TL;DR
Co-founded Samsung Ads from a four-person team inside a global enterprise. Led design and front-end engineering for the advertiser platform, worked with data science to make global TV viewership behavior usable to advertisers, and helped the business clear $20M in profit in its first year.
- Role: Head of Design, Samsung Electronics (Samsung Ads)
- Dates: 2013-11 to 2015-12
- $20M profit in year one
Context and mandate
Samsung Ads started as a small team with a large company's reach and a startup's clock. Samsung had the hardware footprint and first-party smart TV data at a scale no independent network could match, and no ad business to monetize any of it. We had to build the product, the team, the standards posture, and the design foundations while the rest of Samsung kept moving at enterprise speed around us.
The real problem was not whether smart TV advertising could be a business. It was whether a new business unit could move fast enough inside Samsung to prove the category before the window closed.
I joined as one of four founding members. The charge was to co-found the initiative and build what needed building on the design and front-end side: the advertiser platform, the data visualization layer, the standards posture with IAB, and the team behind all three.
Key decisions
Translate viewership data into advertiser insight, not just dashboards. Surfacing all of Samsung's TV behavior data would have buried advertisers in noise. I worked with data science to identify the signals advertisers actually used to make decisions, then designed around those. The AI-powered visualization work and the patent filing came out of that framing.
Engage IAB on standards before the industry locked them. Smart TV advertising was new enough in 2013 to 2015 that the standards were still being written. We chose to sit on IAB working groups instead of waiting for external rules to land. That gave Samsung Ads early influence over the category and produced tighter design constraints for the platform.
Hold a design quality bar at startup speed. Advertiser trust depends on the platform looking like it knows what it is doing. I refused the early-stage tradeoff of "ship rough, polish later." The same bar that earned advertiser trust also made the IAB standards work credible.
What I authored to lead the function
Design org artifacts, 2014.
- 01 / 02Design principles
I wrote these for a four-person founding team that needed to critique each other's work without me arbitrating every call. Storytelling, hierarchy, user-centered, seamless, simplicity, extraordinary. Every contractor who joined after held the same six. - 02 / 02Design process
The first design-process diagram I authored at Samsung Ads. Required headcount and sync points named at each step, because a startup inside a large company will skip them if you let it. Same shape now, refined since.
Outcomes
Profit, year one
Samsung Ads, 2014.
From a four-person founding team to a business unit.
- Samsung Ads generated $20M in profit within its first year.
- Scaled from a four-person founding team into a multimillion-dollar Samsung business unit.
- Filed a patent for AI-powered visualization of global TV viewership behavior.
- Contributed to IAB standards for smart TV and large-display advertising, giving Samsung Ads early influence over the category.
- The design work made its way into the broader Samsung TV experience and stayed there.
Reflection
A startup inside a large company is a different problem than either alone. Speed matters, but trust with the larger organization matters as much. You have to ship enough proof to keep the room behind you while protecting the team from the gravity of enterprise process. When that balance holds, a small team can build a new business inside a system that was not designed for new things.
I would engage standards bodies earlier and more deliberately. We contributed, but reactively. Helping set the agenda would have translated into cleaner product constraints and a stronger competitive position from day one.