Inside Yahoo DSP’s high-performance culture with Alia Lamborghini

Imagine leading a team where drive and accountability are the standard, not the exception. 

That’s the high-performance culture every leader dreams of.

In this episode of Reveal, host Dana Feldman sits down with Alia Lamborghini, SVP of Global Revenue at Yahoo DSP, to explore what it takes to create a culture of growth and excellence. Alia shares her “Autonomous 11s” philosophy for building high-performing teams, the importance of stepping up for new challenges, and the role of direct communication in driving results.

Tune in to discover what it takes to build a culture where top talent thrives.

Dana Feldman:
What do the world’s best CROs have in their playbooks? This is the place to find out. This is Reveal: The Revenue Intelligence Podcast. I’m your host, Dana Feldman.

Hi y’all, I’m Dana Feldman and this is Reveal, the Revenue Intelligence podcast. Each episode, we are focused on helping you build the ultimate CRO playbook. And we promise to give you access to the most influential revenue leaders at the world’s top companies so that you too can achieve your goals. As the SVP of Global Revenue for Yahoo DSP, Alia oversees the business globally driving strategic growth and innovative solutions for advertisers. With over 15 years of experience leading high-performing teams and industry-defining strategies, she has been instrumental in shaping the future of digital media and advertising.

Dana Feldman:
Alia’s experience spans programmatic advertising, data-driven insights and delivering results for some of the biggest brands in the world. Beyond obviously her impressive professional journey, Aliya is passionate about empowering her teams and creating a collaborative culture that thrives on innovation. So with that, I am really excited to dive in. Alia, welcome to the show.

Alia Lamborghini:
Awesome. Thank you Dana. I’m really happy to be here. Nice to see you.

Dana Feldman:
So let’s start really just kind of from, from the beginning, tell the leaders a little bit about your career journey and how you got to where you are today.

Alia Lamborghini:
I lucked into the ad tech industry. It’s been incredibly fun and rewarding. I feel very fortunate to have gotten into it. I started at a startup called advertising.com in 2002 when I graduated from college. It was a Baltimore headquartered ad tech startup really before the moniker of ad tech even existed. Started by two brothers, John and Scott Ferber, who are amazingly influential and smart and fun and no one in the building was over the age of 30. So we had a rich work life and personal life too, which there’s a lot of good stories there. And I was there from 2002 all the way to 2010.

So we actually got bought by AOL in 2004 and we ran as a wholly owned corporate subsidiary for most of that time. And then in 2010 I followed some other really smart, bright, talented people over to Millennial Media, which was another Baltimore-based ad tech startup, this time mobile advertising. So the iPhone came out in 2007. Millennial launched shortly thereafter. And in 2010 I went over there to southeast region and then kind of just had the opportunity, as one does at a startup, to do more and more and the next thing and the next thing, mainly because there just wasn’t anybody else to do the other things. So it was like we need leadership in Chicago and Detroit, you know, hand raising for that, or we need leadership in Dallas, hand raising for that. And then ultimately that included the East Coast.

We moved to New York with Millennial—my husband and I and two of our three kids. And then Millennial was bought by AOL and Verizon in 2015. So it was a very interesting full-circle moment of having been a subsidiary of AOL for all that time at advertising.com and then going back into due diligence with the AOL team again as a purchase and then moving back over to AOL with a lot of people that I had worked with before who had come from advertising.com who are some of my great friends and still are to this day. So that was a really cool moment to do a little bit of that boomerang opportunity.

After that, Verizon had bought AOL in May of 2015. They then bought Millennial in October of 2015. They then bought Yahoo in like June of 2017 and then in 2021 divested and sold AOL and Yahoo, which we were calling Oath at the time—or we were back to Verizon Media at that point—to Apollo Capital.

And so that was 2021. We had a new CEO, Jim Lanzone, who’s amazing. We’ve been operating as Yahoo ever since.

Dana Feldman:
You were truly at the cutting-edge beginning days of online advertising. What would surprise our listeners about that time in that era? I mean, this was not a well-paved space motion, you know, here’s what you do. So I don’t know—just what would surprise listeners that you’ve kind of reflected on during that time?

