Jesse Pujji is Co-founder of Ampush, and Jon Oberlander is CEO of Ampush. Jesse and Jon tell us how they scaled their agency to $25 million in revenue in five years, why Jesse decided to step down as CEO, and how he chose Jon to replace him, how they utilized their 427-person-strong alumni network, why discovering your zone of genius is so important, and why they like their team to always be on a light, uncomfortable learning curve.
Jesse Pujji is Co-founder of Ampush, and Jon Oberlander is CEO of Ampush. Jesse and Jon tell us how they scaled their agency to $25 million in revenue in five years, why Jesse decided to step down as CEO, and how he chose Jon to replace him, how they utilized their 427-person-strong alumni network, why discovering your zone of genius is so important, and why they like their team to always be on a light, uncomfortable learning curve.
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David Rodnitzky (David)(00:02): In this episode of Agentic Shift, we talked to Jesse Pujji, Co-founder of Ampush, and Jon Oberlander, CEO of Ampush. Jesse and Jon tell us how they scaled their agency to $25 million in revenue in five years, why Jesse decided to step down as CEO, and how he chose Jon to replace him, how they utilized their 427-person-strong alumni network, why discovering your zone of genius is so important, and why they like their team to always be on a light, uncomfortable learning curve. Enjoy the show.
Jesse and Jon, thank you for joining us today on Agentic shift.
Jesse Pujji (Jesse)(00:38): Thanks for having us.
Jon Oberlander (Jon) (00:40): Yeah. Thank you, David.
David (00:41): This is the first time I’ve interviewed two people at once on the podcast. So we’re going to see how it goes, but I’m excited to talk to you guys because you guys have an interesting story, an interesting business model. And also this is the first time we’ve had anyone who’s had a succession story, which I think is important for agencies because a lot of agency leaders get to a certain point and then they either want to move on or they need to move on and knowing how to do that is challenging. So maybe we could start with Jesse. I think maybe this is best for you to answer, tell us the founder story of Ampush.
Jesse (01:12): Yes, sure. The name Ampush I’ll start there, is the first two letters of the founders’ last names. So Chris Amos, Jesse Pujji, Nick Shaw. And we were freshman college roommates. And all of us did kind of brief stints on Wall Street afterwards, but had this dream. We bought the domain when we were sophomores in college, and we were like, one day we are going to start a company called Ampush. We have no idea what it’ll do, but we’re going to start a company, and that’s what it’s been called. And middle of financial crisis, we’re working on Wall Street, we said, this is a great time. Let’s move out west and let’s try something.
And the story is pretty funny. We said, okay, we’re number cruncher data people. What’s a good business? Someone’s like, go look at digital marketing. And so we said, oh, this thing seems cool, clicks, conversions. We don’t know anyone. We have no experience and no clients. Try performance marketing. And they were like, okay, cool. Performance marketing, they’ll try you. There’s no risk as long as you can perform. They’re like, what’s a good sector to do this in. Well, at that time, 2010, online education. The University of Phoenix was one of the advertisers. So go see if you can get those guys to do something.
And we built up kind like a mini lead gen business. We had our own domain and we’re trying to buy media on search. And we started searching and got crushed. We had no idea what we were doing. We thought we were the hot shit. We thought we were really smart. Turned out we weren’t. We had a big learning curve, and I think I discovered the keyword nutrition degree, and I was able to like eke out a 10% margin on $1.50 a click and X percent conversion rate. And that led to $30 it cost per lead or $35 and we sold the lead for 40 bucks, and it wasn’t going that well.
Then right around that time was when Facebook was launching their self-serve ad platform, and this, to take you back, what people don’t even realize, there was no mobile phone. There was no mobile app. It was a desktop. There was a right rail ad. And the actual insiders since the listeners of this are sophisticated, what we actually did was we took our AdSense category groups and we moved them over to Facebook. We made some of the first ads. And I made one that was like substitute teachers. And it was 43,729 substitute teachers on Facebook.
I wrote the ad, “Sick of being a sub?” Had like a mean lady and a kid was throwing a paper airplane at her. And it said, “Go back and get your master’s in teaching.” And we lit those ads up, and within a week, they were doing $8 CPL, 75% margin. We go, oh my God, what is this? And back then, you had to put in every ad one at a time in Facebook’s interface. And we just tried to scale it as fast as we possibly could with offshore labor and people staying up all night and whatever we could do. And that went on for about six months and it was great. The business grew really fast and that was really exciting.
And then in early 2011, we got a call from Facebook and they were like, who the hell are you guys? You’re of our top 100 global advertisers. We’ve never heard of you, though. And we went in and the first meeting with them, we had a 25-slide deck with all of the things we hated about the product. We’re like, why don’t you allow bulk upload? Why don’t you allow people to concatenate images and pictures. And they go, these are all great ideas? Why don’t you guys go build a software that does this? And we said, oh awesome. They said, yes. You seem smart. Like here our API. Go build this thing.
And so we went out, we tried to build software. It wasn’t easy, but we built a little bit and we tried to pitch people on it and they go, what do you want me to do with this software? I don’t know how to run a Facebook ad. Can you guys run the ads for me. And that was really like the formation story. And then we started saying, oh, sure, we’ll run them. And at 2011, you know this too, David, like our clients were Uber, Dollar Shave Club, Peloton, Blue Apron. Those are the names you’ll remember. The other half, they’re no longer around, but those are the early customers. And then from there, the businesses kind of scaled through.
