Gabriel Shaoolian sold the agency. Then he went back to the drawing board.

Gabriel Shaoolian had already done the part that usually earns an entrepreneur a comfortable final chapter. He had built Blue Fountain Media, attracted corporate clients and sold the agency to Pactera. There was an executive chair available in the next act. He chose the much less restful business of starting over.

By January 2018, he was describing the indignities of building DesignRush from scratch: finding freelancers, hiring writers, defining responsibilities, arranging the legal entity and deciding how the money might eventually arrive. Experience supplied a map. It did very little of the packing. A founder with a sale behind him still had to get a website online.

His account contained a small admission that makes the whole enterprise more believable. He disliked the early site. Yet he published it so search engines could begin indexing it, accepting that improvements would follow. For someone who began as a designer, this was a useful surrender of vanity. A website kept indefinitely in rehearsal has a rather limited audience.

That willingness to begin again helps explain Digital Silk, the agency he founded in 2019. The second agency brought him back to familiar work, armed with experience of what running the first one had demanded. He had learned enough to return; he had also learned enough to know that returning would be hard.

An apartment, a screen, an audience somewhere else

Shaoolian grew up in Queens and later attended high school on Long Island. His education took him to New York University, where his LinkedIn profile lists attendance from 1990 to 1994. His career would eventually make NYU a recurring name, appearing again among the clients associated with his agency work.

He dates his first work in website design to the late 1990s. What caught his imagination was the reach: something made on one screen could be discovered by a person anywhere in the world. He also liked the freedom to revise. Printed work acquired a finality that websites could cheerfully evade. On the web, a finished design could become the next draft.

An early career account places him at the startup Zeborg as head of interactive design between 1998 and 2000. In his later telling, he was working from an apartment with a laptop in 2001. The career that followed grew out of graphic design, observation and the patient business of finding out what visitors did after arriving.

He paid attention to user behavior, people leaving websites and the performance of individual pages. Those are modest subjects for someone in a visual profession, yet they reveal the nature of his interest. An attractive page had to survive an encounter with an actual person, who might be distracted, impatient or entirely unimpressed.

More than 200 people, and a buyer at the door

By the time Pactera announced the acquisition in January 2016, Blue Fountain Media had become a substantial operation. The announcement described more than 200 people across strategy, design, development, marketing and related roles, alongside offshore development teams in Portugal and Ukraine. Its client history included NYU, AOL and the NFL.

The acquisition offered a larger technology business access to the agency’s digital capabilities. For Shaoolian, the attraction included opportunities that a bigger organization could open for his team. Building an agency meant satisfying clients while retaining people who could readily find another job. Growth came with a payroll and a crowd of competing expectations.

Years later, he was candid about the decision. He had not begun with an elaborate plan to build hundreds of jobs and then sell. The company grew, and his choices grew more complicated with it. An exit can look wonderfully tidy from the outside. The person making it still has to decide whose future the deal will serve.

His later writing about selling companies is correspondingly practical. Document the processes. Give people clear responsibilities. Train them. Keep financial records in order. Make the business capable of functioning without its founder. There is a pleasing difficulty here: to create something another owner can run, the entrepreneur must become less indispensable to it.

The customer gets a vote

DesignRush took him into a different part of the same industry. He initially described it as the design resource he wished he had possessed earlier in his career, with curated work and interviews. A marketplace followed, designed to help brands find agencies. He had experienced the problem from the supplier’s side; now he was working on the introduction.

When Digital Silk followed, its positioning centered on growing brands online. His public biography names work with organizations including Microsoft, Sony and NASA. Such names explain why prospective clients might listen. The more revealing part of his pitch is what he asks them to do once the conversation begins.

He wants clients to contribute time, knowledge and a clear understanding of their own product. In his account, agency work requires regular collaboration. The client knows the business; the agency contributes research, strategy and execution. A cheque can purchase professional attention. It cannot conveniently stand in for everything the buyer knows.

He has described winning NYU’s confidence by showing a manufacturing project with comparable challenges. The useful connection was the problem, rather than the industry label. It is an example of how he sells: demonstrate understanding, offer recommendations and make the discussion specific enough for the other side to recognize itself.

His startup advice follows the same logic. Begin with a minimum viable product, put it in front of customers and let their responses shape the next version. For established companies, he identifies different constraints: finding time to collaborate, or working through institutional bureaucracy. He is interested in the particular obstacle in front of the particular business.

“A brand has to be ready to allocate time. This is collaboration.”

Gabriel Shaoolian, 2024

A beautiful website still has to earn its keep

His published arguments have become steadily more explicit about what marketing can reasonably accomplish. In May 2025, he urged business owners to improve the product before increasing advertising spend. Reviews, support requests and customer conversations belong beside behavioral data. An agency can bring visitors to the door; the experience inside still determines whether they return.

By June, he was making the case for clearer messaging. His explanation of Digital Silk’s own positioning was instructive: the agency spoke about digital strategies that drive growth, giving design, development and marketing a shared purpose. He argued that a clear message also helps a company choose content, clients and priorities. Words have operational consequences.

In July, he turned to loyalty and the usefulness of an experience. Easy ordering, reliable service and less friction interested him more than an emotional appeal unsupported by the product. The appeal of this position is its ordinariness. The customer may admire the story and still abandon a purchase because the checkout is a nuisance.

There is a similar practical streak in his current work beyond the agency. OysterLink, where he is listed as CEO and founder, serves restaurant and hospitality careers. Its team includes co-founder and general manager Milos Eric. The site brings together job opportunities and career resources, putting another version of the audience-and-purpose question to work.

Across these projects, the recurring theme is a useful match: a visitor and an offer, a brand and an agency, an employer and a prospective hire. That is an editorial reading of his work, but it fits the subjects he keeps returning to. The interface matters because somebody is trying to get something done.

Sometimes the next design decision requires a walk

For all the discussion of performance, Shaoolian has a less mechanical account of inspiration. He takes long walks to get away from the computer and think without interruption. He has also singled out younger people as a source of ideas, admiring their readiness to attempt things before the difficulties persuade them otherwise.

His tastes are usefully revealing. Asked about favorite websites in 2015, he praised Google’s speed and Dance.com’s combination of community and function. Neither preference requires a lengthy lecture in aesthetics. A search should produce an answer quickly; a community should give people a reason to participate. Good manners, translated into an interface.

He also talks about music as an influence on his creative thinking. In an August 2026 interview, he described websites in terms of rhythm and a story unfolding toward an action. He said much of his own time now went into finding the right staff. The individual designer’s judgment has become the founder’s task of assembling other people’s judgment.

His March 2026 discussion of company culture included an admission of uneven standards during rapid growth. Teams had been moving quickly without enough cohesion. He described bringing leaders together and seeking outside views to correct the course. The episode gives some substance to his emphasis on accountability: growth had exposed a problem that required management, rather than a new slogan.

He wants employees to take responsibility for their work and its effect on other people. He wants clients to understand why their customers buy. These are demanding ambitions precisely because they sound so simple. There is no decorative flourish capable of answering them on someone else’s behalf.

The young designer’s attraction to the web was its capacity to change. Decades later, the same possibility remains available to the business he runs and the teams he hires. Shaoolian sold an agency, started again and kept asking what could work better. The drawing board, it turns out, travels remarkably well.

“As funny as it sounds, I take walks.”

Gabriel Shaoolian, 2015