Bain’s journey to success
Workaholic Bain hustles to cash in on hashtags
Relentlessly energetic, he built ad biz from almost nothing,
Adam Bain has built Twitter’s ad business from virtually nothing.
A happy-go-lucky workaholic who barely sleeps at night, the Twitter exec cranks out emails at 3 a.m. On his Twitter profile he describes himself as “dad of 2 under 7, insomniac.”
Bain, 41, oversees more than half of Twitter’s 4,100-strong workforce as the company’s president of global revenue and partnerships. He crisscrosses the country each year in a quest to spread the Twitter gospel, hopping red eyes and pulling allnighters with the vigor of a college kid.
“He isn’t human when it comes to being able to go with minimal sleep,” says Ravi Narasimhan, who worked with Bain at Fox and at Twitter, and now works at Google.
The relentlessly energetic Bain can’t sleep because “his mind is always active,” says Chris Blandy, Fox Networks Group’s executive vice president of technology solutions. “He’s always searching for something new and interesting.”
Bain is a contender to be Twitter’s next CEO, a job that comes with the steep task of turning around the company’s stock and user growth.
When Twitter began heavily courting him, Bain was president of the Fox Audience Network, running a division that included one of the Web’s largest advertising platforms and a team that made money from News Corp.’s Web properties and third-party online publishers.
Bain met former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in 2007 when he tried to buy Costolo’s former company FeedBurner. Google snapped it up, but Bain stayed close to Costolo. In early 2010, Costolo sought out Bain to get advice on how Twitter could make money.
In 2009, Twitter had privately set the goal of reaching more than $1 billion in annual revenue but had done little in the way of building an advertising business. Most of the major brands were on Twitter, but they were not paying to be there.
Bain was intrigued by the idea of building advertising that was not in-your-face banner ads but something native to the Twitter experience. Yet he was reluctant to uproot his family from Los Angeles. He had just bought a new house and had a second child.
Twitter was persistent and ultimately persuasive. The day Bain was handed the keys to the new house was the same day he accepted the job in San Francisco. On his first day working for Twitter in September 2010, he was told he had three days to present his plan to the board of directors for turning hashtags into dollars. He had fewer than a dozen people on his staff and close to zero revenue.
Bain presented two options: traditional banner ads that would take off quickly; or a slower path, developing a new, more userfriendly form of advertising, called promoted tweets, where marketers pay to have their tweets shown to users. The board seized on the latter.
With his family still in L.A., Bain fell into the rhythm of longdistance commuting for six months, rousing himself at 4 a.m. on Mondays to head to San Fran- cisco, where he lived out of a hotel all week. He flew home Friday nights. He also embarked on a lis- tening tour of 140 chief marketing officers of major corporations in 140 days to sell advertisers on Twitter.
That year, a group of Unilever executives traveled to Silicon Valley to sit down with the likes of Facebook and Google. Twitter was not on the dance card of one of the world’s largest advertisers. So Bain hit a Unilever luncheon, “bouncing around like a jumping bean,” spending 15 minutes at each table to pitch all of the executives, said Michael Kassan, founder and chief executive officer of advisory firm MediaLink.
Each year he puts on a sales conference with Kevin Weil, who runs product, and Alex Roetter, who runs engineering. It’s not just for the sales team, but for the product, engineering and business teams to bond and create a shared vision and road map.
That’s unusual in an industry that prizes engineers and sometimes treats business people as second-class citizens. Google founder Larry Page famously referred to his sales team as “collectors,” as in “they collect the money for Google.”
Bain held the first conference in 2010 when the business team had fewer than 30 people. It took place in Twitter’s lunch room, the only space big enough at the time. This year Twitter rented out the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.
He is famous for his stunts. This year, to mock the use of flames in sales presentations, he used real pyrotechnics. In 2013, he walked on stage in a spacesuit with a tinted visor and sporting a fake bushy mustache.
Narasimhan says Bain is one of those rare Pied Piper executives. Not only did Bain talk Narasimhan into selling his company to Fox, Bain then talked him into joining Twitter in 2011 even though Narasimhan had promised his wife to take a year off and stay in Los Angeles.
“That’s the kind of loyalty Adam inspires,” Narasimhan says. “There are few people I would lie down in traffic for. Adam is one of them.”