David (04:36): So I’m curious, it feels like the story here is three smart guys who determined to not work on Wall Street and do something in Silicon Valley, and you were sort of flailing, I guess, until Facebook launched. So what do you think would have happened if Facebook hadn’t launched? Do you think you would have just kept pivoting until you found something? What would have happened?
Jesse (04:55): Our official agreement with each other was two years of this before anybody takes the GMAT. That was the official agreement. Nobody’s allowed take the GMAT for two years. So let’s give this thing two years. We were probably like eight or nine months in when we were flailing. So we would have kept going with something. I don’t know. We would have been a bunch of affiliate, like a small affiliate-based lead gen business, or maybe we would have pivoted to something a little bit different. We definitely were embracing the idea of let’s get into something and we’ll learn and we’ll figure things out. Like we had this thing where we said, you’re not going to sit at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and think of a good idea. You have be in the industry, you have to be in the business to find something, and I continue to believe that with some of the new stuff I’m doing. You’ve got to be in world doing things. That’s when you’ll actually see really good ideas.
David (05:35): That’s cool. Jon, how did you get involved and when did you get involved?
Jon (05:38): So I joined in 2011, more than 10 years ago, pretty early. And Jesse and I have a mutual friend from his one year at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street. It was like serendipitous timing. I spent my 20s doing a lot of things that look good on a resume, but I wasn’t really interested in. So I was like a trader. I went to NYU law school. I was a corporate attorney at a big firm for a couple years. And fortunately, it was like the financial crisis. I wasn’t totally caught up in it. I was like, I’ve got to do something that like resonates with me. When you’re a lawyer, you do this thing, these things that people have figured out with like a standard of perfection. And I wanted to do something that was newer, where like make a bunch of mistakes, but like if you actually crack something, it creates real value.
And so I got introduced to Jesse in two forces. I wanted to do this. He wanted to find good people. He was quite the salesperson. And so, yes, I got involved when the team was five people, pretty tactical in the beginning. I was running Facebook campaigns, Google campaigns, a lot of dating daily deals and social games back then, the old like FarmVille wannabes. And so, yes, I got my hands really dirty, but I think I was excited about an entrepreneurial environment. I was able to talk to our clients. Like Jesse, if you’re like doing good stuff, kind of lets you go. And so I started running my own partnerships, figuring stuff out, and I was hooked very quickly. So by six months in, I’m like, oh, this is the world I need to be in, and there was a lot of evolution since then.
Jesse (07:09): One funny story, just backing up, when I was at Goldman, this friend, his name’s Adam, he was like, can you help my friend prepare for an equity research interview about Google. So I talked to Jon, didn’t know who he was, and just explained to him like here’s a CPC and here’s what this is. And here’s what that is. He had been playing poker. And the funny thing about Adam, when Adam pitched him to me, he was like, I have a really special friend. He’s kind of a sales guy, but he’s also really good at quantitative stuff. He was a lawyer. The way he pitched him in some ways was like absurd, but in the other ways it was exactly right because it was like a person who can kind of do a lot of things and do everything and do them pretty interestingly. And so it was really awesome. And it’s worked out obviously really well.
David (07:48): I think there’s one commonality in everyone’s story, and I’ll include myself in this, and I can only speak to the Jewish parents. I can’t speak to Sikh parents or Jon, whatever you are.
Jon (07:57): I’m also Jewish, David.
David (07:59): So I can speak to you, but I once wrote an article whose title was Couldn’t You Have Married A Search Engine Marketer? And the point was 30 years ago, as a Jewish son, you either became a professor, an accountant, a lawyer or a doctor, obviously. And I think it was hard for my parents, honestly, to accept the fact- because I went to law school. I never practiced, but it was hard for them to accept the fact that I was eschewing this job that was secure and respected and going into this crazy internet marketing world. And I’m just curious to know if you guys felt any of that pressure or had any of that from your families.
Jesse (08:32): Yes, my mom’s exact quote was “Where am I going to tell people you work now? I used to walk to my friends and be like you work at Goldman Sachs. Now what the hell am I going to say to them?”
Jon (08:39): I have a little of that, but I kind of hacked the system. Jesse mentioned it. In between leaving the big firm I worked at, Kirkland & Ellis and Ampush, I was making money playing poker on the internet. And compared to that, I think my parents were happy, oh, it’s this tech startup. So if you set the bar low previous to making the move, I think it helps.
David (08:59): So between being proud that you’re a lawyer and being ashamed that you’re a gambling degenerate, working at Ampush was a happy medium, is what you’re saying.
Jon (09:05): Yeah. Exactly.
David (09:07): All right. And I like the fact that you were like the fifth employer, like the fifth Beatle. I know Jesse and his co-founders, in fact I actually, I was remembering the way that I met Jesse was I was at a Moroccan coffee shop in South of Market. And I think Chris was there sitting there, and I kept hearing all these AdWords terms being thrown around. And I like, I got to at least introduce myself because it’s not every day that I go to a coffee shop and I meet someone talking about AdWords. And then it was, turns out it was Ampush, and that’s how we met. So small world.
So I guess my question then is where was the transition? I think Jesse, you were officially CEO, if I’m not mistaken. And then at what point did you decide to elevate Jon to the CEO level?
Jesse (09:45): Yeah. There was a few important milestones before that that might just help people understand our story. We grew the business, and it’s a really interesting story for I think anyone in this world. We grew the business to probably 3,400 million in ad spend, 75 logos in 2015, but all very kind of like Facebook. We had our tech and our tech platform, and we had a bunch of analysts and kind of called the standard model, which is like, everyone works on a few accounts and they kind of go through all that stuff.
