Founder origin stories get polished until they’re useless. Here’s mine with the varnish off.
The unglamorous truth
I started MarkitAds at 16, in Bethesda, Maryland, because Boosted Notify had taught me something surprising: businesses will pay a teenager real money if the teenager solves a real problem and answers email faster than the adults. That’s it. That’s the secret. I was not a prodigy; I was available, specific, and relentless about follow-up.
The early agency did whatever legitimate work was adjacent to attention: press outreach, social growth, lead generation. Some months were great; some clients taught me expensive lessons about scope creep and about promising outcomes I couldn’t control. The thing that compounded wasn’t a niche — it was documentation. Every engagement became a checklist; every checklist made the next engagement faster. Years later I’d learn Dennis Yu teaches exactly this as doctrine: repeatable excellence beats heroics.
Where it stands
Today MarkitAds is a team of roughly twelve running two lines: PR and lead generation (client placements have included USA Today, The Washington Post, Fox 5, Mashable and Men’s Journal), and the campus activation network — the business I believe is the real company. In between: Mission: Mentor, 10,000 students, an acquisition by Crimson, a degree path at UNC Chapel Hill and a semester in Tokyo.
The claims on this page are sourced on my LinkedIn and Crunchbase profiles, and this site holds itself to the verification standard: if I can’t source it, I don’t say it. What I’ll say without a source, because it’s an opinion: starting at 16 wasn’t brave. Staying honest about what actually worked is the hard part.