This is the 126th article in Bears Doing Big Things, a bi-weekly column celebrating the stories of notable M-A alumni.
Elliott Baer ’00 has built a career by exploring new opportunities, learning from each experience, and following his passions. His journey has taken him from music and athletics to leadership roles in business, technology, and beyond. Baer is the head of service operations for Google’s Ads business, where he ensures Google Ads work smoothly for millions of customers while maximizing revenue.
Baer’s childhood revolved around his dual passions for baseball and music. “I thought I was going to be a major league baseball player from a very young age,” he said. Baer began singing classical music at the age of seven and performed across the Bay Area, later transitioning into more mainstream popular music as he grew older.
At M-A, Baer continued to pursue music as a member and manager of the jazz band, singing and playing guitar at school events and dances. “We got to play at these really famous jazz festivals in Europe because our band director, Frank Moura, had great connections. We were playing with celebrity artists at these festivals, and weren’t necessarily qualified to do so, but it was a total blast and a great growth experience for us,” he said.
During his freshman year, Baer formed his own band, “Midnight Lightning,” which performed at multiple locations throughout the Bay Area. He also produced a CD featuring his original songs.
Additionally, he maintained his love for baseball, playing on the team as a pitcher and running cross country all four years. “I ended up having rotator cuff surgery in baseball, so that slowed me down a little bit, but I still played all four years. I had a chance to play in college, but I decided not to and did cross country instead,” Baer said.
Baer especially enjoyed cross country, crediting coach Eric Wilmurt’s encouragement for shaping his experience. “He was just getting started when I was there. [Wilmurt was a] very high-energy cross-country coach that helped me stick with it for four years and give it my best,” he said.
In addition to baseball, cross country, and jazz band, Baer sang with the Peninsula Teen Opera, tutored M-A students, and volunteered at Stanford Hospital through its now-discontinued “Partners in Caring” program.
During his senior year, Baer received the 2000 Jerry Jacobs scholarship from the Menlo Park Chamber of Commerce for his work in the community. The award honors the late Menlo Park businessman Jerry Jacobs, who contributed greatly to education projects and Chamber activities at Menlo High School and M-A.
Baer reflects on his time at M-A with gratitude for both the experiences he had and the teachers who shaped him. “In English literature, I had some teachers who really encouraged me and brought out the best of me, and I’m eternally grateful for that, what it brought me, and how it influenced my focus post M-A,” Baer said. “The academic experience and unique extracurricular opportunities that were availed to me were just so special and have a special place in my heart.”
After graduating from M-A, Baer attended Williams College, where he majored in economics. “I liked the community. I liked that I could play sports and do music and still have a rigorous academic experience with small classes,” he said. “Having this relatively small and isolated community helped me build really close relationships and connections with my classmates.”
While at Williams, Baer expanded his involvement in music, directing a touring a cappella group, performing in the jazz band, and playing in his own band. He also competed in cross country. “In some ways, it was a continuation of my M-A experience, with a similar size to M-A,” he said.
“Going toward the end of college, I just couldn’t get it out of me the idea of being in the music business,” Baer said. “I started doing summer internships at record labels between [school] years, and that started my foray into the music business.”
Baer’s first internship was with a record label called Arista Records in New York, where he worked as a music talent scout. “I sent out, I don’t know how many hundreds of resumes to get my first job, first unpaid internship,” he said. “I got to meet artists like Avril Lavigne and Santana and a variety of other artists. I was at the bottom of the totem pole for the record label, but it’s helping seeing their careers through a little bit in small ways.”
As Baer approached graduation, he wanted to find a more permanent, full-time position. “I sent out literally 1000 emailed resumes. I remember going through an industry guidebook of people who would dare to hire someone right out of college,” he said. “10% of people responded, and about 10% of those were willing to talk to me, and then I got two job offers for entry-level jobs.”
One of the job offers was for a startup music company called Ron Shapiro Management & Consulting, founded by industry executive Ron Shapiro, the former co-president of Atlantic Records. “I was going to be his first employee,” Baer said. “So he hired me. I got my U-Haul the afternoon of graduation in Massachusetts, and drove to New York that afternoon for the job, and started the job the next day.”
“Through that time, I managed some artists who did really well, and some artists who you will never have heard of because they didn’t [do well]. I realized that was part of the business and my job was to help keep the company running,” Baer said.