And in 2015, we had grown really fast. I think the year Jon joined, we did 2 million in revenue, and 2015 we did 25 million, something like that in revenue. So it grew fast and we’re like, all right, well, this was hard and we were all tired. Maybe we should go and run a process and try to sell the business. And that was an interesting process. We had gotten down the road that made sense like Rocket Fuel and Marin Software where like high market companies. And by the time we went out to actually do it, like their market caps have imploded.
And we saw that in our valuation and the timeline of our process. It took a lot longer and it was lower than we were expecting, but we’d known them a little bit, but really got to know them more during the process. The folks at Red Ventures, and Ric has become a friend and a mentor to us and he said, “I’ve built this really unique business where I take the whole full funnel. I will only work with a few companies, like clients. I don’t have many, but I really take on their problems. I understand them. And then I get compensated in an aligned way. I get paid based on the results I generate. You guys are a really unique culture and company. I think you can do that for direct-to-consumer businesses. We’ll invest in you guys and we’ll open the kimono and teach you everything. Do you want to do that?”
The deal was good, and we liked them a ton relative to some of the other options we had on the table in terms of culture fit and personality. And so we said, yeah, let’s go do that.
I was 30 I think when we did that deal or 29. I was young. I was like, I’m an 8 out of 10. I’m a baller. Like I’m an entrepreneur. And then I met them, and I was like, oh, I’m at 4 out of 10. These guys they’re a whole another level of sophistication in every regard: how you deal with large scale relationships, how you negotiate, but even the technical capabilities and other things that they shared with us, and they’ve been just amazing partners to us.
And so the first phone call I made officially was Jon, and I said, “Hey, what do you think about building a business where we take on the entire funnel, not just run the Facebook ads. We own every piece of it, but there’s upside and we can share in the compensation and grow it.” And given what he said earlier, like he was like, “Hell yeah. Let me go figure that out.” And that was the genesis.
In many ways, like what Ampush is today when you think about succession, Jon started in 2016, because over time we basically transitioned and we could talk about the bumps. It hasn’t all been great and perfect, but we transitioned to that model where we work with fewer companies, we go much deeper. We align our interests and we’re closer with them.
So when it came to succession, this 2019 to actually answer your question, I’d been at the helm for a long time. I think I had wanted to move. This was before COVID when all of this happened. I was like, I want to move cities. I want to move back to St. Louis where I grew up, which at that time meant you couldn’t run a company now that’s obviously changed. But at that time, I was like, well, I can’t be the CEO.
And Jon was running, I don’t know, 70% of the company anyway in terms of headcount, most of the New York team, most of the team in the future direction we were going in. And so we did our diligence. We met outside candidates. We thought about other things, but ultimately Jon was kind of the right guy. We hired a recruiter and everything. We went and ran the process and went through all that stuff, but ultimately it made most sense for Jon. And it was an exciting opportunity. He can talk about this, but then it was two years ago to this month, and we all know what happened two years ago to this month within weeks of his- I don’t know, he has ever walked into an office as a CEO. Let me put it that way.
Jon (13:20): I’ve led like 28 remote all hands and zero live ones is the best stat on that front. I think I was excited about the opportunity. It surprised me. Jesse was always like the CEO that seemed like how we were doing this. And I had moved into a cool role, but like the interesting part, to use a metaphor, what’s your favorite sport, David?
David (13:39): College football.
Jon (13:41): College football. So Jesse was like college Bo Jackson. Jesse’s just like, everybody knows about Jesse. He’s doing this one thing in a way no one’s ever done it before. It’s wild. It’s like fun to be a part of, and I had to figure that out how to be like, whatever the linebacker, like looking at what the offense is going to do, calling the shots, and like Jesse would be like, we’re going to be a billion-dollar platform. And I’d be like, cool, cool. Let me actually do some math and see where we are from that.
And so the interesting shift for me, we talk about the pandemic or not, that’s a whole other thing, but it was like, I’ve gone from being like the operational person behind this very foundry impressive leader. How do I make the shift and make sure I’m thinking big enough and like creating that energy when like the previous role had been pretty different. And to Jesse’s point, I had this unique setup in New York where I built our New York team.
First, it was just me. I persuaded him to let me hire a couple people, built trust there. And I always ran New York as if like, it’s like, well, if I’m Jesse, this thing’s annoying. It’s annoying that I have to deal with these people on the other side of the country. So it better be better. It couldn’t be as good as a San Francisco operation. It’s got to be like more profitable, sharper people, tighter culture, better results, harder working. Like he’s going to come visit and be like, woo, something’s going on here. What do I think about that?
And so when I took this seat, I was like, all right, what can I pull from those leanings? And then how can I also, you know, Jesse and I’ve gotten very close over this period of time. I have this person who’s lived through a lot of these things before. So we have like a CEO advice Slack channel where in the beginning, I was like, all right, how’d you handle this? How do you do this? What do you say in this situation? How should I think of myself differently in this case? And I think that’s made us a lot more successful in the torch passing.
