Joe Yakuel traces his business education back to Manhattan's yellow cabs. His parents emigrated from Israel and built a taxi business that supported a family of seven. The lessons he remembers concern questions, ambition and an unwillingness to accept the arrangements already in place. There were, he has joked, two possible career outcomes: become an entrepreneur, or become an entrepreneur. Some families offer a little more variety on the menu.
Today he is the New York founder and CEO of WITHIN, the marketing agency he started in 2015. The family lessons still sound remarkably close to his working instructions: understand how something works, challenge its assumptions, and keep the goal in view. His particular target is an industry capable of reporting excellent results in several departments while leaving the business owner wondering where the money went.
A year is an expensive way to learn
Yakuel's account of his first startup contains very little founder mythology. He spent a year getting it live, then quickly understood that it would fail. His retrospective judgment was blunt: he could have discovered the problem in the first few weeks. The painful expense was time committed before the idea had earned it.
The next venture failed within three weeks of conception. Another succeeded in its first week. In his telling, that sequence taught him to test whether anyone would buy an idea before building the machinery to deliver it. Failure had become faster and, consequently, more useful. An entrepreneur can survive an unwelcome answer. An unanswered question can keep the meter running indefinitely.
“test before you build”
Joe Yakuel, on his early startup lessons
That lesson helps explain the attraction of his later work. Marketing offers repeated chances to put an assumption in front of a customer and discover whether it deserves another dollar. It also offers numerous opportunities to delay that discovery with a presentation. Yakuel's early experience gave him a reason to prefer the experiment.
Finance first. Then the customer.
He graduated from Tulane University with a bachelor's degree in finance, then earned an MBA at NYU's Stern School of Business. His graduate studies covered digital marketing, entrepreneurship and innovation, and business analytics. It is an education that places a creative proposition within conversational distance of a spreadsheet.
Before launching WITHIN, he worked at Quidsi, whose family of shopping sites included Diapers.com and Soap.com, and at The Vitamin Shoppe. His work encompassed digital acquisition and, later, customer retention. The distinction matters: attracting a buyer and giving that buyer a reason to return are different assignments with a shared commercial consequence.
Stephen Bontempo, who brought Yakuel into The Vitamin Shoppe, describes a colleague whose usefulness extended beyond digital marketing. He recalls Yakuel building an in-house team and bringing a broad business perspective to a web-store redesign. He also remembers his energy, humor and capacity for work. That combination gives the account some welcome texture. The person asking about the numbers could also make a colleague laugh. It is a modest detail beside the budgets, but anyone who has worked through a difficult project knows the value of having both qualities available in the same room.
By 2020, his professional biography credited him with optimizing more than $500 million in media across his earlier roles. The useful point is exposure: he had sat on the side of the table where marketing expenditure had to answer for an actual retail business.
An agency with the owner's problem
WITHIN began in 2015. Yakuel describes its founding resources as a computer, digital marketing knowledge and a considerable appetite for the work. His complaint concerned the distance between a client's business and an agency's assignment. A specialist could make a channel look successful without improving the outcome the owner cared about.
The agency's name eventually lost its first word: Agency Within became WITHIN in 2020. Its proposition was to work closely enough with a client's organization that brand, media and measurement could pursue compatible objectives. The term it uses is performance branding. Beneath the label is a practical ambition: make the people creating demand and the people converting it responsible to the same business.
The client names have included Nike, The North Face, Foot Locker and Movado. They make the proposition concrete, but the more interesting claim concerns behavior. An agency that thinks like an owner must be prepared to question the request it receives. A beautifully executed instruction can still be an expensive mistake.
A useful partner occasionally disagrees
His relationship with Alicia Reich, Movado Group's vice president of digital marketing, supplies a revealing example. Approaching a holiday period, a brand's performance was causing concern. Reich favored a sweeping reset. Yakuel disagreed. They talked through their competing ideas rather than allowing politeness to settle the matter.
The episode illustrates his preference for candid debate and a shared understanding of goals and constraints. Reich also described the challenge of introducing creator content to a luxury business accustomed to polished campaigns. Yakuel's response to the anxiety about authenticity was dry: “God forbid we show up authentic.” Even a watch brand can afford a moment without its ceremonial cufflinks.
The exchange makes room for something agency pitches rarely advertise: neither party possesses the answer in advance. The relationship has to accommodate a hypothesis, a disagreement and an admission of uncertainty. For Yakuel, a strategic partner earns the description partly by being willing to have that conversation before the money is spent.
Why the next company concerned content
Yakuel also founded brkfst.io, a creator-content platform. The business addresses a production problem that becomes more obvious as media operations grow: a brand can buy distribution more quickly than it can produce enough useful material to distribute. A media plan has little patience for an approval queue.
His account of creator work is specific about the customer's situation. Someone encountering a product for the first time may want evidence that other people use it. Someone comparing options may need to see its size, fit or operation. Someone who has already bought may need a clear demonstration. Those are separate editorial jobs, even when the same product appears in every video.
He argues for briefing creators carefully and shortening feedback cycles so the content can match those jobs. In his view, a fast ecommerce operation loses part of its advantage if the product page still waits weeks for a useful video. The production schedule belongs in the growth conversation alongside inventory, site performance and media buying.
The unglamorous machinery of speed
In discussing creative workflows in January 2026, Yakuel emphasized putting rules into the initial brief, making approvals predictable and returning performance information to the people making the next asset. Much of the difficulty, in this account, occurs before filming or after delivery. An unclear instruction and a missing response can be surprisingly effective forms of sabotage.
He treats iteration as an operating requirement. Teams need to learn which opening, topic or editing decision helped a piece of work, then make that information available for the next attempt. Producing more without retaining the lesson simply enlarges the pile of things to review.
His conversations about systems return to the same tension: scale can make an operation efficient while weakening its understanding of the person it hopes to reach. Shared plans, explicit tradeoffs and small tests offer ways to manage that tension. The appeal is recognizably consistent with his startup lesson. Find the failure point while changing course is still affordable.
The customer has more than one afternoon
Yakuel's argument for organic search and longer-term content begins with the way buying decisions unfold. People look things up, compare alternatives, read and return. A business that addresses only the final purchase query has left much of the conversation to somebody else.
He wants content to answer questions across that decision, with measurement that eventually follows the quality of the customer relationship. In his view, immediate paid performance and an investment in future demand belong within one plan. The question is whether the business is becoming easier to choose, and whether that advantage survives the current campaign.
By April 2026, he was describing the cost of neglecting that investment: paid channels can become more expensive while growth stalls. His case is commercial rather than sentimental. The finance graduate has a way of bringing even an argument about patient storytelling back to the economics of tomorrow's customer.
Still asking an awkward budget question
At Shoptalk Fall in October 2026, Yakuel was still challenging last-click measurement and asking marketers to consider the return on the next dollar they allocate. He also argued that live shopping deserved more attention and that brands should begin building the capabilities to operate it well. These are his judgments about where the market is going, rather than promises about what will happen.
The continuity is more revealing than any individual forecast. From the early startup that consumed a year to the agency asked to defend a campaign, Yakuel keeps returning to the same obligation: examine the assumption before it becomes an expensive habit. The family taxi business supplied an entrepreneurial example. Finance supplied a vocabulary. Retail supplied the consequences.
WITHIN gives him a place to put those lessons to work, including the inconvenient ones. A client may need an experiment, a different measurement or a polite argument. For all the changing platforms, the job he has chosen remains pleasantly demanding: help decide what deserves the next dollar, then be willing to learn that the answer has changed.