The Power of Kind Leadership in Business

My guest today is Jesse Pujji, the Founder & CEO of Gateway X, a holding company that builds, buys, and invests in companies that are driving the direct-to-consumer landscape. Prior to Gateway X, Jesse was the CEO and co-founder of Ampush, a performance marketing business helping power customer acquisition across some of the world's biggest brands. Jesse is my go-to person for all things performance marketing and customer acquisition, so we decided to record this episode to bring his incredible lessons to a wider audience. It also dovetails nicely into the series of episodes we are making called Primers, where we take our audience from a 0 to a 7 on just about any topic. In this Primer with Jesse, we dive into how revenue mechanics affect ad campaigns, why long sales funnels often offer the greatest opportunities for differentiation, and the various channels and strategies available for performance marketing. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jesse Pujji.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

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Show Notes

[00:03:58] - [First question] - Overview of Jesse’s career and starting Ampush

[00:12:11] - Red Ventures

[00:13:11] - The four components of performance marketing

[00:17:47] - Time and other variables in between impressions and revenue events

[00:23:12] - Understanding the dimensions of a business and their offering

[00:25:32] - Common misunderstandings businesses have about their marketing

[00:27:17] - Major changes in the Facebook and Google digital marketing ecosystems

[00:29:27] - Direct response marketing vs brand marketing[00:35:08] - The importance and impact of effective messaging

[00:37:28] - The differences between good and bad conversions

[00:40:56] - Does alpha still exist, is it worth looking for, and does beta have a place

[00:43:25] - Fundamentals of a high performing marketing organization

[00:50:04] - Attention aggregators of marketing agencies[00:50:18] - Nerdwallet - Thumbtack 

[00:51:22] - Product channel fit

[00:52:11] - PebblePost[00:53:58] - Lessons learned from working with Uber

[00:55:42] - Retention marketing [00:57:31] - Upcoming frontiers of performance marketing

[01:01:15] - Overview of Nerdwallet [01:03:36] - How Jesse’s time at Ampush has shaped his investment lens[01:07:20] - Lessons from bootstrapping a business vs venture capital funding

[01:17:05] - The entrepreneurial execution loop and operating cadence 

[01:29:20] - Kindest thing anyone has ever done for him