David (15:29): Jon, you and I were chatting earlier about the entrepreneurs operating system, the EOS model, and a lot of what they talk about there is that every company at the top of the business has a visionary and an integrator. The visionary is the guy who’s like three years from now, there will be robotic ducks that buy ads on Facebook and we need to create this amazing tool to handle that. And then the integrator is like the dumpster over there is on fire and we need to pay these bills and hire this person and whatnot. And it sounds to me like that was kind of a little bit of the role that the two of you guys played. I don’t want to put words into your story, but do you feel that that’s accurate? And if so, my question, I guess, would be to Jon, who is the visionary today? Have you taken on that role? Is that something that you’re comfortable doing?
Jon (16:09): Yeah, I have, and I had to learn how to do my version of it because Jesse’s like a very well-informed conjure. So he’s like always reading about different things going on in the world and technology and he was an investor and he brings that lens and is able very quickly to create like a credible, here’s why there’s going to be robots. And my version was different. Like one of my biggest advantages as a leader here, has been that I ran Facebook campaigns in the beginning. Like I did every role along the way.
And so I was just super credible, to Jesse’s point, about building a performance culture and doing those types of deals. You can’t pat your team on the back every day they made money and be mad every day they didn’t if those variables weren’t in their control. You got to actually know, no way, you made a smart deduction and platform costs went up. So we didn’t realize it today, but over time that stuff’s going to be super valuable.
So I was like, yeah, all right. How do I translate that into something that can be inspiring for the broader team? It took some time. It took some like feedback from Jesse. And then I think it’s just much more of a here’s where we are today. Let me read about a bunch of different things. Let me like project a few different versions of this forward, and then we set a target that’s like credible but also exciting. And like nowhere I’m going to bring my energy to make us like super different from where we were before.
So I think I am doing it. I think it was like the big growth edge coming into the role. Sometimes I used to start talking to Jesse like, Hey, here’s what I’m going to do on this process. Here’s why this performance is going to work, and he’s like, yeah, yeah, you don’t need to convince me. You’re going to like run this thing functionally very well. He’d be like, yeah, let me help you in this other area.
Jesse (17:45): Yeah. One of the cool things about our partnership is we also both think the other thing is important and have a lot of respect for each other. I think there are some foundry people who go my vision’s the only thing that matters. Whatever you’re doing, just figure it out. I don’t care. But I grew up, my dad was a small business entrepreneur. The bills were paid on time. Those things mattered to me even if they weren’t the things that brought me a lot of energy or strength. I think Jon obviously saw me from a young age being like, we’re going to build this thing, and he saw the value that that also creates while also. So there was a good balancing went on there.
David (18:18): Yeah. I think that’s what they talk about in the book. That’s that balance that you need. Jesse, has it been hard or different than you expected to not be the CEO? Is it hard to let go at some level or were you just ready to move on?
Jesse (18:33): That’s such a great question. I think it’s learning a new skill, which is hard. There’s a new learning curve associated with it, and I don’t think interestingly I do what I’ve heard a lot of other founders do, which is like that guy’s a CEO, but I’m going to like be all up in his grill telling him what to do, and okay and what that client said. Let’s do that instead. If anything, I think pendulum swung too far initially in the other direction of cool, Jon, good luck, man.
And so I think I’ve been learning, how do I bring my value as potentially seeing things out in the world force multiplier to be able to really jump into problems and help problem solve them or bring resources and do that in a way that’s helpful to Jon, not disruptive to him. It also lets me understand where he is and how things are going in the business.
And so that’s been kind of the learning curve. It’s almost like learning to be a chairman or learning to be a board member that’s good and effective at that. And we’re getting better constantly at it, but that has been a real learning curve for me. After the first year, again was like first year of the pandemic, I was moved to a new city, and I was relatively checked out. Like I probably went the other direction, and I think there is. Now that we’re doing it and I think we’re doing the best job we’ve done so far, I’ll say, it feels good. Like it feels productive and it feels helpful to everybody. And so I think we’re getting there.
David (19:47): So changing topics a little bit here. I want to talk about the performance marketing model that you have been using. And again, I think the best way to explain it is you’re taking the risk. You’re saying to someone, I’ll get you a whatever app install and you pay me $20 on app install, and I’m going spend my marketing dollars to get that installed. And if I get it for $3, I get $17 of profit. If I get it for $26, I lose $6. That’s the model, right?
Jesse (20:13): Yeah. That’s where it started. And not quite that. I think that was one of the first misconceptions I’d say I had when I got introduced by Red Ventures was like, oh, this is just like an affiliate thing. And instead what it started as was using a lot of things Red Ventures taught us like, Hey, you have a baseline, you have a certain amount of performance you’ve been generating. You spend a million bucks and you get a hundred dollars CPA. We could see that.
For the last X number of years, that’s been the case. That’s your baseline. That’s where you’re at. What if you just gave me the budget instead, or you like, I spent that instead of you, and you kept paying $100 for every customer, or maybe because you haven’t been able to grow the way you’d like to you pay me $100 for the first to 10,000 customers, then $120 for every incremental customer. Because by the way, those customers are worth hundreds of dollars to you and that’s a good deal and we’ll help you kind of grow and scale that.
And then we would come in, and it’s not just a media arbitrage, but we would take on creative and we take on the landing funnel and let’s go see if we can improve that, and there’s a win-win there that we can both build together. And that’s kind of the core where the model started. I think for a variety of reasons, pretty openly it’s like that model was like a 7/10 in direct-to-consumer. Some of it, there was issues with transparency, which we can talk about. Some of it was just issues of the sophistication of the buyer, which is probably different if you’re AT&T or Verizon versus Stitch Fix and someone else, and some of it was the length of the funnel when you’re getting people on the phones. That’s different than when they’re just converting on a website. So we’ve evolved the model, and again, I should say, Jon has really taken the lead of this and evolved the model to where it still now is very win-win, but it’s not so cut and dry the way you described it.
