He expected a little more than 300 applications. More than 3,000 arrived. Daniel Knijnik had a staffing problem, and his answer had produced a rather different staffing problem: choosing whom to hire. His engineering business was growing quickly in Brazil. Experienced engineers were scarce. Recruiting them from competitors would make the payroll expensive. So he offered graduates a route into the profession, then built the training to make that offer useful.
He hired 25 people. Their program lasted 12 weeks and covered the technical work and software the business actually needed. The starting salary, 6,000 reais, was competitive for a graduate and cheaper than hiring established specialists. There is something pleasingly practical about the arrangement. Instead of waiting for the labor market to supply exactly the right people, he made room for people who could learn.
This was 2013, years before Quartile became his best-known company. Yet the episode is a useful place to begin. Knijnik would eventually run a business that automates advertising decisions across online marketplaces. The earlier problem involved engineers rather than ads, but it already contained the tension that runs through his career: demand can multiply faster than the organization built to serve it.
A deadline was the family business
Knijnik studied civil engineering, following his father, Anibal, and started a contracting business in Porto Alegre before graduating. His father combined structural engineering with teaching and consulting. Their conversations about work led toward a narrower proposition: an engineering design company that would deliver projects when it said it would. A deadline sounds a modest thing to sell. Anyone who has waited for a building project may appreciate its commercial possibilities.
The family name became the company name. In 2007, Knijnik secured clients including Vonpar, Goldsztein-Cyrela and CFL. His brother Fabio, who had worked in commercial roles at other businesses, joined the operation. Daniel pursued ways to organize the work; Fabio brought his administration experience. Eventually the company moved its headquarters from Porto Alegre to São Paulo, taking a group of employees with it.
The problem grew more complicated as customers wanted structural, electrical and hydraulic work coordinated together. Separate specialists brought separate schedules and additional handoffs. The integrated engineering offer gave customers one supplier across disciplines. In 2015, Endeavor selected Daniel and Fabio as entrepreneurs in its network. Its description of their business emphasized a surprisingly ordinary customer benefit: fewer arrangements to make, fewer separate firms to manage.
Archival photograph: Endeavor Brasil.
Borrowing a method from the next desk
Daniel looked beyond the familiar methods of construction management. Software development offered another way to organize complicated work: agile management, with its repeated adjustments and incremental delivery. He adapted ideas from that world alongside project and construction management into the Knijnik Production System. The interesting part is the direction of travel. Before he became a software entrepreneur, he was already borrowing software people’s working habits.
In April 2013, he said the engineering company had reduced its project development cycle by 40 percent. The business had developed its own management software and expanded from structural design into complementary disciplines. That summer, his argument about building information modeling was equally direct: purchasing better tools would only take a firm so far. The different disciplines still needed to work together. A new software package could be bought; coordination required work.
Crunchflow carried that interest into a workforce planning product. Knijnik became its co-founder and CEO before Quartile. Endeavor later described the software as helping service businesses hire people, allocate them to projects and manage performance. These are unglamorous verbs. They are also the verbs that decide whether a service business can accept its next customer without disappointing the previous one.
How do you organize more work?
- EngineeringCoordinate disciplines
- CrunchflowAllocate people
- QuartileConnect advertising decisions
A different kind of construction site
Quartile took shape in 2016; its company history dates the Madison Avenue launch to 2018, after two years of algorithm development. The distinction matters. An origin can include both the work before the doors open and the moment customers can walk through them. For Knijnik, the new field was ecommerce advertising, where product listings, bids and budgets created another coordination problem with many moving parts.
In 2018, he described how unfamiliar Amazon’s processes could be for a brand’s marketing department. Businesses entering the marketplace often needed outside help, while internal managers supervised the relationship. His perspective was grounded in the work of getting products presented and sold. Behind the talk of algorithms sat a customer with a catalog, a marketing team and a finite number of hours.
His advice on international expansion was cautious and specific: translate listings locally, research demand and begin with a few products. Familiarity with Amazon could help a company cross borders, but products still had to appeal to shoppers in each country. In 2019, Quartile partnered with transcosmos in Japan. Knijnik welcomed the combination of local market knowledge and Quartile’s advertising technology. Software could travel; the partnership supplied knowledge of the destination.
