The first headquarters was Brian Gonsalves’s living room. The first fulfillment network was a small storage unit in Vancouver, Washington. The catalog had the cheerful disorder of early ecommerce, when a person could sell a ThighMaster beside a folding stepper and call the selection strategy “the internet.” There were orders to print, products to pack, customers to answer, and very little room for theatre.
Gonsalves and his close friend Chris Marantette started Netrush in 2006. One brought years of hands-on internet retail; the other brought a finance background. They were early enough that online commerce still felt less like an industry than a collection of stubborn chores. Their advantage was not prophecy. It was repetition.
Buy something. List it. Ship it. Learn what broke. Repeat.
Two decades later, the company has become a blend of retailer, operator, advertising shop, analytics team, and logistics system for consumer brands. Gonsalves is again its co-CEO. Yet his most interesting idea is not about adding another layer to the machine. It is about helping brands reclaim what layers tend to obscure: the transaction, its economics, and the relationship with the person buying.
01 / Start where you are
The dorm room before the living room
The Netrush story started before Netrush. As a junior at Pacific Lutheran University, Gonsalves launched an internet business from his dorm room. He graduated in 1998 with a degree in Physical Education, which is either an unconventional preparation for ecommerce or a perfectly sensible education for somebody who would spend a career studying endurance, coordination, and what happens when people ignore the fundamentals.
He owned that first retail business until 2004, then began Netrush with Marantette two years later. The new company did not begin as a polished platform. It began as a seller. That distinction matters. Operators encounter truths that slide decks miss: a product title can quietly wreck demand, inventory becomes expensive the moment it stops moving, and a customer’s patience is always shorter than a supply chain diagram suggests.
“Make the big time where you are.”Frosty Westering’s college maxim, carried into Gonsalves’s leadership
Gonsalves has said a line from PLU football coach Frosty Westering stayed with him: “Make the big time where you are.” It has the useful modesty of advice that does not require a funding round. The dorm room was where he was. Then the living room. Then the storage unit. Each was large enough to learn the next thing.
02 / Build the machine
Amazon made a city. Netrush learned the blocks.
Netrush eventually focused on helping established brands operate on Amazon. The proposition grew far beyond posting a listing. It bought inventory, handled catalog content, ran advertising, forecast demand, protected brand presentation, and moved products through fulfillment. The physical and digital parts of retail sat in one operating model. In 2013, the company opened a processing facility in Kentucky. By 2018, it had 180 employees across four locations.
The company also shared risk. Instead of collecting only a service fee, its accelerator model operated as a retailer and made money when products sold. That arrangement aligned Netrush with a brand’s results, but it also made Netrush the intermediary. The company could see the machinery because it was sitting inside it.
Growth followed. Netrush appeared on the Inc. 5000 for six consecutive years from 2016 through 2021. At its fifteenth anniversary, Gonsalves described the distance from his living room as humbling, crediting the employees and partners who built the company. His public leadership principles were similarly unornamented: be first to take blame, first to pass credit, and do the right thing even when it hurts.
The partnership with Marantette is part of the architecture. They began as friends with different strengths and kept adjusting the division of labor as the company changed shape. At various points their titles separated finance, operations, entrepreneurship, and the chief executive job. By 2023, both were listed as co-CEOs. Founder partnerships are often narrated as chemistry or conflict; this one looks more like maintenance. Two people keep moving the load-bearing walls without pretending the building will ever be finished.
03 / Question the bargain
The strange education of a middleman
Amazon offered brands a metropolis of demand. Gonsalves once compared it to a “big, crowded, vibrant city of products,” advising young companies to focus on their block, then their neighborhood, and work outward. The metaphor captured the promise. A small brand could find a street with foot traffic. It also captured the risk. Cities have landlords, tolls, and rules that change while the shop is open.