Alia Lamborghini:
You know, this was pre-RTB, right? So this was like IO-based digital buying that we were—we were on the path of becoming programmatic ultimately. But the manual nature of the things that we did from the conversion—like manual conversion matching in huge spreadsheets, you know, just powered by your average VLOOKUP, right? Sort of taking SKU numbers. I mean, it was so manual. Everything we did was so manual. And we were definitely in a “hide the crazy” period of time because we were way out ahead of ourselves with the capability of the technology that we had, and yet a lot of it was still pretty manual.

So we had an incredible performance algorithm, but, like, the reporting and the measurement and all the pieces that came from that. I would love to go back to 2002, 2003, advertising.com and just kind of run through those systems and see that again. It’s come such a long way.

And we were, to your point, like—we were bleeding-edge performance marketing and Millennial was similar. And there were a lot of things that we were doing manually, just fast and furious to try to keep up with client demand. So I think that’s the thing that would be so fun to go back and see. If I could tell myself, you know, that we were going to have access to all of these tools. We have always had machine learning, but just what AI has done, even over the last couple of years, it’s been wild.

Dana Feldman:
It’s so funny. I remember this era as well, and I was actually doing an internship in, like, 2000, and I built this company’s website and we wanted to get it bumped up on the search engines, right? And so back then you could call Google, and I’m trying to, like, negotiate them into telling me what’s—like, I don’t even know if algorithm was, like, a word back then, but, like, I’m like, “Well, how do we get bumped up?” You know, and they’re, like, trying to dance around it. But it’s just like—you were really just trying to build or scrape out whatever you could back then because it was so not defined. So I feel you.

Alia Lamborghini:
That would have been Overture and Google, right? Since Overture ultimately got bought by Yahoo and then that brand went away. But it’s just that it was a totally different cast of characters in the industry, and yet some have stuck around and been, you know, resilient through it all. So it’s very cool to see it. And those people that I worked at advertising.com with have gone on to lead huge companies and functions within massive, you know, Fortune 10 companies and product at Amazon. And it’s just very cool to see all those—we were kids—and what they’re doing now and the professional success that they’ve had is really fun to be a part of, too.

Dana Feldman:
So the other thing you just mentioned in your story and journey is several times you talked about, “I raised my hand for that opportunity. I raised my hand to move there. I raised my hand for this,” right? This concept of raising your hand. Talk to me a little bit about that. Along with that, how do you make the decision about what you raise your hand for? I think this is a really interesting concept for people who want to grow their careers. In doing that, how did you also not let fear or other things get in the way of jumping at some opportunities, which I think often happens to a lot of individuals?

Alia Lamborghini:
So a couple key things in terms of raising your hand and being in a position in my life where I could raise my hand. I had no one else to be responsible for. I had a really great boyfriend who later turned into a spectacular husband. He was in New York, and I was in Baltimore. We had no kids. It was all about, “What can I do to grow?” And there was this awesome environment of—again, I went back-to-back startups, 200-person startups, in some cases less, and then they grew to that. But that really fostered this opportunity of, like, we are all trying to do this. I mean, now there’s this whole thing about founder mode.

Like everyone in that building was in founder mode at that time. Like everyone really cared about the success of the whole team, and if something needed to be done, then everyone raised their hand. And if that wasn’t what you were into, you probably didn’t work there that long. Right. Because there were a lot of different things that had to get done. And I don’t think raising my hand for those things was particularly unique. That’s just what we did. And that was the culture that we came up in.

And having no personal responsibility, it was like, “Do you want to move to Atlanta?” “Yes, sure. Great. Wonderful.” “Do you want to take on this role, this team, travel these days and weeks?” Like, “Yes, of course I do.” Because we’re just trying to run the world, you know, it’s like a really fun moment in time that is—it’s different now. Every decision you make now has a cascading influence on the huge team that reports to you, your family that depends on you, your social structure around you. It was different.

