Lessons Learned: Tumri's Hari Menon says choosing right people is critical early on

Harder to replace a team member than it is to pick a distribution partner or marketing firm

Many entrepreneurs have told us about the importance of hiring the right people, especially in the early stages of a startup's life.

In this interview, Tumri founder and CEO Hari Menon tells us why.

"When you make a mistake building the team, those are hard things to get out of," says Menon, who founded two prior startup companies before starting Tumri in 2004.

In other words, it's harder to replace a key team member with a lot of institutional knowledge than it is to pick a new distribution partner or marketing firm. 

"Be very selective who you work with in the early stages of a company," he says. 

In October, Tumri was named as a company to watch at the DealMaker Media's Annual Momentum Growth Conference.

The company's technology, called AdPod, is an interactive widget that lets advertisers create advertising units directly from product listings, whether they be a pair of pants in a retail catalog or a house listing on a realty firm's Web site.

With AdPod, advertisers don't have to go through the step of buying keywords from Google, Yahoo or other search-based advertising networks. While the company's 200 million page views are relatively small compared to the billions served up by the big ad networks, they are growing rapidly, Menon told Vator.tv's Bambi Francisco in this interview.

Other companies that allow businesses to buy ads using something other than keywords have been hot properties, with Yahoo buying BlueLithium for $300 million in September and AOL acquiring Tacoda in July for a reported $275 million.

To give us your thoughts on the future of online advertising, post a comment to this story. 

To learn more about Tumri, you can watch Menon's Vator.tv pitch here.