April 18, 2025

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

1 hour 4 minutes

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."

Links

Genius Monkey on LinkedIn
Genius Monkey website
Cypress Growth Capital website

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