Jon (21:45): There’s like two versions now. One is like some base fee that’s more traditional, retainer percentage of spend, something like that, and then bonuses or upside based on beating targets. So it’s like really what I wanted is everyone to wake up thinking, how do we achieve this goal? And it’s the same on the client side as in our side. So it’s like, no, they need to hit this plan or they need to improve their return on ad spend this percent. Cool. My team’s going to do the same thing because we’re going to get paid for it. We’re going to set up a channel on our Slack every day that updates us on our progress. That’s how we’re going to talk about the thing. And then, you know, in terms of how we strike the model, it’s like, what is the law of friction?
The other version is what you said, David. We do sometimes spend our own dollars, assume full risk, and get a bounty, like a bounty for a customer, but typically that’s a byproduct of they’re running something in-house or they have some operation going and we’re an incremental big affiliate, and one of the benefits of that setup is pretty churn-proof. Because if people are getting you riskless volume and they’re making a margin on their own, it’s typically God bless is the approach from the client. So I think we’ve honed that into two distinct models and sometimes one evolves from one to the other, but that’s a state of today.
Jesse (23:04): The industry dreams of this model. Like, I wish I could get paid for all these results I’m creating. And then most agency owners and people out there are like, oh, I don’t want to take risk, and it’s scary to upset my customers or my clients in any given way. And because of the whole way we did this partnership with Red Ventures and our own incentives and stuff, we paid our dues. And in many ways, where we’ve netted out, that Jon just covered, well, first it was like no, let’s do it exactly the way they do it. And I was like, well, that transparency thing doesn’t work for the Stitch Fixes of the world. Okay, So we got to find a different model for that.
But the other thing we saw simultaneously was we got so much better at performance marketing. Ric Elias told me that would happen, and I kind of believed him. I thought I was already really good. We got 10 to 100 times better than we were in 2015 by the time 2018 rolled around. But at the same time in the marketplace, we struggled to make the model work, and we kept doing a deductive like, let’s try this model. Everyone thought, oh, this is it. This is the answer. It would work and then we’re like, oh, that’s not quite a win-win.
So we’ve paid our dues, and I like to tell people that we stubbed our toes and our shins have gotten kicked in a couple times to get to the place where we now think we’ve figured out the happy medium of how this model could work, but also deliver amazing results and build really great performance marketers.
David (24:20): Honestly, the two reasons that I’ve always been worried about that model, reason number one, is the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose situation where maybe you’d be charging a client $50,000 a month and with your performance bonuses, suddenly they’re paying you $500,000 a month, and they’re like, you know what? I think I’ll just go back to the $50,000 a month model with another agency or with you. And then the flip side of that is if things aren’t working and you’re putting in a ton of time on creative and analytics and everything, and now you’re losing money. They’re like, well, not my problem you’re losing money. So that’s challenge number one.
Challenge number two is just the headwind of trying to explain to clients a new mouse trap, right? You have nine agencies telling you we’re charging a percentage of spend, and then one agency saying, well, it’s some of its percentage of spend and some of it is performance and it depends on this and that and whatever. You guys have to have some pretty strong conviction to keep pushing forward because I think those are two real issues.
Jon (25:14): Yeah. I think you got them right. Those are the things we’ve been like fine-tuning over the past five years. That’s what I’ve been going at. I think what is required is you actually have to be better. Like if we were just the same, we would never get a deal, the reputation would tank. It would just be like some weird thing, and to Jesse’s earlier point there’s no substitute for actually coming up with innovative step function wins than like seeing red ink every morning and knowing you have to get over that hurdle.
So yeah, my conviction is we got to be the best at this and we got to maintain an edge on the market and that’s going to have to evolve because any innovation, that gap will get closed over time. When I was a trader, when I was a poker player, you got to do the same thing. And to your point, we have removed a lot of dogma around things that used to be sticking points to like get a deal done and get in the game and get proof points to prove that. And so like, yeah, I think now it’s more about the consistency of results than really drawing a hard line where people are going to pitch us out because everyone else’s thing is easier to digest.
Jesse (26:21): Yeah. One underlying thing that we aren’t explicitly about, but I’d like to is talent. And underlying all of this is a deep love and a deep trust of really great talent. One of the stats we throw around is that over 80% of our staff, prior to working at Ampush, has no experience in marketing and advertising. And probably 50% of our staff joined Ampush out of college and studied at a top 20 university and have really their whole career has been at Ampush. And that’s a really unique thing about our business that has allowed us to do the kinds of things we do. Some of that being deciding just to change our whole business model overnight. That’s a huge, crazy thing. Some of it is also just the ability to learn this performance marketing and keep evolving it and getting it better. But talent is really something that we feel really proud of, probably the most proud of frankly, but we take it really seriously.
And the talent started as again, we didn’t know what we were doing. I didn’t know what an agency was in 2011. I literally did not know what one was. I was like, well, consulting firms and finance, okay, let’s hire the way those guys hire. Let’s go to these great schools. Let’s find young people. This is a new sport anyway. No one knows how to run a Facebook ad. Let’s try it and let’s learn and then they came in. I said, oh, we got to train them. Let’s train them and then they got two years further along. I said, well, we got to teach them how to like actually talk to clients. Let’s train that. And so everything has been homegrown every step of the way by me, by Jon, by Nick, by Chris, by others, through our journey, but it’s created this really, really unique talent franchise that’s very New England Patriots, and it’s the way that it works.