Dana Feldman:
I think it’s interesting though because I get into this topic a lot with our guests, and I think early in your career, this idea of how planned out you need to have it. I think people sometimes get a little too stuck in titles or, “Is this move directly moving me up a level?” Whereas I love this concept of raising your hand, and I’ve said it before, but this idea of treating your career like it’s a passport book and you’ve got to go and get stamps in different areas to broaden your experience to then give you those more senior, bigger-scoped roles or other opportunities. So when you talked about raising your hand, I just—I had to double-click on it. I think it’s really interesting. Do you have any sort of point of view that you typically share with your team or you’ve kind of built over the years around how to manage your career and how to approach it?

Alia Lamborghini:
I do. It’s evolved, and it’s still evolving. I love your concept of the passport. I think that’s really interesting. In ad tech particularly, the pace of change and compute power and how that impacts how quickly we move is so rapid that, I mean, you’re like a passport a day sometimes, right? Like there are new data relationships and partner agreements and technical capabilities that we’re trying to keep up with every single day. And I think what I’ve learned is that you really do have to be as immersed in it as you can be. So you have to want to do it. It has to be interesting.

And for me, the most interesting part of it is always the business that my clients run. So I’m most interested in, “How can I help GM sell more Escalades?” or, “How can I help Papa John’s sell more pizza, Dunkin’ sell more coffee, and so on?” That’s the most interesting thing to me. And then the ad tech part of it supports that curiosity and desire to support them. So ad tech’s a tool. I am not a particularly technical person. I still need friends and colleagues and family members to help me with ridiculous things. I just put Perplexity on my iPhone. So I’m trying to stay as current as I can, but that’s not my natural habitat.

I have to push to that. So if I can take the tech piece of my job and position it back toward, you know, the business portion and the client-facing portion and the curiosity that I have about what makes my client’s business run, that seems to work really well for me. And so I would say as you’re building a career, you need to find the particular thing in your path that lights you up the most. And you might be in commercial real estate, and maybe that doesn’t totally light you up. But the human aspect or the customer-based aspect—if that’s the thing that you care most about, then you lean into that.

You know, as a kid, I didn’t say I want to be in ad tech when I grow up. I wanted to be a journalist on TV like Katie Couric. I wanted to be asking questions and conducting interviews and doing that. And I think I do that every single day, multiple times a day. And I’m asking questions about ad tech and business. You know, there’s still, like, the human interest part of that. So I think it’s just looking at your career and connecting with the part of it that you love and then holding onto that and driving toward that. Because whatever you love the most is usually what you are best at. And we do best when we’re doing what we do best. I think that’s important.

Dana Feldman:
What about a lesson that you’ve learned, or maybe even if you want to call it a mistake in your career, a reflection moment for you—something that really taught you something you brought into the rest of your career? I would love to just hear what that is.

Alia Lamborghini:
So many lessons and a lot of mistakes, and I try really hard not to think too much about the mistakes for much longer. Over a glass of wine, I can tell you some of my worst. But I would say from an early career advice perspective—this was given to me by a leader at Advertising.com—he said, “You are going to need favors from all of these people, so you get out there on the second floor, and you make them all your friends.”

That was the trafficking people, the legal people, the computer science people, the tech folks—like, everyone in this building is related back to making sales successful in some way. And you’re going to need to call on them at any moment in time, and they better know your name, and it would even be better if you had recently done them a favor.

So, like, this concept of favor trading, I think, is something that I’ve taken forward in my career. It brings me great joy to do favors for people or to help somebody. It could be, you know, a job connection or any number of things. But I love to be actively doing favors for people, and I know that’s also going to work out for me in the future too. So there is a currency around this. I am very comfortable with you calling me, asking me for a favor, because that just means that when I call you, you’ll be comfortable doing that back for me too.

So that concept of “everyone in this building is important to what you do in some capacity, and you need to figure out what it is,” I was taught that pretty early on at Advertising.com.

Dana Feldman:
So powerful, especially for all of us in sales—the currency between all the teams that support us. How do you show up for them? How do you make them feel part of this team and know that we are not doing this alone? So I feel you very much on that answer.

Dana Feldman:
I’m curious—I know that I’ve heard you mention a concept called Autonomous 11. Will you tell us a little bit more about that and how it impacts the way that you drive results with your team?

