Andreas Roell wanted the soccer scores. He was a German college student in the United States, with a team back home to follow and an internet-connected campus computer available to him. So he used it. Before the agencies, acquisitions and board appointments, there was this modest application of a new technology: finding out what had happened on a pitch thousands of miles away.
The detail survives because it makes his later career easier to understand. Distance was a problem; the computer supplied an answer. He did not need a manifesto about the future of media to find that useful. The future had thoughtfully arrived with something he already cared about.
Born and raised in Karlsruhe, Roell played soccer in Germany before coming to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. UNLV’s soccer records list him from 1994 through 1997. He studied international business, and earned Academic All-Western Athletic Conference recognition for the fall of 1997. The classroom and the playing field occupied the same years of his life.
He also began making things for the medium he had discovered. In 1997, while still in college, he co-founded the athlete-focused website PrimePlayer.com. An MBA at the University of San Diego followed. By the time he began Geary in 2000, he had experience of being both the person using an online service and the person trying to build one.
A search box is only the middle of the story
Geary Interactive’s business brought together website development, media buying and strategic planning. Those are easy services to list and harder ones to coordinate. A prospective customer can admire an advertisement, search for the company and arrive at a baffling website. Each department can claim to have done its job while the customer quietly leaves.
In March 2008, Roell’s company bought Fathom Online, a San Francisco search-marketing business. The price was undisclosed. Geary had approximately 42 staff; Fathom had 22. The acquisition brought people and technology, including keyword modeling and analytics tools. It also brought a useful test of whether the combined business could make its different disciplines work together.
Roell had spent about 18 months looking for search expertise. His reasoning was broader than putting more specialists on the payroll. Advertising could create the interest that a search engine later captured. The website then had to turn that interest into something a client could measure. A click was a point along the journey, with work to do on either side.
Geary’s announcement explicitly connected web development, paid and organic media, and data analytics. The ambition was to offer clients an integrated service across those activities. That required the company to understand how one piece affected another. The attractive acquisition was the one that helped complete the work.
“Search can’t stand on its own anymore.”
Andreas Roell · March 2008
The audience, rather than the crowd
Roell was also writing about the practical choices advertisers faced. In an October 2008 column about online video, he examined the attraction of smaller, concentrated audiences alongside the reach of large distributors such as YouTube. The question was how to choose a setting for a message, rather than assuming that the largest audience settled the matter.
It was a revealing preoccupation for someone building an agency. Reach gives a campaign a number to admire. Relevance asks a less flattering question: how many of those people had a reason to care? His argument made room for both large video outlets and specialist destinations, depending on what the advertiser needed to achieve.
The same period put him in front of other entrepreneurs. In January 2009, he returned to the University of San Diego to talk about Geary’s beginnings and growth. His advice to MBA students was to develop their business plans while they still had the flexibility of school. He had taken that route himself. The unfinished idea deserved some time before it acquired employees, clients and a payroll.
His professional life also extended beyond his own firm. In May 2006, after serving as vice president and president-elect, he became president of the San Diego Advertising Club. Building a business and helping organize the local trade were overlapping commitments. The company needed customers; the profession needed people willing to take a turn doing its less glamorous work.
The announcement and the aftermath
By April 2012, the scale had changed. Geary Group and LSF Network combined to form GearyLSF Group. The transaction announcement described more than 200 people, five offices in the United States, two in Europe and one in Asia. It paired performance marketing and advertising with creative web development and local, mobile and social services.
Geary itself had become a holding company with three divisions: Geary Interactive, Geary PMG and Geary SEO. Its client roster included WD-40, Bumble Bee Foods, MobiTV and Kyocera. The merger brought together businesses that had already been assembling capabilities of their own. The name on the announcement represented a considerable distance from the company’s start.
Roell’s later account of the sale was considerably less tidy. In 2019, he described growth through acquisitions, outside investment and an eventual loss of control over the decision to sell. He said he had opposed the sale and had not received his full earn-out. Those are his recollections of the transaction, and they give the celebratory announcement a more complicated human counterpart.
For a founder, the mechanics of a deal have consequences after the congratulations. An earn-out makes some payment depend on what happens later. Decision rights determine who can influence that later period. Roell’s story brings those two questions into the same room. A chief executive’s title and the authority to decide the company’s future can end up in different hands.
