I didn’t plan a career in marketing. I planned to be a journalist, then a film editor, then a product manager — in roughly that order, in roughly four years. What actually happened is I took an SEO job at Ticketmaster in 2003 because it paid better than the alternatives, and twenty-two years later I am still, somehow, an SEO.
That’s the short version. The long version is below — chapter by chapter, with what I took from each one.
The early years (2003–2011)
Ticketmaster was my first real seat. I learned the unsexy half of marketing first: titles, headers, internal links, the slow drip of an index update, the weeks you’d spend explaining to engineers why the canonical tag mattered. There were no growth hackers then. There was no playbook. The job was figuring it out and writing the playbook for the next person.
From there, Adobe. A much bigger machine, a much more sophisticated audience, the same fundamental problem: get the right pages in front of the right people at the moment they’re searching. I learned what a marketing org actually looked like at scale, and what it costs, in friction, to make a single change.
The growth chapter (2012–2017)
Box, then Hired. These were the years where the work I’d been doing in obscurity turned out to be exactly what fast-growing startups needed. At Hired, I owned marketing as a function — brand, demand, content, the lot. We took organic from an afterthought to the primary acquisition channel, and I learned that a marketing leader’s job is mostly making fewer, better bets while everyone else asks for more, faster, sooner.
The platform chapter (2018–2022)
Upwork was the biggest SEO surface I’d ever touched. Millions of pages. Programmatic content that had been accreting for a decade. The two years I spent there were almost entirely architecture — rebuilding templates, partnering with engineering on a multi-year replatform, rewiring internal linking. None of it was clever. All of it compounded.
Then Blue Bottle, on the digital-first chapter post-acquisition. Different category, same shape of problem: how do you make a brand discoverable without sanding off the things that made it a brand in the first place?
The founder chapter (2023–present)
Sundry is the company I’ve been quietly waiting to build for a decade. Operator-led, marketing-first, in a category I’ve watched try and fail to be solved by people who weren’t operators. The work is the work — patient, unglamorous, mostly invisible. I’m putting twenty-two years of pattern-matching to use, and writing about what I’m learning as I go.
The throughline
If there’s a single thing I’ve learned in two decades it’s this: the leverage is in the boring middle. The shiny stuff at the start (the launch, the rebrand, the campaign) and the shiny stuff at the end (the exit, the IPO, the cover story) are roughly meaningless next to what happens in year two, year three, year four. The operators who win are the ones who stay in the boring middle long enough for the work to compound.
That’s what I’m trying to do, still. That’s what I’m writing about.
— TA —