Alia Lamborghini:
It’s important to take note that I don’t feel like I drive results. I feel like I hopefully encourage results or engender drive, or mostly hire people who are what I call Autonomous 11s, which is essentially like you have an internal drive and a personal integrity. You don’t need me to drive you.

And those are the best salespeople. They wake up in the morning thinking about what value they can drive for their customers that, in exchange, would bring more budget from a competitor to us. That’s what drives the best salespeople. And so they don’t need any additional drive from me, right? They are motivated by that.

And then 11 for me is just this version of—I love to find the people that are 11 out of 10 in that particular category, right? So tens are great. Show me the people who overachieve. We joke around at work a little bit about, “Bring me your anxiety, and I will turn it into sales success.” But like, if you wake up at 3 in the morning thinking about what you didn’t do, or the email you didn’t send, or a better way to do that, and you write a note down, I mean, that would be the behavior of an Autonomous 11.

Dana Feldman:
When you are interviewing for this characteristic, do you have a question or two great questions that you ask to really eke this out?

Alia Lamborghini:
So here’s the tricky part of this—it is very difficult in an interview environment to determine true Autonomous 11s. You can get some really great indicators. You can get part of the way there. You can assume based on the answers that they give that they’re like that.

But to me, the best way to screen for that is to go find people who worked with those folks who were actually in the trenches working on a project, up against a deadline. And this goes back to favor currency. I’m always kind of recycling old contacts to say, “Did you work with this person? How closely did you work with this person? What kind of work did you do with this person?”

Because even in your day-to-day, you can work fairly closely with a person but not be in the trenches with them on a project. And it’s hard to understand how they really operate. So I think the best interview version of that is the external, the backchanneling, right?

Dana Feldman:
Yes, we all are. You have to be, right? I mean, that’s the heart of the matter—being able to go back and backchannel.

And I also think that’s something newer-to-career folks often overlook. Your career journey is long, but the world you tend to live in is very small. You’ve got to keep that in mind in whatever decisions or however you want to show up throughout that journey. I’m going to steal your Autonomous 11 concept.

Alia Lamborghini:
By all means! We’ve actually got someone in the interview process right now that a guy on my team came back and said, “Wow, Alia, she’s actually an Autonomous 12, I think.” So we can ratchet it up from there.

Dana Feldman:
I love it. I love it. Okay, so I think this is obviously one of the things that you use to make sure that you’re getting the right team in place. After they’ve been hired, is there an effective tool or practice that you continuously use to drive results with your team? Because you said, “I don’t look at myself as driving the team to results,” but is there a way that you help them on the path to get there?

Alia Lamborghini:
I don’t know if I would call it a tool, but we do a lot of work on communication style internally, which I think from a sales perspective you have to be able to communicate carefully. We work with a group called Gallaher Edge and do a ton of organizational psychology work—around direct communication, making sure to not triangulate internally and instead go back to the human being directly with a clear framing of how a particular conversation made you feel, how you can work through things together, kind of getting a hold of your internal emotion around something.

Approaching everything—I have a great leader who always talked about, “Assume positive intent.” So we actually do a lot of that woo-woo work. There are people on my team who roll their eyes at that. Then they do it anyway, and they’re grateful that they’ve done it. So I believe in that in terms of driving revenue results. I think there’s a direct correlation between how well the team can work together and collaborate together—both intra and inter-team in an organization, too.

Dana Feldman:
Do you have a personal example of where you’ve used that training, and it’s changed something in how things are going internally? I’d love for you to share it if you’re comfortable with it.

Alia Lamborghini:
I’m happy to. One that just—I mean, there’s a zillion, honestly, Dana, but one that comes to the top of my head would be prep work for a conversation that maybe isn’t going to be a pleasant conversation. By being so direct that at the beginning of the conversation, you say, “This is going to be a hard conversation for me,” or, “This is going to be a really direct piece of feedback,” right? So you kind of let people take a minute and gather themselves and prepare to receive something that they might not be thrilled to hear.

Honestly, our HR team at Yahoo is really great in coaching toward that, too. Saying, “This is going to be a difficult conversation,” right? And then you can go right into whatever feedback you need to go into to help that person give you more of what you need, and they need to be successful in this organization.