Another market, another set of rules
He continued building. At EGM Worldwide, headquartered in Dubai, Roell worked with Arabic entertainment businesses on video on demand. The company operated across North America and the Middle East. In 2014, he was invited to the Utah Global Forum to discuss doing business in the region after serving as EGM’s co-founder and chief executive.
The change of geography mattered. A digital business still needs material people want, partners who can provide it, and a way to reach its audience. The screen is portable; the relationships behind it take local work. His move from American agency services to Arabic entertainment widened the settings in which he had to make those pieces fit.
Later came venture building and investment. Through Analytics Ventures, Roell helped establish AlphaTrAI. A CFA Society Los Angeles event on artificial intelligence in asset management listed him as AlphaTrAI’s CEO alongside other investment-industry speakers. Carib Ventures also became part of his professional portfolio. The former agency operator was working with businesses whose products depended on technology as well as businesses that bought its services.
Katana supplied another connection to advertising. As executive chairman and co-founder, he worked on the use of data in paid media. Other roles connected him to DataQ and CPC Strategy. The work varied between creating companies, providing capital and advising the people running them. It was a broader set of responsibilities than one chief executive’s desk.
A field belongs to the people who build it
Soccer remained an undertaking of its own. Through love.fútbol, where he served as chairman, Roell supported a model that asked communities to help plan, build and operate their playing spaces. The organization supplied support for projects whose life would continue in local hands. A finished field needed people who regarded it as theirs.
He met love.fútbol co-founder Drew Chafetz through his daughter’s nonprofit incubator competition. The organization placed third. Roell was drawn to it anyway, a small reminder that a competition’s ranking and a person’s conviction can diverge without causing any particular difficulty.
The appeal was concrete: land, materials, local effort and somewhere to play. Fields could become gathering places for leagues, schools, cultural events and small businesses. His contribution included financial planning and strategic direction. These were familiar business skills put to work around a game he had known since childhood.
In San Diego, he became chairman of Albion Pros. In a 2016 interview, he explained the attraction of a youth program connected to a senior team, recalling his own experience of that structure in Europe. He wanted the club to give younger players something visible to work toward. His ambitions included competitive soccer, a durable local organization and an impact beyond match day. The game had given him a route to another country; he wanted it to offer other people a route forward, too.
Now, the founder across the table
Today, Roell is CEO of Evros Group, advising companies in marketing, media and technology. Its work covers preparation, positioning and transactions. His biography also records advisory work through Madison Alley and involvement in deals including Jump450’s sale to Omnicom and TheoremOne’s sale to S4. He approaches the negotiating table with years spent on the operating side of it.
Evros advised DE-YAN on a strategic investment from Shamrock Capital. Its account of the engagement describes preparation for life with an outside partner as part of the assignment. That is a useful detail beside Roell’s own exit story: closing day creates a new arrangement that somebody has to operate the next morning.
In June 2025, Evros advised Residence on an investment from Gemspring Capital. Residence’s network had more than 700 people globally. The assignment included explaining the organization’s shared systems and operating structure, as well as its creative work. The transaction required prospective partners to understand how the studios functioned together, a familiar problem for anyone who has tried combining specialist businesses.
Roell has described his move into full-time advisory work as growing out of requests from other founders. He wanted to help them achieve a sale that matched what they had spent years building. The ambition is personal as well as commercial: a transaction has a value on paper and an effect on the people who live with it.
There is still room for A-ha
An executive biography can accumulate so many companies that the person becomes difficult to spot. Roell has supplied a few helpful corrections. Asked for his overused phrase, he offered: “Great. Now let’s make it better.” Asked to choose a karaoke song, he chose A-ha’s Take on Me. Apparently, improvement has a soundtrack.
He also wanted faster planes that could get him back to Germany in three hours. The student who used the internet to follow home had discovered a limit to what a better connection could accomplish. Soccer scores travel rather more conveniently than soccer players.
Those details leave a more recognizable person beside the transaction history: someone who followed a game across an ocean, built businesses around changing ways of reaching people, and learned that a larger company can bring a smaller say in its future. His next conversation with a founder carries that experience into the room. There is plenty to discuss before anyone reaches for the celebratory photograph.