Dan Pantelo and the advantage he gave away

Dan Pantelo had a useful problem: his customers liked the machinery. Inside his marketing agency, engineers had helped turn the slow business of producing advertising variations into something faster. Clients saw the output and asked how it happened. When they learned there was a tool, they wanted access. The agency’s private advantage had acquired an audience of its own.

For a service business, this is an awkward compliment. A customer who can operate the machinery may need fewer people standing beside it. You can keep the door closed, preserve the arrangement, and continue sending invoices. Or you can open the door and discover what kind of business is waiting on the other side. Pantelo opened it. Marpipe grew out of that decision.

The customer wanted the machinery

Pantelo describes the transition as a gamble that paid off. Agency profits had paid for engineers to watch the team work and automate the repetitive parts. The initial assignment was practical: look closely at what people do all day and find something tedious enough to hand to a computer.

That is a revealing place for a software company to begin. The customer and the task already existed. So did the irritation. A designer producing another variation of the same advertisement hardly needs a consultant to explain the production bottleneck. The queue provides its own presentation, usually without attractive slides.

The eventual product carried a question about control. An agency could deliver finished work; software could let the customer make and test more of it independently. Pantelo founded Marpipe in 2019. His earlier business supplied the problem, the initial experiments, and the people close enough to notice what could change.

“We made a casino bet and got lucky.”

Dan Pantelo, on opening up the agency’s internal tool

Before the software, the street corner

Before running a technology company, Pantelo sold electronics on New York street corners. Later, while at Binghamton University, he launched a marketing consultancy from his dorm room. The business became an agency in Soho, working on creative production and demand generation for direct-to-consumer brands. The distance between those jobs is considerable; the recurring task is persuading somebody to care.

He is the son of immigrants from Soviet Ukraine. His public accounts of his work return to competition, making things, and the opportunity to build a business. Those details give the chronology a human scale. The startup did not begin with a funding announcement. There were customers to find and ordinary commercial skills to acquire before there was a platform to explain.

At Binghamton, which he attended from 2013 to 2017, his activities included student government, policy debate, and rugby. His degree was an individualized program in financial public relations. The list is an unusually busy mixture: argument, organization, money, and a sport in which disagreement can become rather physical. It offers a less tidy picture than the familiar founder biography with all the rough edges sanded away.

He was also publishing. In 2017, through PR Professor, he wrote about growing an Instagram audience for communications ideas. He described asking potential readers what interested them and testing alternative article titles. His own content became an experiment he could inspect. The habit was already visible: make a claim, try something, see what happens.

An investor changes the answer

Marpipe’s early fundraising included a refusal. Laconia met Pantelo in May 2019, liked aspects of the technology, and questioned whether the offering was essential enough to support the business. The firm passed. Pantelo stayed in touch, sought feedback, and kept building. After another meeting in November, Laconia and TIA Ventures issued a term sheet; the investment closed in January 2020.

The detail worth keeping is his conduct during the uncertainty. Investor Jeffrey Silverman described a founder who listened without becoming defensive. Nobody enjoys having a commercial ambition examined for structural weaknesses. Remaining useful company while it happens is a skill of its own. A fundraising conversation can survive a disagreement if there is still something substantive to discuss at the next meeting.

By September 2021, Marpipe announced an $8 million Series A led by Stage 2 Capital. Participants included Samsung, Ripple Ventures, Commerce Ventures, and ValueStream Ventures. Mark Roberge and Greg Coleman were among the individual investors. The company’s earlier seed financing had included Adobe. These were connections to businesses that understood the advertising workflow from several directions.

Later that year, Pantelo was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Marketing and Advertising class of 2022. The recognition supplied a clean milestone in a less orderly process. The underlying business had come from a team trying to get through its work more efficiently, then discovering that the method might travel beyond the agency.

A good ad is a question with a budget

Pantelo’s interest in testing starts with a deceptively small observation: changing a background color or a few words can change an advertisement’s performance. In his agency days, the team was accountable for results. The visible object on the screen became a collection of choices that could be examined, rather than a finished composition whose success arrived as a pleasant mystery.

Consider a simple, invented example. A shop has three product pictures, two headlines, and two backgrounds. Those choices produce twelve combinations. Make two complete ads and compare them, and you learn which complete ad did better in that particular test. You still have work to do before crediting the photograph, the words, or the background.

This is the distinction Pantelo wanted software to help investigate. Automating production can make a wider experiment feasible. Analyzing components can help a creative team formulate the next question. The designer still has to choose ideas worth testing. A machine capable of rendering variations does not relieve anybody of the obligation to think of something interesting.

The attraction, for him, extends beyond speeding up a file export. His writing has explored symbols, meaning, branding, and whether advertising experiments can help assess a product before it is manufactured. There is a consistent curiosity about the point where an attractive idea meets a measurable response. His essays bring those questions into practical marketing decisions.

The catalog gets the brief

His subsequent concentration on catalog advertising follows the production problem into a different corner of the shop. A retailer’s catalog carries product information: pictures, prices, descriptions, availability. Dynamic product ads use that material to assemble advertising around individual products. For a business with many items, the catalog becomes part of the creative workflow.

It is easy to admire one beautifully composed advertisement. It is harder to maintain useful design across an inventory. A changing price needs to remain accurate. A product needs the right picture. A visual treatment needs to work beyond the handful of items selected for a presentation. There is a considerable difference between approving a mockup and operating a system.

Marpipe now presents tools for catalog creative, product-level video, generative catalogs, and feed management. Pantelo’s current business puts those elements close together. The product data provides the material; design determines how it appears; automation makes the process repeatable. The ambition is to let a brand exercise more control over advertising that is assembled from its catalog.

In August 2025, he joined the SaaS Operators podcast to discuss growth, pricing, and a free feed management tool. In October, he appeared on Mobile Dev Memo to talk about ecommerce creative experimentation. The conversations place him in two related jobs: building the product and explaining the commercial choices behind it.

A September 2026 Marpipe announcement described Meta subsidizing part of its enterprise offering for qualifying brands adopting product-level video. It is a dated development in the company’s work, rather than a reason to declare the future settled. The practical question remains familiar: how do you make suitable creative for the products a business actually sells?

The joke in the job description

Pantelo’s author biography adds a modest occupational flourish to founder and CEO: part-time janitor. It also lists an interest in chaos delivered through slide decks. There is something cheering about a software executive permitting the presentation to be the joke. Many people have sat through the alternative.

His taste in stories supplies another small clue. Asked in a 2021 interview which film inspired him, he chose The Matrix. In a separate podcast’s favorites, he picked Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan. These are public preferences, not a key that unlocks a person. They do, however, sit comfortably beside his interest in systems and the limits of confident prediction.

There is a warmer moment in the company’s account of his Forbes recognition. At a town hall, Pantelo read a positive customer comment, then turned the credit toward his colleagues: You built that; you’re the reason for our success. The sentence is brief enough to survive the occasion. A company built around creative production has plenty of people whose work can disappear behind the finished result.

The useful thread through his career is that attention to work behind the result. A dorm-room consultancy became an agency. An internal tool became something customers wanted to operate. Catalog data became material for design. Each transition began with a task close enough to examine. Somewhere between the customer’s question and the next variation, Pantelo found a business he was willing to change his own business for.