh
Balakrishnan, Jim Norris, Jim Muller, Thai Tran, Lars Rasmussen. Geographic
Coding For Location Search Queries. Filed on Jan 25,
2007. Granted on Jun 29, 2010.
Yahoo!
US Patent Application 20050027705: Pasha Sadri, Jeremy Kreitler,
Brian Gil, Thai Tran. Mapping
method and system. Filed on May 19, 2004.