David (27:50): What do you think keeps that talent at Ampush? There’s this whole great resignation. I’ve seen instances where people are getting offers of two times their salary to go somewhere else. How do you retain people?
Jon (28:03): I think two things. One, we don’t expect to retain people forever. And so we’re proud of like the alumni network also. We have 427 alumni, like over 200 of which are either leading growth teams or working on growth in-house. There’s like 50 that are at platforms like Facebook and Google. Some of them have left and come back.
To hit your quest straight on, it’s the ability to learn and develop at an accelerated clip, and then like have that payoff, not just 2x, like these offers you’re talking about, but like 7x, 3, 4, 8 years later. So starting with me, I’m the CEO. I’ve been doing this for 10 years. I started as an analyst. Jesse likes to say I was an intern. I think that’s like a little bit dramatic, but my leadership team-
Jesse (28:48): Started on a 90-day contract.
Jon (28:51): That’s actually correct. My leadership team, 6 to 9 years, 10 years, at Ampush, homegrown many of them straight out of school, and we don’t just train like those early hard skills Jesse talked about. We do and we formalized it, but we teach people how to go from individual contributor to manager and have support and formalized training and outside coaching for like the EQ piece of it at a degree that I’m sure is not matched outside of maybe the McKinseys of the world or like really much larger companies who built a brand around that.
And so people see that, and those who want to go and get those leadership skills and then have a direct impact on Ampush from that seat, they see people ahead of them doing it. It’s a very virtuous cycle. And so definitely got harder in the pandemic. It was a very fun live culture of being in office and problem solving together, and when that switched to doing it in a room by yourself, it’s just a very different paradigm that we’ve wrestled with quite a bit. But that’s the answer.
And then we do celebrate when people build on that and move on to these cool roles. Sometimes they refer usbusiness again. Sometimes they come back. Sometimes they just tell us, Hey, you got to check out this thing, this third party AI tool for analytics is on fire. Everybody’s talking about this. You guys want to build, buy, or borrow, like check it out.
Jesse (30:11): I think Jon is this way. I’m this way, Nick, like, we’re like long term greedy types. We purposely recruited people who were also like that. They’re interested in learning and growing as humans and people and less interested in optimizing the next, just, can I make 10, 20 more grand somewhere else sort thing. And that’s not to say it doesn’t happen. Of course, it does. And because we recruited a lot of people like that, that led to a feeling where people would optimize for long term, what’s the right move. More and more alumni have helped us in many ways because one funny thing I remember very distinctly, there was a time when like 18 months everyone would leave. They’d come in out of school, just like in finance, like their market value would go up considerably, and 18 months they’re gone right out of school.
And then there was a few people who stuck around for like four years. And all of a sudden those people who had left at 18 months, basically had gone backwards a year because they had become ad analysts and the person who stayed at Ampush became their boss. And they go, wait, how did that happen? Wait a second. This guy’s a director.
We even had an awesome woman. One of the first New York employees. She’s co-founding a company as the Head of Growth. And so they started to become a thing. Well, wait a second. Don’t leave after 18 months. Stick around because when you learn this other thing, your market value really goes up. So then we saw bunch of people stick around for a really, really long time. And so it’s hard. It’s not easy. It’s not perfect by any means, but there’s been certain things along the way that have made it easier and better.
The other side of it, though, that we’re talking about that we didn’t really talk about is the New England Patriots thing of like, again, Jon credit him, is the, I forget the EOS phrase you use, but integrator. The analyst’s gone, another analyst comes in, picks up right where that person left off. We have a very standard way of doing that. We have a way you’re going get trained, move people around. Red Venture’s also very good at this. Like you were running this thing, now you’re running this thing. So we constantly are moving people around, and who’s next up mentality and a way where we’re recruiting new people. So that’s another piece of how we’ve dealt with turnover is that we have that orientation.
David (32:06): You guys made me think of two things that I think about a lot. One is I’ve always said a good agency is based on PPC, which stands for people, process and culture. And without the process and the culture, all you really have at an agency is smart people running around doing smart things. And there’s no consistency. And so the success of a client is totally determined by who gets assigned to the account, and in the Patriots analogy, it’s like, well, I need a left tackle that does the following things, and if that left tackle leaves, I’m going train another left tackle to play this role.
The company is greater than individual parts I think is what you’re kind of saying. I like this adage, in your 20s, you should learn, in your 30s, you should earn. And I think a lot of people do make that mistake in their 20s where they’re like, oh, I’m making $65,000 a year. Someone offered me $75,000 to go work at a giant 18,000-person holding company where I’m going to end up buying the word Chevy vault and monitoring that every day for the next year of my life. And they just miss out on the learning, and that’s a huge mistake that I think young people make.
Jon (33:07): Yeah. We’ve been very deliberate about trying to keep people in a light uncomfortability in terms of like how much they’re learning and how much responsibility they have, like the right amount of stretch, and then we all also prompt people to look back. Hey, look back at like the emails you were sending a year ago, the role you were in, the work you were doing, see how much you’ve learned.
And to your earlier point, David, about the left tackles, the new left tackle, my proudest moments, we’ve worked with Hubble Contacts for five years. We’ve worked with Starz Lionsgate for five years. When someone gets to that tenure, if they still have any fear about our rotations, like we’re doing it wrong, and the beauty with like the first time we changed the team on Hubble, I jumped in. I was like, Hey guys, you should expect the same level of service. Here’s the background of these people. Next time we did it, they were like, Hey, we’re excited for the next thing. You don’t need to do this. We’re good. Now there’s like 40 people who’ve worked on that business over time. Starz Lionsgate is a bigger team.