As a manager for the company, Baer worked closely with artists on everything from scheduling to traveling with them on tour, while also helping manage and grow the small business from the ground up. “I learned a lot in that experience over three years, and I think more interpersonally than anything else, how to deal with a wide variety of people,” he said.
In need of a change, Baer decided to attend Columbia Business School after four years into his career. “I got to meet awesome people. I got to take leadership and development classes that really changed how I thought about the person I am in the world, and even more than where it led me career-wise, I think personally, it was one of the best experiences I’ve had in my life,” he said.
“For me, it ended up being a pivot. I went from just being a music industry guy to someone who had a little more cred, which was the background and the credentials of a business school and a formalized toolkit for how to be a leader in the business sphere,” Baer said.
After business school, Baer made another unconventional career shift, joining the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a chief of program management. “I wanted to help work with an organization that had a strong mission. In this case, it was protecting and defending the country, something I got excited about. [I also joined] to work with senior leadership in a corporate environment from an early part of my career,” he said.
“One of the first things I did was work on evaluating the performances of other FBI agents, and you can imagine they probably weren’t a huge fan of me doing that. That was this unique blend of having to influence people without having any direct authority over them,” Baer said. “These 30-year gun-carrying FBI agents who weren’t really excited about me being there, I had to warm up to, to build credibility with, and help influence and give ideas for how to do their job even better.”
In his role, Baer worked with people like Robert Mueller, former director of the FBI, on various organizational projects and managed his own internal advisory group, providing strategic guidance to leaders within the FBI. “I learned a lot about organizational management. It was such a unique experience, and the FBI, I applaud them for being willing to take on some new folks at a business school to help shape things up at the FBI,” he said.
After four years with the FBI, Baer decided to switch to management consulting, joining the firm McKinsey and Company. “I realized that I should expand my horizons a little bit more, to use my skills in different ways, otherwise I was going to be a government lifetimer, and that’s not really what I saw for myself,” Baer said.
At McKinsey, Baer worked as an engagement manager, helping companies transform their performance through organizational strategy. “I started to find that I had some strength in sales, specifically in technology,” he said. “I was like, ‘This is really interesting,’ because I can do this work, and I can see the impact in real time. You can measure how revenue for the business is changing, and how customer satisfaction is changing. So I found that really gratifying.”
With a growing interest in sales, Baer accepted an opportunity at Google, working in their advertising sales operations. “This hadn’t been my planned path by any stretch of the imagination. Following my interest and following what people seemed to think I was good at was what led me in this direction towards sales operations for a tech company, in this case, Google,” Baer said.
“What’s unique about it is I took a roundabout path to where I am. But in some ways, that roundabout path has made me better at my own job because of the different context through which I see and try to solve problems,” Baer said.
Currently, Baer is head of service operations for Google’s Ads business, focusing on revenue protection and growth, operational efficiency, and improving customer satisfaction. “The last eight and a half years at Google have been so exciting, and it’s been great to have impact and be able to see it through in a way you don’t get to in consulting as much,” he said. “I’ve learned so much about how to drive change, how to influence people, and how to deal with setbacks when things don’t go according to plan, as they don’t always do, and don’t always in the context of a complex place like Google.”
At Google, Baer develops strategies for a wide range of customers and leads a team that manages customer support while working to improve processes. “What I like about this job a lot is it brings together having the ideas and actually seeing those ideas through,” he said. “There’s a little bit of firefighting, and it’s not always the most glamorous part of the role, but execution and working with customers so closely is one of the parts of the job that makes it really gratifying.”
“It reminds me back in the music industry days where I would present to a record label CEO, one day about an artist or an idea, and the next day being on the tour bus, riding with the band and solving their problems, about the hotel, or whether they could take a piano into the venue,” Baer said. “That’s, for me, the magic of my career is that I enjoy bridging the gap between high-level strategy and on-the-ground execution, and it is rare to be able to do both these things reasonably well.”
In 2023, Baer moved back to Menlo Park with his wife and two boys, who both currently attend Laurel. Baer continues to perform music today, keeping his lifelong passion an active part of his life.
Baer’s advice to current M-A students: “I would urge people not to worry too much about having a five, 10, 20, or even three-year plan for themselves, but to think through where their interest intersects with impact in a sense, and to encourage people to experiment in their roles and be reflective about what works best for them.”
To those interested in technology and business strategy: “Be ready to pivot and understand that it is not a linear journey. It may take a more circuitous path to figure out where you’re going, even when you may look like you’ve arrived.”
