While other kids wanted to be lawyers and doctors, I was the kid who thought a fictional character's gig in advertising was the most glamorous job in the world.
Then I grew up and got into the industry, only to find out I was more responsible for annoying people than inspiring them.
This is the story of how I tried to fix that, sold a company, and accidentally found my way back to the job I dreamed of in the first place.
The First Win: Pressboard
My career in advertising started with Angela Bower in the sitcom Who's the Boss when I was 13 years old. I thought her job as the head of an ad agency was the coolest gig in the world. The reality, after 10 years in the industry, was far less inspiring.
The Problem: The internet was becoming a minefield of pop-ups and banners that everyone was getting really good at ignoring. My co-founder Tiam Korki was building ad servers and I was selling programmatic ads. We felt like we were contributing to the noise instead of creating anything of value.
The Insight: Our bet was simple. We believed great stories were more powerful than any ad. We wanted to build the bridge between the brands who had them and the publishers who could tell them.
The Play: So, we built Pressboard. It was a marketplace born from that single idea, designed to make it easy for brands and publishers to create and measure content together. The journey was a roller coaster of big wins and risky pivots, culminating in a successful acquisition by impact.com. That moment felt like both a finish line and a starting gun.
The result? We proved that storytelling was a real business driver. Our tagline “Stories are better than ads” turned out to be true. I was also about to get a whole new perspective on the industry I thought I knew.
The Intermission: Doubling Down
Selling your company is a surreal experience. It’s the goal you grind towards for years. When it finally happens, you're left with a strange mix of pride and a "what now?".
My first role inside impact.com gave me a chance to deepen my knowledge. We had built a platform to help brands and publishers tell stories and understand if they were read. At impact we could see if these same stories drove sales. It was about diving deep into the publisher world and using impact.com’s scale to help media companies prove their own value. The John Wanamaker quote of not knowing which 50% of his advertising worked was finally being solved.
My Second Act: My First Real Marketing Job
I have worked in sales, management, as an executive, and as a CEO, but despite my childhood dreams, the role of marketer remained elusive. Today I finally checked that box, my role as Director of Strategic Marketing feels like the job I was trying to get all along. I spend my days crafting campaigns, talking to the world’s most important brands and sitting on top of what is arguably the single greatest source of consumer commerce data in the world.
The Disruption: We’re moving the conversation out of the old interruptive ad world. Instead, I’m helping brands partner with media, creators, and even their own customers to grow their business.
The Play: I get to take the scrappy, story-first lessons from the startup trenches and apply them on a global scale. Vibe coding apps, launching podcasts and running marketing programs that weren’t even possible a few years ago.
The Result: It feels like I finally got that "Angela Bower" job, and I bet she would be proud.
The Common Thread: Enjoy the Process.
Looking back, I see my career as more of a puzzle than a path. You move along, putting pieces in place, and it isn’t until you stand back and see what you’ve built that you can appreciate it all. The people, the experiences, the wins and the failures. Each puzzle piece on its own seems insignificant until they all come together as one.
My early career in sales helped define the edges. Pressboard filled in a lot of the middle and now my work at impact is about finessing those last tricky pieces. It was never about some grand, twenty-year plan. It was, and still is, about the simple satisfaction of tinkering with something you love and trying to make it a little bit better every day.
A Few Things I’ve Learned Along the Way:
Chase the Problem, Not the Payday: The most rewarding work comes from fixing something that genuinely frustrates you.
Success is a Team Sport: No good idea happens in a vacuum. Surround yourself with people smarter than you and learn from them.
Stay Curious: The moment you think you have it all figured out is the moment you become irrelevant.
What was your childhood dream? Are you still working on that puzzle?
