Dan Pantelo: Real MarTech Start-Up Founder Lessons

Dan Pantelo is a marketing technology executive, founder and CEO of Marpipe. Marpipe is the operating system for creative testing and helps companies perform multivariate testing on their creative and generates optimal creative results.

Prior to founding Marpipe, Dan launched a marketing consultancy from his dorm room in college, which turned into a fast-growing agency based in Soho, Manhattan that specialized in creative production and demand generation for DTC businesses. Marpipe was initially developed when the agency ran into trouble with creative testing, and today, Marpipe has raised over $10m from the likes of Adobe, Samsung, and executives at Buzzfeed, Hubspot, MediaMath, and Criteo.


This Episode’s Heavy-hitters:

- Dan’s family is from the Soviet Union, where his grandmother was actually a business owner in an environment that was not very kind of accepting of a Jewish woman owning a business.
- Dan’s parents came over to the states when they were just 19 years old and arrived 3 months before Dan was born, which meant Dan just made the cut to become an American Citizen by birth.
- Some of Dan’s first jobs were selling makeup and what his boss called “Obama phones” on the street (not necessarily at the same time). He took these jobs as an entry point and also for the commission opportunity, which allowed him an opportunity to make money without a ceiling.
- In college, Dan started writing essays for people to make extra cash. Eventually, the demand was so great that he ended up giving other talented writers in 500-level courses a cut of what he was made to write more essays so that he could scale. When teachers started catching on, Dan decided to go legit and pivoted his team of writers to start writing in SEO as an agency.
- Dan’s tip on mentorship is that people should “graduate” from their mentors. Depending on where you are in your life and professional journey, you should find people that can help you learn what you need to in order to get to the next step, and then continue seeking new mentors out to elevate further.
- One of Dan’s favorite interview questions is to ask people what the likelihood that we’re currently living in a simulation is. He uses this question to gauge a person’s ability and willingness to think outside of the box and entertain challenges by problem-solving, rather than just laughing the question off as ridiculous.

Learn more about Marpipe: https://www.marpipe.com/

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