Jessica Holton and the advantage of starting small

Jessica Holton sent Adam Grant a pitch. It had the ingredients a founder is often told to include: ambition, credentials, investors, confidence. Grant had questions. The email eventually became a public lesson in how to ask someone to believe in your company. There are easier ways to make a first impression.

Holton was willing to talk it through. She admitted feeling embarrassed and “a little defensive, to be honest.” The useful detail is that she stayed in the conversation. Grant challenged the gap between having a compelling idea and showing someone else why it mattered. Holton acknowledged that advice to sound confident had pushed her toward grand language.

That exchange offers one way into her career. The co-founder and CEO of Ours Privacy has worked in investment banking, private equity, consumer products and nonprofit education. The interesting part is how often she returns to a practical question: what does the person trying to use this actually need? Her early education in that question came with birthday parties.

Birthday parties were part of the business

Her parents opened a children’s science museum in central New Jersey when she was four. Her father taught high-school physics; her mother had a business background. They ran the museum until Holton was about fourteen. Family holidays frequently involved visits to other science museums. Research, apparently, could be arranged around the school calendar.

For Holton, the place was a second home, complete with birthday parties and sleepovers. She checked visitors in and thought about memberships and children’s parties. She also watched families spend hours playing and learning together. A business could create something people remembered after they left. That was an unusually tangible introduction to entrepreneurship.

The name was Discovery House. Her later biography connects that upbringing to her interest in business as a way of reaching people at scale. It gives the career that followed a different starting point from the one suggested by its bank names. Before she evaluated companies, she had seen a small one being made useful, one arriving family at a time.

Learning the machinery of money

At Georgetown, Holton studied finance and accounting. She joined Morgan Stanley’s Financial Sponsors Group, first as a summer analyst and then as a full-time investment-banking analyst. Private equity followed: she worked in Carlyle’s U.S. Buyout Consumer & Retail group as an associate. Her work included evaluating investments, valuation models, financial analysis, diligence and portfolio companies.

These are occupations with a considerable appetite for detail. A promising business has to survive questions about what it earns, what it costs and what might happen next. Holton’s apprenticeship placed her on both sides of that examination: advising in investment banking, then helping assess investments in consumer and retail businesses.

Her teaching work adds another dimension. A Wharton Online and Wall Street Prep private-equity program lists her as a senior instructor with Wall Street Prep. Explaining financial work to someone learning it requires its own kind of precision. A model has to be understood as well as built. Across those roles, the recurring material was business; the audience kept changing.

Two years to choose the next chapter

Holton went on to earn an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her explanation for going is refreshingly specific. She wanted time in the startup world and time to think deliberately about the rest of her life, professionally and personally. A degree was one way to arrange that pause.

She has also been clear about the costs. Business school takes money and time, and she does not present it as a requirement for founding a company. The distinction matters in a career decorated with recognizable institutions. She describes a choice that served her circumstances, rather than a set of admission requirements for everyone else.

“Business school is just one of them,” she said of the ways someone might invest in an intentional future. That is a useful qualification from someone who went. The school name occupies a line in a biography; the decision behind it took two years. Her next projects would involve people whose opportunities depended, sometimes too heavily, on which institution appeared on their own first line.

“Business school is just one of them.”

Jessica Holton, on ways to invest in your future

The colleague sitting behind her

Mannie Ajayi and Holton met during their junior-year summer internship at Morgan Stanley. They sat back to back. Their subsequent paths included full-time finance roles, private equity and Stanford. When they looked back, they saw how much their early careers had supplied: financial stability, a network and the confidence to choose a next step.

They also recognized how much had gone right before they arrived. Mentors had helped. Their universities were places investment banks already recruited. Support systems made demanding workplaces easier to navigate. Their own effort was real, and so were those advantages. The question was what happened to an equally ambitious student at a school those employers rarely visited.

In their joint account of the nonprofit’s beginnings, they describe wanting to extend the change in life trajectory that a finance career had given them. The ambition was personal without being confined to their own progress. They had benefited from an entrance into the industry. Now they wanted more students to find one.

Thirteen students, then a larger classroom

Access Distributed began in 2019. Its fellowship helps students from schools outside the usual recruiting circuit prepare for finance internships. The work extends from interviewing to succeeding during the internship and earning a full-time offer afterward. Getting through the first door is only one part of staying in the building.

The pilot had thirteen students. The program went on to graduate more than 160 fellows. Its early growth took it from a small first class to an alumni community of its own. For an organization concerned with networks, that progression has particular meaning: each cohort leaves with people who shared the experience, as well as the material they learned.

The design is concrete: a distributed curriculum, preparation and support for students whose campuses offer little or no direct recruitment by these firms. It turns a general concern about opportunity into work a student can do before an interview or an internship. That specificity is part of what makes the project revealing about Holton. Her response to a closed recruiting circuit was to help build a route through it.

A routine that fit in your hand

Another experiment took her into consumer products. Holton founded Blaze, a beauty brand organized around a tailored daily routine. In March 2019, it won the EDENS Retail Challenge. The competition drew concepts from entrepreneurs and students across twenty-nine universities, including Stanford, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.

The final presentations took place on March 8 at the Angelika Theater in Washington’s Union Market District. Finalists had worked with business mentors and EDENS leaders to refine their concepts and plans. It was a public test of a proposition Holton had taken from an idea to a pitch.

Blaze’s central question was what a familiar product category might look like if it were designed again from the beginning. Its daily-dose format aimed to make a routine easier to understand and use. The bathroom shelf was a different setting from a finance classroom, but the underlying design problem is recognizable: reduce the work someone must do before the product becomes useful. Simplicity still had to earn its place in front of judges.

The problem inside their own company

Ours Privacy emerged from another operating experience. Holton, Adam Putterman and Tyler Zey were trying to run marketing and analytics for an existing business while controlling what information reached outside tools. They could not find the system they wanted. They built one, then launched Ours Privacy as a commercial platform in 2024.

Its work sits between an organization’s data and the advertising and analytics services it uses. The platform brings information together through server-side tracking and lets teams filter sensitive fields before sending permitted data onward. For a marketer, the practical question is whether a campaign worked. For the person represented by that data, the question is where their information goes.

Holton’s role now involves selling infrastructure for that intersection. The customer is buying a way to exercise control while continuing to measure results. It is less visible work than a consumer brand, but it still begins with a person encountering a system and finding that the available options make an ordinary task harder than expected.

More room to build

In July 2025, Ours Privacy announced integrated consent management alongside a funding round led by Rock Health. The product brought permissions and data handling into the same offering. That expansion gives a clearer sense of what the team was building: a broader toolkit for marketing decisions, with control over information built into the process.

August 2026 brought a $15 million Series A led by Lightbank and Health Velocity Capital. The announcement named Holton as co-founder and chief executive officer and reported more than 200 customer organizations. Funding and customer counts describe a company at a particular moment. They also change the scale of the work in front of its founders.

Her next task is already visible in the company’s stated plan to develop the platform and reach more organizations. The childhood museum offered a direct view of the people walking through its doors. Software puts more distance between the builder and the visitor. Holton’s career makes an argument for keeping that visitor in mind anyway. The door can become larger. Someone still has to make it work.