#140: The Anti-Silicon Valley Playbook: How Genius Monkey Built a $100M Ad Tech Business on Their Own Terms - Seth Hassell and Clint Ethington

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Apr 18, 2025

Seth Hassell and Clint Ethington, childhood friends and co-founders of Genius Monkey, delve into building their bootstrapped ad tech empire without relying on venture capital. They discuss their unique partnership, the significance of profitability over rapid expansion, and how they compete with giants like Google. The duo shares insights on fostering a strong company culture, innovative marketing strategies, and the value of non-dilutive funding. They emphasize the importance of adaptability and learning from failures in the ever-evolving ad landscape.

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ANECDOTE

Founders' Decades-Long Partnership

Seth Hassell and Clint Ethington have been business partners since seventh grade.
Their long collaboration began with a dairy farming business before venturing into digital advertising.

INSIGHT

Network-Agnostic Ad Platform

Genius Monkey connects agnostically to all ad networks, reallocating budgets dynamically for best performance.
This flexibility lets them independently verify ad conversion claims across platforms.

INSIGHT

Few VC Ad Tech Survivors Remain

Most VC-funded ad tech firms either failed or were acquired, leaving less than 20% independent.
Genius Monkey is among the rare few profitable, bootstrapped ad platforms still thriving.

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Seth Hassell and Clint Ethington are the co-founders of Genius Monkey, a programmatic ad tech platform with proven targeting, tracking, and attribution for optimized results. Seth and Clint were childhood friends who worked on many business ventures before launching Genius Monkey in 2009, leveraging their experience in digital ad technologies.

Genius Monkey grew steadily as a bootstrapped company, with the founders and team working hard for years to improve their platform, prove results to clients, recruit agencies, and grow their team. Most ad tech peers took VC funding and are no longer around, but Genius Monkey is still growing and getting more profitable every year.

In this episode, Seth and Clint talk about their unusual long-time partnership, the power of profits, competing with giants, building a strong company culture, and leveraging non-dilutive funding to grow faster.

Quote from Seth Hassell and Clint Ethington, co-founders of Genius Monkey

"Don't be afraid to fail with the smaller stuff. A lot of times, people don't take the chance of seeing, "What if we do it this way?" What happens? And all those little things that could become something big, they never pursue because they're comfortable with where they're at."

"Fail fast. Try stuff out. If you see it's not working, shelf it and go to the next thing. Move on until you find that one that's doing better than where you're at right now. Then, I will put the determination and the motivation behind it to see it through. Clint and I tried through lots of things that just didn't work out."

"If it wasn't working, we were okay. We wouldn't say, "It's all over, close the doors." It wasn't like that. It was like, "Okay, we know that doesn't work. What's our next thing we're trying?" And we always had different ideas in the background."

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