Jeffrey Campos had a business plan to build and restaurant shifts to work. He had left a communications job in Costa Rica for New York, where opening his own company required the less photogenic business of earning money and meeting people. Manhattan supplied the address. Campos still had to supply the enterprise.
There was an unusually memorable piece of encouragement behind that ambition. In 2012, while he was a university student, he met Lady Gaga during her Costa Rican concert visit and told her he wanted to move to New York and establish a communications company. She encouraged him to pursue it. Five years later, he had something to report back.
Today, Campos is the founder of Sharp 2.0, working across recruiting, marketing and AI automation. The tools have changed considerably since those early restaurant shifts. The recurring task is familiar: attract someone's interest, start a conversation and give that conversation somewhere to go.
A wish with a Manhattan address
Campos grew up in a small town in Heredia, Costa Rica. His account of being a Gaga fan includes friends teasing him for his enthusiasm. He had followed her since 2008. By the time he met her in 2012, he had a specific ambition of his own, involving a city, a profession and a company.
His early career included journalism and public relations. Those are useful occupations for someone preparing to introduce himself repeatedly: one requires questions, the other requires a reason for somebody else to pay attention. His later work would keep returning to both sides of that exchange.
The New York chapter involved practical improvisation. By late 2017, Campos was running JCK Luxury Living in Manhattan. Along the way, he worked in a restaurant, including nights, while developing his business plan and finding contacts. He was also still working out the right market for his company. Arrival and certainty had apparently booked separate flights.
He gave JCK a Costa Rican expression to carry into its American business: A Pura Vida Experience. It was an effort to make his origins part of the offer. The company's work included corporate campaigns through a client broker, with Verizon, Quill and Direct Energy among the brands he named at the time.
The return visit, pink jacket included
In November 2017, Campos met Gaga again after a Connecticut concert. He had won a dinner through a contest. This time, the university student who had described a future in New York could tell her he was living there and running his own business.
He recounted reminding her about their first meeting and the encouragement she had given him. The conversation delighted him. It also brought Costa Rica back into the room: he asked whether she wanted to return, and she talked about wanting to see the country's mountains and beaches.
The photograph has the cheerful imbalance of a fan's souvenir: an elaborate stage costume in the middle, Campos in a pink jacket at the right. A business story rarely comes with such obliging wardrobe. Its relevance is personal, though. He had attached a dream to a conversation, then returned with the experience of trying to build it.
That distinction gives the anecdote some weight. The dinner makes a good photograph. The restaurant shifts make the photograph a better story. Between the two sits the work that a picture cannot conveniently itemize.
A communicator learns to sell
Campos's career crosses several kinds of persuasion. His work history includes luxury hospitality marketing, public relations and a business-development project with the Cayuga Collection. He also worked in marketing and PR at Hacienda AltaGracia. These roles placed him around destinations and experiences whose appeal had to be explained to people elsewhere.
He continued writing about that world. A January 2017 LinkedIn article introduced a Costa Rican travel experience through Cayuga. An August 2018 article covered a Pérez Zeledón hotel's place among international hotel brands. Travel, place and commercial storytelling remained connected in his work.
Sales introduced another measure: whether interest became revenue. Campos lists a September 2016 Credico USA award for placing third among US agents on a Direct Energy campaign. His account credits more than $3 million in revenue in under six months. It is a specific, self-reported milestone, attached to a client and a period.
The recurring connection is the audience. A hotel guest, a business customer and a job applicant want different things, but communicating with each involves understanding what might bring them closer to a decision. Campos's career has repeatedly put him at that point of introduction.
“Why I Appreciate Struggling In NYC”
The title of Campos's March 2019 LinkedIn essay
That essay title offers a revealing choice of emphasis. He made the difficult part of New York worth discussing in public. Appreciation is quite a word to put beside struggling; it leaves room for a more complicated account of entrepreneurship than a photograph outside an office door.
The same audience, a smaller screen
Social media became another working surface. In July 2018, Campos published an article making the case for Instagram as a platform for brands. In a related post, he said his own account had grown from 2,000 to 17,000 followers over five months. That was his reported result at the time, rather than a current audience count.
For someone with a background in PR, Instagram offered a direct place to publish and see a response. The story could travel without waiting for an editor to accept a pitch. Presentation, timing and an audience's willingness to come back all became visible parts of the work.
His present real estate business puts those communication skills around a substantial purchase. At JCK Luxury Group, Campos is founder and CEO, with Dominic Kennedy identified as a co-founder. The business is affiliated with Real Brokerage Technologies and serves Southern California property clients.
The service categories are concrete: buying, selling, leasing and investing. His agent profile also lists English, Spanish and Portuguese. Across those transactions and languages, the business asks him to make details intelligible, keep clients informed and help people progress through a decision with plenty of moving parts.
A Beverly Hills property page gives a small example of that work in practice. Campos is named as the presenter of a three-bedroom, four-bathroom Benedict Canyon house. The presentation walks through rooms, terraces and a movie room opening onto a pool deck. The job is partly descriptive: help a prospective buyer understand a place before visiting it. His hospitality background and property work meet on that page, where photographs and a written account turn a physical setting into a reason to arrange a viewing.
Giving the next step a place to live
Sharp 2.0 brings Campos's work into CRM systems, recruitment and automated communication. Its public positioning puts hiring and customer acquisition alongside one another. Both involve reaching people, collecting responses and arranging what happens next.
The interesting overlap with his earlier career is the handoff. Public relations seeks attention. Sales asks someone to act. Recruitment needs an applicant to become a conversation on a calendar. A company can do the first part well and still leave the next person waiting.
- InterestA person responds
- ConversationThe inquiry gets a reply
- Next stepA meeting is arranged
Sharp's service offering spans AI calls, SMS, appointment booking, recruiting campaigns and follow-up. It also brings CRM setup and marketing into that sequence. Campos now works on the machinery around conversations as well as the messages that begin them.
It is a practical turn for a career rooted in communication. The glamorous part of marketing gets the photograph; the calendar invitation does its work without a pink jacket. Yet the invitation can be the piece that turns a promising exchange into an actual meeting.
An alarm clock enters the picture
There is a personal-productivity counterpart to this interest in follow-through. Campos is also a co-founder of Day Ahead. Its iPhone app, Day Ahead Challenge, lists Jeffrey Campos as the developer and combines planning, habit tracking and community accountability.
One feature is particularly easy to picture: alarms that require an action before dismissal. The ordinary morning negotiation with the snooze button acquires a referee. Other features include progress tracking, challenges with friends and a leaderboard.
Day Ahead places structure around a person's intentions; Sharp places it around a company's inquiries. They address different users, but their descriptions share an interest in making the next action happen. Read together, they suggest a founder paying attention to the gap between an intention and its execution.
That is also a useful way to read Campos's own route. The university student had a destination in mind. The restaurant worker was financing the attempt. The founder has since worked with hospitality brands, sales campaigns, property clients and software products. Each chapter adds another setting in which an introduction needs a follow-up.
Back in 2012, the wish was to live in New York and open a communications company. By 2017, he could tell Gaga he had done it. The more durable subject of his story is everything that came between those two conversations, and the work that continued afterward.