For Brian O'Kelley of AppNexus, Learning Never Stops This interview with Brian O'Kelley, chief executive of AppNexus, an advertising technology company, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant. Q. Were you an entrepreneur early on? A. I was always a failure at lemonade stands, but when I was in high school I was into computers. A buddy of mine and I started building Web sites for local businesses, right when the Internet was taking off in "95. We eventually had about 50 customers. It was our side project to help pay for pizza in college. Q. Sounds like you were busy in college. A. At Princeton I got roped into rowing crew. I didn't really enjoy it all that much. I would row crew at 6 in the morning, go to classes all day, go back and row some more, go to my campus job washing dishes, come home and do my homework and then build Web sites. I would go to sleep at 3 or 4 in the morning, then wake up at 6. Q. So you don't need a lot of sleep. A. No, it was awful. I persuaded my dad to let me quit the campus job, because I could make more money building Web sites. I ended up quitting crew because of exhaustion. I got mono. My body was wiping out. Q. So after Princeton, what was the next step? A. A couple of people in my class had been spending a lot of time in Los Angeles and thought there was an opportunity in building Web sites for clubs and venues. The winter of my senior year I flew to L.A., and my gears got going about building e-commerce sites. We hired four classmates from the computer science class, we raised a half-million dollars, and the day after graduation I was the C.E.O. of a 30-person company. It was amazing for about six weeks. But then, because of some fast changes in the industry, suddenly there wasn't any path to revenue for us. So I flew to New York and negotiated a deal to sell the company for about $4 million. I flew back to L.A. to tell my partners the good news, and they said: "Brian, we've got some bad news for you. You're fired. At the time, all these other tech companies were worth a billion dollars, and they couldn't believe I was giving up on our dream for $4 million. I was a paper millionaire for about three days, and then I was sleeping on my dad's couch. In some ways you couldn't ask for a better first gig. I had this incredible insight into my strengths and weaknesses as a leader, as a manager. I was able to go write a business plan, raise money and get classmates to follow me to L.A. But I also had a very clear snapshot of what I was not good at. How do you manage 30 people? I'm a little introverted, so how many company meetings did we have in the two months I was a C.E.O.? None, because why would you do that? I had never worked at a company before. So I joined a consulting firm, and I eventually managed a team of 25 to 30 consultants. Q. You started AppNexus six years ago. Tell me about the culture. A. We've grown quickly, and have close to 600 employees today. The challenge is to not end up with this cultural rift between the inner circle and everyone else. How do you hire 100 people a year and have them actually know the business? So our culture is built on this idea of learn and teach, learn and teach. And you can't only teach or else you'll be obsolete. Q. How do you do that? A. Lots of ways. One is we do "razzle dazzles." We built a 300-person auditorium so that at least once a week, people will get on stage to share what they're learning. We have "lunch and learns," too. We do a whole series of things so that people can always be sharing. Q. What else? A. We created an e-mail alias called "dumbquestions@" so that if you have a question that many people might be wondering about, you can send it around and everybody in the company sees it. For example, somebody wrote recently, "Hey, we had a couple of low revenue days. Does anyone know what's up? I love having those out in the open, and then we'll write back that a couple of seasonal things happened, and here's what's going on. Hopefully that eases people's concerns. I like that it's not anonymous, because it helps me get to know who's really smart. A. I'm looking for energy. Do I feel fired up having a conversation with you? Do we feel collaborative, so that if I give you 10 ideas, do you understand and give me feedback on three of them, or nine of them? I'll also ask people, "Walk me through a very complex problem you've solved." Some people will talk about something strategic. Some people will talk about a people problem. Some people will talk about something completely weird and unrelated. Then I ask questions about motivation, which I think is the most important in some ways. Why do you come to the office? This is a tough business. We grind it out. There are good days and bad days, so what's going to make you want to come to work and really drive through things? There's something about the challenge that has to motivate you. Q. What's your pet peeve? A. People who say, "This is how it's done." I hate that. Tell me why people do it that way. What's the reasoning? Are those people smart? Did they really think about this? It's status quo thinking. Just because we do it this way doesn't mean it's right. That's where complacency comes from.