Jeffrey Nicholson runs Tracer, a data intelligence company in New York that exists to solve a problem he lived through himself: too much data, scattered across too many places, with too little of it actually usable. Tracer pulls fragmented, siloed information into a single system where marketing, finance, operations, and sales teams can explore it in real time, without needing an engineer to translate. The pitch is plain, and Nicholson keeps it that way. He spent years running ads and watching good decisions get lost inside messy spreadsheets. Tracer is his answer.
The company is not a hobby project. It has raised an $18.1M Series A, employs a leadership bench pulled from The New York Times, WPP, and Yahoo, and counts its own former home, VaynerMedia, as a client. Nicholson became full-time CEO in January 2020 - roughly two months before the pandemic rewrote how everyone worked. What he expected to be a launch year turned into a crash course in running a global, remote-first business. He now says he could not imagine operating any other way.
Tracer was born out of my own personal problems, because I watched myself struggle with datasets.
- Jeffrey NicholsonThe Product: The Pilot and the Plane
Most companies in this space sell one thing: software or services. Nicholson insists on both. He describes Tracer's edge as offering "the pilot and the plane" - the technology to unify data plus the human expertise to fly it. In a market convinced that automation alone is the finish line, that is a deliberately old-fashioned position. A dashboard nobody understands, in his telling, is an expensive way to feel informed and stay confused.
That instinct comes from experience, not theory. Before Tracer, Nicholson spent his career on the buying side of advertising, executing campaigns and living with the consequences of bad data. "I used to run ads for many years," he has said, "and I have a great appreciation for the difficulty in executing data." Tracer is built for the person he used to be - the operator drowning in reports, trying to answer a simple question about what is actually working.
Growth, referral by referral
Nicholson has been public about wanting a tight roster of clients who treat Tracer as an extension of their own business rather than a vendor on a list. Early on he framed the goal modestly: a small number of companies who see the partnership as mutual. It is a slower way to grow a software company, built on win-win relationships and word of mouth instead of aggressive marketing. It also fits his temperament, which leans toward selectivity over scale for its own sake.
Before Tracer: VaynerMedia and Gary Vaynerchuk
Tracer did not appear from nowhere. Nicholson built it inside VaynerMedia, where he served as the agency's first-ever Chief Media Officer, partnering directly with Gary Vaynerchuk. In about five years he grew the media department from a handful of people to nearly 250 across the globe, drove performance for brands like Chase, Tapestry, WeWork, and PepsiCo, and helped push the agency's expansion into Asia. Vaynerchuk gave him room to incubate Tracer within the media team, alongside co-founder Leighton Welch, a Harvard-trained engineer who has now worked with Nicholson across three companies.
Instincts are your biggest differentiator.
- Jeffrey Nicholson, on committing to Tracer before it launchedThe two committed fully to Tracer before it was officially a business. That gut call - build the thing now, formalize it later - is the sort of decision Nicholson credits to instinct over spreadsheets. "Usually, when something does or does not feel good, you are right," he has said. It is a striking philosophy from a founder whose entire product is built on making data trustworthy. He is not anti-data. He just does not think the numbers relieve you of the responsibility to decide.
The Unlikely Path
Nicholson took the conventional route out of Babson College: a finance degree, a finance job. He lasted less than a year. A role running Google ads pulled him into digital advertising and reset the whole trajectory. Looking back, his one regret is not betting on himself sooner - following a predetermined path when the entrepreneurial one was always the better fit. It is the lesson he now hands to others: trust the pull toward the work that lights you up.
Along the way he collected a resume most founders would envy. He was VP of Ads at LeadKarma, part of the team behind its sale to Bankrate for a reported $30M, and Head of Ads at SocialCode. He holds the odd distinction of running the first-ever advertisement delivered through Snapchat's global API - a small marker of a career spent at the front edge of new media platforms. Today he advises Roku, Pinterest, and Nextdoor, and teaches at Babson, NYU Stern, the University of Virginia, and Miami Ad School.
Curiosity as a Strategy
Ask Nicholson what makes a data company work and he does not start with algorithms. He starts with a mindset. "You have to start with curiosity, no matter who you are, from analysts to CEO," he says. He grew up playing basketball and credits the game for teaching him to grind it out - to keep doing the reps when the outcome is not guaranteed. Persistence plus curiosity is, more or less, his whole operating theory: keep asking, keep learning, keep showing up.
He is candid about the hardest part of the job, and it is not the technology. "I underestimate how difficult it is to be responsible for other human beings," he has admitted. For a leader who scaled a 250-person department, that honesty lands. The engineering is solvable. People are the permanent challenge.
NicholNotes and Family First
Running one company is enough for most people. Nicholson also founded NicholNotes, an education venture aimed at developing entrepreneurs and future leaders. The reasoning is simple and personal: successful people learn from mentors, and he wants to pay that forward. "Taking the time to answer one person's question could make a world of a difference," he has said. It is a low-key thesis about generosity from someone who could easily keep his lessons to himself.
At home, the organizing principle is "Family First." He lives in New York with his wife and children, and speaks about teaching his kids the same value that anchors him. The pandemic, for all its disruption, handed him unexpected time with his family and a permanent preference for how Tracer operates - global, flexible, remote. The through-line across the company, the classroom, and the household is consistent: start with curiosity, trust your gut, and take care of the people around you.