It’s probably like 75, only a quarter of whom are still at Ampush. You build that trust when you prioritize that. I don’t want anyone to ever say, oh, I got the B team or whatever. I was just like, no, how do we set this up through our deliberate training? So like that’s not a thing at Ampush.
David (34:19): Yeah. I think it’s amazing how many service companies don’t think of themselves as basically a brand, because once you’re a brand and you have predictable, consistent results, then you can switch people around all day long because the results are going to be the same. But if you’re just hiring smart people and putting them in a corner and saying, do smart things, yeah. You switch the account team on a client and that client’s pissed because they’re getting a different result with the new account team.
Jesse (34:40): And I didn’t even realize it was a brand until we’d hear people in the market go, oh, Ampush. We’ve had funny examples, David, where I’ve heard this from multiple alumni where they go, I went to work at another company, Company X. I was looking for my third company, and nobody cared about Company X. They only wanted to talk to me about my Ampush experience. That was the only thing that mattered in my interview process. I didn’t even realize it. To your point, I didn’t think about the brand until you start hearing people refer to it that way. And then you’re like, oh yeah, that is something huge.
David (35:11): Yeah. I do think you guys have built a brand and Red Ventures as well. This is two brands that to me say really smart marketers who are going to figure stuff out. So I agree with that. I have to ask you about this alumni network actually because I’ve never actually heard that before. I was interested that Jon said you have 427 alumni. So either you just made that number up or you’re actually-
Jon (35:32): I got a spreadsheet.
David (35:34): So it’s never occurred to me to like even have that concept, but what do you do with that and how do you use it?
Jon (35:41): A few ways. We still have not operationalized it to the degree I think we potentially could. One is like, who do we want to stay in touch with? Who do we think may want to come back here in a leadership role because they wanted to get some outside experience? So like one of our early, strongest Phase 1 of Ampush tactical people, who had also been a poker player, his name’s Trevor left, went to an in-house direct-to-consumer role. Then I asked him to come back when we started doing the full funnel work that Jesse described where I was like, great, how do we build out this other capability set? He had another three year stint as a stellar leader, and now he’s in a very senior role running all of supply side acquisition at DoorDash.
And so one is just like, yeah, who do we want to actually like stay in touch with who has appetite then should come back. Another one is if we want to assemble like a focus group to be like, man, we’re going start going deeper on influencer. Who can we reach out to and try to get a discussion going like what do people know, who are doing this in-house or other things. And the third one, the one I have the most fun with is a way to inspire our current talent and make it more compelling to join and learn and develop here.
So I did an alumni panel last year. The co-founder, CMO, who is our first New York hire Jesse mentioned. Her name is Alba, a guy who moved to Greece and is running like a big DTC acquisition team over there, one of the guys from DoorDash I mentioned, and then the last part of that was a guy who wanted the most entrepreneurial setup. So he is doing like a self-driving car thing where he was too early. And so instead of marketing, he’s like hustling drivers at a gas station. But it was just like their combined tenure at Ampush was like 17 years.
I was like, Hey, tell everyone what you learned here, tell everyone what resonates, tell everyone what you wish you learned, and it’s just like super fun and inspiring for the people who are now analysts, and it’s an early way to start letting them know, Hey, you have a lot of room to grow here, and then you have a ton of compelling opportunities.
David (37:35): I think it’s just a genius idea, and I’m going steal it, just FYI.
Jesse (37:42): Please do. We steal, too. I worked at McKinsey and they have a full-on directory. They have alumni updates. They have drinks that you get together. It is a force of nature. The other thing Jon didn’t say, but I think it’s true for him and me is spiritually, it’s the most gratifying part of all this. It’s the thing where we be with pride over one of our former alums named one of the top CMO, you know, CMO Buffy. He was named as 30 under 30 marketing or something and it’s just like that’s awesome. That’s so cool.
David (38:10): I’m just imagining like 50 years from now, there’s going be alumni weekend for Ampush, and all these like 70-year-old guys, you’ll be walking in. Like, “I remember when I was at Ampush.”
Jon (38:22): That stuff happens informally, but I like your idea.
David (38:25): So I want to ask you one more question about the Red Ventures investment. A lot of agency owners dream of someday having a liquidity event or having investors or even being acquired. What would you say has been the experience? What’s been the best part of it and what’s been the part that maybe has not been the best that you didn’t expect.
Jesse (38:45): I’ll take my stand, and Jon have a different perspective. I think the best part is new people to learn from and beyond the obviousness of the liquidity. I don’t want to undermine that. That was very impactful personally. So that mattered a lot. But beyond that, I think just people to learn from, and they’ve been fantastic people to learn from. They themselves are a mosaic of different kinds of people and personalities and stuff. So that’s just been really a cool part of it.
The part that’s been probably least great is this was too strong of a word, but I can’t think of a better one. Like it destabilized us a little bit. We had these other people with other perspectives that mattered and they were around the table and had a way of doing things that may or may not been the right thing. And I made the mistake as a young leader, sometimes trying to copy and paste what I saw there, heard there, into a culture that didn’t really fully bring it in. So just kind of that thing of another person, it’s like a smart, loud, long-lost cousin moving into your house and they’re there. And they’re saying things and doing things and you’re responding to them and reacting. I think that was an adjustment for us and had an impact.