The progression offers a useful reading of his career. First came coordination among engineering disciplines. Then came allocation of people to projects. Now the units were products, customers and advertising channels. Each business involved specialist work that became harder to manage as the number of connections increased. The industries changed substantially. The management question remained familiar.
The acquisition widened the map
In December 2021, Quartile acquired Sidecar, a Philadelphia performance marketing technology business. Sidecar brought experience across Google, Microsoft Bing, Facebook, Instagram and Amazon. Knijnik remained chief executive of the combined business, based in New York. The transaction widened Quartile’s reach beyond its Amazon origins and put more channels inside the same organization.
The combined companies said they had managed approximately $2 billion in advertising during that year and served clients in 26 countries. Those figures describe advertising handled for customers, rather than revenue earned by Quartile. The distinction keeps the scale intelligible: the company was responsible for decisions affecting a substantial pool of other people’s money. Its challenge was to make the combined technology and expertise useful to the brands paying for that work.
In 2022, Quartile received Amazon’s US Scaled Technology Award. The winning work involved automated advertising tactics, including placement optimization and product targeting. It was recognition for the company’s implementation of technology in customer campaigns. For an engineer turned advertising executive, the continuity was easy to see: a system had to prove itself through what it helped someone accomplish.
Advertising managed during the year by Quartile and Sidecar. Client advertising spend, not company revenue.
Keep a person in the decision
Knijnik’s own writing makes room for a quality that rarely appears on a software specification: emotional intelligence. In a 2021 essay, he argued that working with artificial intelligence still depended on human judgment, relationships and the willingness to accept help from technology. His examples came from merchants and business decisions. Even a campaign organized around enormous amounts of data ultimately depended on a person deciding to buy.
That argument reveals his stated view of leadership more clearly than a list of executive titles. He values the ability to respond thoughtfully to change, to recognize tasks beyond one person’s capacity and to spend time on relationships. Automation, in this account, creates room for work that requires attention to other people. It is a practical case for both technical competence and social competence inside the same business.
He also participates in conversations with the people watching the marketplace change. In 2023, he joined Marketplace Pulse founder Joe Kaziukėnas for a discussion of Amazon seller fees and the seller outlook. In June 2025, he appeared with enterprise sales engineer Mike Egan in a Pro Suite webinar covering audience targeting, competitive intelligence and a conversational data assistant. He also spoke at Amazon Accelerate and Unboxed in 2023, discussing product traffic and measurement tools. These appearances put him alongside the sellers and advertising practitioners using the systems his company builds. The topics bring his job back to the customer’s daily questions: whom to reach, what the competition is doing and how to understand the results.
The bigger company needs a clearer job
At the end of 2025, Knijnik described a company that had added more than 100 employees during the year. He emphasized the expanding responsibility of its Center of Excellence: standards, consistency and repeatable work. In his account, strengthening leadership also let him devote more attention to product direction and platform strategy. The founder’s changing workload was part of the organizational design.
“Urgency doesn’t require chaos,” he wrote. It is a compact statement of a problem he had been tackling since engineering. Growing businesses often celebrate speed in public and spend their private hours untangling the consequences. Knijnik’s stated answer was clearer responsibilities and a structure that could support the pace. That is less theatrical than the usual founder mythology. It also sounds rather more useful on a Monday morning.
“Urgency doesn’t require chaos.”Daniel Knijnik · 2025
His public outlook in March 2026 extended the same argument into advertising. Shopping behavior, he said, should inform decisions across streaming, search and offsite media. Quartile’s ambition was broadening with the market: connect decisions that had been made separately. In September 2026, the company announced an Amazon Ads Strategic Localization Award for its work with Honeysticks, bringing international execution back into the picture.
The career can be read through those recurring handoffs: father and sons, one engineering discipline and another, people and projects, marketplaces and media channels. Knijnik has repeatedly built around the space between specialists. The young company selling dependable deadlines and the later platform coordinating advertising share a recognizable concern. Once the business grows, someone still has to make the pieces arrive together.