Vol. MMXXVI — Personal Edition
Los Angeles · Est. 1982 Builder. Marketer. Operator. Investor. Friday, May 22, 2026
Builder & Writer

20+ years of growth.
Multiple companies founded.
One operator.

Twenty-plus years of marketing, SEO and growth — from Ticketmaster and Adobe to Upwork, Hired, Box and Blue Bottle. Now building Sundry and writing the playbook in public.
Tony · 2026
Newsletter

One essay, every Sunday.

Marketing-operator notes. No course, no funnel, no upsell.

My experience building & growing
Ticketmaster
Adobe
Upwork
Hired
Box
Blue Bottle
Sundry
What I do

Three words I live by.

i.

Operate

Founder mode and operator mode. Sitting close to the product, close to the customer, close enough to the call.

ii.

Grow

Two decades on the marketing function. SEO, demand, brand at scale — patient bets that compound.

iii.

Write

An essay most Sundays on what I’m building, what I’m reading, and what I keep getting wrong.

About

I’m a builder who learned to write, and a writer who never stopped building.

My first real job was at Ticketmaster in the early 2000s, back when SEO meant arguing with engineers about title tags. From there I went to Adobe, then a string of companies in their messiest growth chapters — Upwork, Hired, Box, Blue Bottle Coffee. Each one taught me something different about how products actually reach the people who need them.

The throughline is operator work: sitting close enough to the product to know what’s true, close enough to the customer to know what hurts, and far enough above the noise to make a call. I’ve owned every channel that matters, built the teams that ran them, and made the mistakes that pay for the next ten years of judgment.

These days I’m building Sundry, advising a small group of founders I genuinely like, and writing essays about the unglamorous middle of a company’s life — the part everyone skips on the conference stage.

22

years operating

7

companies, in seat

100+

essays in the notebook

12k

newsletter readers

What I'm building

What I'm building.

Sundry
Co-founder · 2023–present
Building from zero, again.

Operator-led, marketing-first. Putting twenty years of pattern-matching to work on a category I’ve quietly been waiting for someone to build.

Upwork
Head of SEO · 2018–2020
Programmatic SEO across millions of pages.

Re-platformed the world’s largest freelance marketplace for search — partnering with product and engineering on a multi-year technical rewrite.

Hired
VP of Marketing · 2014–2017
Took organic search from afterthought to primary acquisition channel.

Owned brand, demand and content from Series B through Series C — built the team, rewrote the funnel, shipped the brand refresh.

Guest posts & columns

Where you can find me.

Speaking & press

Recent talks and interviews.

  • The Operator’s SEO — keynoteSaaStr · 2025
  • On programmatic content at scaleLenny's Podcast
Writing

Notes from the field.

Browse all writing

Subscribe

One essay, every Sunday.

The marketing operator’s notebook — what I’m building, what I’m reading, what I keep getting wrong. No course, no funnel, no upsell.