Jon (39:44): I thought they were incredible to learn from. I got to spend a lot of time in Charlotte when I switched roles to figure out the Ampush version of full funnel performance deals, and Ampush could be insular. It might have been a little stale. I know what Jesse’s going to say when I ask him questions a lot of the time. They had a whole new set of perspectives, preferences, even like phrases, cultural phrases. And so that was amazing. I generally agree with Jesse on the long-term piece of it. There were things about their business that other companies can’t emulate that depend on the brilliance of their leaders. And so sometimes we’re just like, oh, let’s do this thing they do, but we under thought it, and then it just ended up as kind of a weird diversion.
David (40:25): So we only have a couple minutes left, but I did want to ask, Jesse, because you’re now working on Gateway X out of St. Louis. And I’m assuming that Gateway is an homage to the arch and the gateway to the west, which in Iowa, we used to call Iowa the gateway to Nebraska. So tell me what Gateway X is and what you’re working on.
Jesse (40:43): Yeah. Jon mentioned earlier, we do coaching for a lot of our people. And a lot of that started by me, him, Nick getting coaching from some great coaches. One of the many formulas or frameworks they teach you is like zone of genius. Like if you can do the thing you’re really great at and you get energy from it and it makes you show up in a certain way with energy, you’ll tap dance to work every day. I’m an optimist and someone who likes that kind of thing. So I’m like, Okay, Yeah. I’m in. Tell me about this.
I think as I did some of the work and took many, many years to harness, it was like, my zone of genius is this zero to one entrepreneurial experience. It’s also coaching and teaching people and helping them learn and see things. It’s also relationships and building like one plus one equals three. It became more clear to me. I was like, I want to run a business that that’s what it does, that I can in live in those zones all the time.
Ampush is a great business, but it’s not zero to one anymore. There’s certain things that are very not what I just described. And in many ways, Jon was the receiver of a lot of this. I tried to zero to one things and that wasn’t the right for the business and would just create muckety-muck things.
The idea was, it wasn’t perfectly formed. It’s becoming like a venture studio. So we come up with ideas that generally leverage my unfair advantages, which is either digital, B2C businesses with a large customer acquisition angle, or B2B businesses that are selling to marketers and brands. Those are kind of the two things I think I know how to do top 10% in the world, and we try to come up with ideas that we think will work there and we launched them and we build them out.
We’ve launched three companies in the last year and it’s been a lot of fun. What I would say is one cool thing for the people listening is Red Venture obviously has also done this really well. Like one of the nice things about running a services business with a lot of different things going on and a lot of different people and personalities, as a leader, you really learn how to inject and eject. It’s been an absolutely critical skill to make this thing work where I’m having to inject and eject across a variety of different business, like full-on businesses now. They’re all small, but it’s not that dissimilar from having five big clients and being able to show up and bring your best to each of those and add value in a smart way but let them keep running. So I would say it’s been an interesting experience to forward that skill set over.
Jon (42:54): Let me add on something supportive and humorous. Jesse mentioned trying to do this at Ampush. So here’s what would happen. So we do it an offsite every year, bring the whole company, and we do a roast where we make fun of ourselves. And so Jesse would launch a thing within Ampush that made much more sense in the version he’s doing it now. So it’s like Ampush capital. Like we’re now an investing firm, and then at the roast, we’d be like, all right, this year’s fire festival was Ampush Capital. And then we’d like talk about whatever half big progress of that.
But yeah, Jesse’s the best 10% in selling it short. He’s like, you know, best 1% in the world. And so I think clearing the way for him to do that and then Ampush staying focused, I think that’s been a mutual big win. And yeah, there were people who miss it. They’re like, what’s the crazy thing we’re about to do. And I got to be like, all right, how do I match some of that energy? I think that’s one of the reasons to give Jesse credit. Like he hasn’t stuck his nose in and done this thing that people might worry about with the CEO moving to a board level and something like that because I think it’s just such a good fit.
David (43:57): I really like this concept of a zone of genius, too, because I think Jesse, what you’re saying is you recognize that the fun part for you is like early days of a business where you’re the Chief Costco Orderer and the Chief Talent Officer and you’re putting out fires. And at a certain point, some people love running 1,000-person business. But there are other people who are like, no, I would rather pass that on to someone else and focus on what I love. So kudos to you for identifying that and finding Jon who seems to love growing the business.
Jesse (44:24): Yeah. There’s a great Dolly Parton quote of all people, which is “Find out who you are and then do it on purpose.” I like it a lot because it’s like, oh yeah, kind of like you find out who you are and then, okay, now I’m going to actually go do that thing that I am on purpose.
David (44:37): So I think we need a totally separate podcast to figure out how you came up with Dolly Parton quotes and where that came from.
Jon (44:44): You could cross that off your list of podcast requirements, too.
David (44:47): Yeah. Well, that’s usually one of my questions, like what’s your favorite Dolly Parton quote, but you beat me to the punch. Well guys, this was really great. I really appreciate the time. I think it’s fascinating how Ampush scaled and how you guys dealt with investors and changing the guard and all that. So I appreciate the time, and I think this is going to be really valuable to people listening.
Jesse (45:07): Awesome. Thanks for having us.
Jon (45:07): Yeah. Thank you David. It was fun.
David (45:11): A new episode of Agentic shift drops every Wednesday. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or visit agenticshift.com to see the latest episode.
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