Dana Feldman:
I think one of my favorites along those lines is certainly when there’s feedback to be given, and it is feedback that will be needle-moving to that person’s success at the organization. One of my mentors taught me this: open it up by saying, “I want to give you some feedback. I want to frame this up so that you know this is needle-moving in terms of your success at this company, and I really appreciate you taking the time to hear me out.” Right? And then you give it—to kind of give them that framing of, “Is this just like a little thing, or is this going to basically dictate whether or not you’re going to have a long time at this organization or a long path?”

Alia Lamborghini:
Who would not be willing to hear needle-moving feedback, right? I want that all the time. One of the things I think that happens when you get more senior in your career is there are fewer people kicking around who will give you needle-moving feedback.

Dana Feldman:
You also, as senior leaders, have to hire and surround yourself with some people who are willing to give you that feedback and are willing to be bold—or maybe just be comfortable. I guess bold might be too strong of a word.

Alia Lamborghini:
And everyone can be comfortable if you create an environment where they feel like they can do that, right? That’s a really important tenet of leadership, too: “Let me make you feel comfortable enough to tell me when I’m doing something that’s not working for you, or that’s hampering your success, or that you need more of.” I hope that I can create that. I work hard at that. It’s challenging.

Dana Feldman:
My leaders and I recently—we had this leadership off-site, and we recognized that we weren’t creating enough moments for feedback both ways. So for each of my leaders, we have a one-on-one doc, and we each go in and put in our topics. We track action items—that’s kind of our agenda, right? And now we have a set section in there that’s feedback.

So every week, that section is set in there and allows us to have that moment of, like, “Hey, do you have any feedback? Do you have any feedback for me this week?” “No? Great.” They ask me the same, and we don’t every week, but at least it creates a safe space for me to show, as a leader, I want it. And then they don’t have to think about, “How and when am I going to give Dana that feedback if I have some?” You know?

Alia Lamborghini:
Yeah, because no one on your team wants to say, “Hey, Dana, this is going to be a difficult conversation.”

Dana Feldman:
Totally.

Dana Feldman:
Talk to me about just how you seek out innovation from your teams. You talked about the early days of the industry that you’re in and just scrappy, figuring it out, trying new ideas. But in today’s world, how do you eke some of that innovation out from your team?

Alia Lamborghini:
We absolutely have a currency of innovation at the Yahoo DSP. So the good news is that it’s all around us. The things I mentioned earlier—just about the speed of compute power and innovation and machine learning and AI—it’s happening so quickly. And the best way that my team and I can stay connected to that is through tight, tight collaboration with our product teams.

We do a lot of work. Product and sales at the Yahoo DSP are probably tighter than in any place I’ve ever worked. Just in terms of how closely we work together, how direct we are with feedback, and how hard we work to make sure that we are on the same page and consistently collaborating. Innovation is what we sell and market.

So it’s critically important. Everything we do is done under the lens of innovation. We gather a ton of feedback from our clients. We make sure that we share that with product. We provide opportunities for product to get that feedback directly from clients. Sometimes we joke because, you know, product and engineering need to do product and engineering work—they don’t need to go on sales calls with me—but it’s so valuable when they do.

So trying to consolidate that information back is key. Our client councils are done in lockstep with our product team as well. We have twice-a-year client advisory board council meetings, and it’s product plus sales. They get to hear that feedback directly. We break into small groups for very direct feedback from our clients, and we take a lot of that into consideration for the product roadmap. It matters a lot for us to stay aligned.

Dana Feldman:
I think any sales leader would feel this. I’m curious, and thank you—you got into some of the examples around the customer advisory board. I mean tactically, what do you do to really keep that closeness to product? Do you guys have a weekly meeting between product and all sales leaders? Do you guys have a different forum? Share some of that because I think this is an ongoing challenge for any of us in sales with our counterparts in product.

Alia Lamborghini:
We do have a weekly meeting on Tuesday nights at 5:00 Eastern, and that is sales leadership and product leadership together, with a few partners from pricing and yield management and legal. There’s a few other partners who kind of come in and out of that meeting as well.