By 2022, Gonsalves was describing a broader transfer of power. Brands had once held control. Retailers took a turn. Now consumers held it, moving between marketplaces, brand sites, creators, and social platforms with little respect for anybody’s channel strategy. The straight line from advertisement to store shelf had become a pinball table.
The modern commerce handoff
Gonsalves’s emerging playbook connects the channels while keeping the brand close to the transaction.
Creators + ads
Social + search
Marketplace + DTC
Data + retention
His recent argument is that brands should use platform infrastructure directly where possible, understand the economics, and preserve a clearer path to the customer. It is not an anti-Amazon position. Netrush continues to work deeply across Amazon. It is an argument for knowing what happens beneath the convenience.
“The best opportunities usually show up after the next question.”Brian Gonsalves
The useful lesson is about dependency. A platform can be an extraordinary road to market and still become a fog around the business. If a brand cannot explain who owns the transaction, what each handoff costs, or how a buyer becomes a returning customer, reach has purchased confusion. Gonsalves spent years building the intermediary. That is precisely why his case for visibility carries weight.
04 / Return to building
A title change with sawdust on it
In 2022, Gonsalves moved out of the CEO role and became Netrush’s Chief Entrepreneur. The title could have been decorative. His explanation was specific: he wanted to return to his roots as a builder and inventor, driving innovation and growth while working beside a larger leadership team. The following year, he returned to executive leadership as co-CEO with Marantette.
- Starts an internet retail business in college
- Co-founds Netrush with Chris Marantette
- Co-founds Findaway Adventures
- Moves from CEO to Chief Entrepreneur
- Returns as co-CEO and invests in Batch
- Builds Brand Day around Amazon, TikTok, creators, and commerce
The movement between roles reveals a founder less attached to the height of the title than the location of the work. He has also widened the field. As a founding partner at Findaway Adventures, he has backed founders. As an investor in Batch, he is connected to a commerce model that lets independent barbers recommend products, receive credit for the sale, and avoid holding inventory. Again, the interesting piece is who owns the relationship.
His public posts read like field notes from somebody testing that idea in rooms full of people. He asks entrepreneurs what they love, how they built, what works, and what changed. He writes about handling problems early and directly. He borrows from an eighties sitcom to note that business offers no theme music, neat resolution, or grin before the commercial break. The joke works because it admits the mess.
05 / Keep the sentence going
Culture in increments of one word
One Netrush tradition began when strategy leader Raj Sapru asked a new employee to describe the company in one word. The prompt stuck. New hires offered their word, and employees celebrating anniversaries received another word for every year they had stayed. Eleven years earned eleven words. Sixteen years earned sixteen. Gonsalves liked the way a word became a sentence over time.
It is a tidy metaphor for Netrush itself. Dorm room. Living room. Storage unit. Warehouse. Marketplace. Data. Creators. Control. None explains the company alone. Together they show an operator revising the business as commerce revises itself.
In August 2026, Gonsalves helped host a Netrush Brand Day in Denver with brand leaders, Amazon, TikTok, and creators. The agenda reflected his current map of commerce: attention and transaction no longer live in separate departments. A creator can demonstrate a product to a live audience while brand operators discuss supply chains in the same room. Content, community, and the box on the doorstep have finally met.
The meetings also reveal his preferred method. Gonsalves has written about entering a room of entrepreneurs, brands, service providers, and creators and asking hundreds of questions. What do you love about the work? How did you build it? What is changing? It sounds almost comically basic until one remembers how many strategy sessions begin with answers nobody has pressure-tested. His curiosity is not ornamental. It is a way to keep a twenty-year-old company from confusing experience with certainty.
The founder who began by selling online is still preoccupied with selling online. The difference is resolution. He can now see the cost of a shortcut, the value of a direct relationship, and the trouble caused when a brand mistakes access for ownership. His aspiration is less a moonshot than a difficult operating discipline: connect the system, understand it, and keep the customer visible.
Make the big time where you are. Then ask the next question before the neighborhood changes.