Ampush

“If you Google amp push and McKinsey, there's an article by tech crunch, which describes amp push as the McKinsey of growth marketing. And I literally like before the call with the reporter, I was like, Many people are calling us the McKinsey of growth and mark…”

“We grew the business super hard, super aggressive, bootstrapped it to 30, thirty million in revenue in four or five years and killed ourselves.”

“Chris had a Commitment to Carlisle. He was a private equity and he had nine more months left on his contract and he didn't want to burn the bridge and leave early. But we all agreed that basically we would treat ourselves as one entity and he would give up two…”

“When we ran the Red Ventures process, we didn't use a banker. And I actually think it was a mistake.”

“In June of 2010, the business did a hundred grand in gross revenue. By August of the following year of 20 11, it was doing two million a month in gross revenue.”

“I made that mistake when we divested the EDU business. I took the highest bidder and they're, and I'll say it publicly, they were scumbags. They retraded the deal. They kept adding time to the deal. You know, they had, they knew they had leverage. I was buildi…”

“We never gave pricing guidance because why would you do it? I mean, you know, if someone comes in, like, why would you signal?”

“The lawyers and accountants kept coming to me and Nick for every decision. And actually they left it with one of their jokes and we were doing like superlatives at the end of the deal. And one of our jokes was John was the most left off person of emails. And i…”

“We ended up selling a minority stake to this really cool company called red venture. Add punctuation. And we actually gave them an option to buy the rest of the business for, you guessed it, nine figures.”

“I think I said, 15%. I'll accept a 15% discount on mine in exchange for you choosing the right partner for you.”

“Especially our management team and our CEO got a lot of equity. We got a little bit which was by design, but so we're riding a little bit with them in terms of what's, what's going to happen.”

“We spent a lot of time in the beginning of 22, as an example, getting all of our most important customers into really long-term agreements. Right. So I'm like, these are going to be ironclad multi-year agreements. And we may even gave up on price and certai…”

“Two days after the deal, we announced it to the employees and former employees. Cause they were all getting paid.”

“We had a stat that eight out of 10 unicorns have been ambush clients at some point.”

“One thing that just happens in businesses as your business gets bigger, investors pay a higher multiple. It's more stable. It's demonstrated more sort of staying power. And so what a lot of these private equity firms do, and we were sort of a part of this arbi…”

“And like, next thing you know, we scaled them to 600 cities globally. We were spending 50 to a hundred million dollars a year with them on driver acquisition, getting drivers to sign up to be on the platform.”

“Lesson number one of selling your company. It ain't your company anymore.”

“The number one thing for me was cash at close for me and my family. You know, I wasn't running the business anymore. I don't control a lot of what's going to happen if there's an earn out or anything else like that.”

“I think it's one of the most unseen roles in any kind of success like this and I'm, even now, we're still unpacking sort of, you know, my appreciation, gratitude, the things I didn't even know I was feeling or know that I needed, that I was getting from that”

“The three of us each decided to put 33,000 dollars in, which we had made kind of working on our Wall Street jobs. We were 25, 26.”

“On average for every ad dollar of any platform, there's about 20 to 30 cents in services, support, software, tools to make use of that platform.”

“If you're running the business. There's nothing wrong with that, but don't also try to do those other things because that's not going to work and vice versa. If you're not running, you know, if you're not running the business, you have to find the right people…”

“In Ampush, we were focused on revenue growth for the first five years, and man, everyone knew our revenue every day. I knew it. It was in channels. It was talked about, and then when Red Ventures invested, they were like, guys, screw revenue. We don't care abo…”

“Where if Silicon Valley Bank had thrown the book at us, we, Ampush would have never made it, would be out of business, and they gave us grace, and they were, like, helpful to us”

“I would tell people, most people, if that's similar, like you go give yourself two years, Quit everything, go all in and make it work. And I think that sets you up for more success around entrepreneurial ventures.”

“I feel pretty confident I could scale a business to twenty five million dollars. You know, I've done it multiple times. I don't know if I could scale one to 250 or to 2.5 billion.”

“The funny thing about Ampush in particular was most of the people who click and buy e-commerce direct to consumer things are women.”

“And I know for many, many years at ampush, that was like the only reason I was continuing to run the company. And it took me multiple years to like unwind that from myself.”

“This is less strategic, but it can get as big, but it's just way more sticky. As far as I can tell so far, I'm only two and a half years in, right? But it feels way, way more sticky than Ampush did.”

“Typically a staffing agency in the United States, if I just find you an engineer, I mark it up 30%. Like our markup is higher than that because we are like identifying really good talent that's so cheap”

“Our first 10 to 20 customers were former employees of mine. Right, who worked at Ampush, who then were running growth at DoorDash, or running growth at Careof, or running growth at whatever.”

“There are certain times in an organization where, you know, just like on an airplane, like the pilot has to take carte blanche and basically say, guys, I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to own this and we're going to, I'm going to quarterback the crap out of …”