It goes over everything from specific agenda items that we need to talk about and hash out—like product roadmap, for example—all the way to industry news and, “What’s your take on this new article that launched about our partner or our competitor?”

The head of product and I are really close. We talk several times a day. We’re on a lot of meetings together. The product strategy team that reports up to him works incredibly closely with me and with my team to ensure that all of the input from our sales teams makes it back to the actual product managers and engineering teams.

They’re controlling all of that flow and the prioritization process. Sales is present in the prioritization process as well. So we are totally intermingled, and it’s pretty tight-knit, which is great. And we really like each other. I think that’s what’s going on right now that makes Yahoo feel so fun. Everybody is happy to be here, and everybody loves the rest of the team.

If you ask anybody at Yahoo, one of the things they’ll say first is, “The people. I love the people.” People at Yahoo are great. They want to do good work. They want to be good humans. They want to drive great results, and it’s a fun place to work.

Dana Feldman:
You’re touching a little bit on a couple more questions, but you’re touching a little bit just on culture. What do you do? Do you follow a school of thought, a methodology, a framework? Is there some pattern that you’ve put into your teams? Talk to me—how do you drive that culture?

Alia Lamborghini:
I think it’s built on trust, and it’s built on staying human and personally accountable. I think it’s about displaying the attributes that you expect to see and showing up in every meeting. Again, kind of coming back to that direct communication.

We have all these sort of informal taglines, one of which is “make money, have fun.” It is very possible to run a really successful sales organization and for everyone to have financial success at a personal level and also have a ton of fun.

I think our culture is—we don’t take anything too seriously. We make jokes out of everything. A PR partner said to me, “Yeah, I mean, this is PR, not ER. Let’s not mistake that.” So there’s all these things together that I think at the same time work.

That culture of fun works because at the core, we’ve got a bunch of Autonomous 11s who are really serious about doing great work. So the culture of fun only works if you know you have these driven humans who want to do spectacular work on behalf of clients.

Dana Feldman:
I just got goosebumps. I did. I got goosebumps. It’s true, though, right? Because if the bar you’re setting in hiring and who you’re bringing on creates that culture, generally I close out these conversations by asking: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received along your journey? And you shared a great piece of advice earlier around, “Don’t forget everyone on this floor, and everyone’s working for you.”

So I probably want to close it out by asking you: Fast forward 10 years from now. What do you think are going to be the most disruptive innovations for our revenue teams?

Alia Lamborghini:
I am so excited to shed these repeatable processes. In 1997, if you had said in 2007, “I’m going to be able to tell you how to get to your mom’s house via a small computer held in your hand,” I wouldn’t have believed you. I would have said, “That sounds so futuristic.”

I think the things that we are doing today are so futuristic compared to 10 and even five years ago. And again, this whole concept of rapidly expanding compute power with edge computing—it’s happening at a massive rate of change. So I can’t even imagine what annoying sales processes we won’t have to deal with in the future and the efficiency that will take place as a result of that.

We’re already seeing some of that today. It’s just that today, it’s a little bit clunky. We’re recording calls for coaching. Notes come out of the calls—like automated summaries. Those things are amazing, and yet we’re in the very infancy of that actually being usable.

So I’m really excited to see what’s going to be happening around here in 10 years. I can’t even imagine it.

Dana Feldman:
I have sore cheeks from smiling during this conversation. It has been really fun, and I appreciate your time. I just want to say thank you for joining us for this episode. For all of our listeners, please remember to follow Gong on LinkedIn for our tactical takeaways from this conversation. We’ll include the best plays to add to your playbook, of course. And be sure to follow the show so you never miss an episode.

Alia, thank you. Thank you for your time and your insight and just telling your story. What an awesome ride you’ve had, and I’m just grateful for this time with you.

Alia Lamborghini:
Same for me, Dana. I would like to crown you an honorary Autonomous 11. I can tell.

Dana Feldman:
Thanks so much for joining us for this episode. Follow Gong on LinkedIn for our tactical takeaways from this conversation, including the best plays to add to your playbook. And be sure to follow the show to never miss an episode.