Jonathan Jadali learned something useful about the internet before he started selling publicity: people will spend a considerable amount of time watching other people explain how to make money. He was among them. As a teenager interested in Bitcoin, he watched YouTube videos about earning money and tried to work out where opportunity might appear next. The ambition was straightforward. He wanted to make money. The more complicated discovery was how much depended on getting someone else to pay attention.
That curiosity eventually became Ascend Agency, the public relations business he founded in 2020. The distance between cryptocurrency and publicity looks considerable until you consider the common preoccupation: what people notice, what they believe, and what they do next. Jadali moved from participating in an online market to helping businesses find their place in the public eye. Along the way, he developed a particular dislike for paying for an effort whose result remained a mystery.
Public relations is an awkward product to put in a shopping basket. A good idea may become a story. It may also become a very polite unanswered email. Jadali built his offer around reducing that uncertainty, arranging publisher relationships that made particular placements available as a service. There is something appealingly plain about the proposition. After all the conversation about visibility, a customer can ask whether the article actually appeared.
YouTube before the agency
Jadali was born in Orange County, California, and is based in Irvine. In his account of his early life, family helped shape his interest in business. Academic achievement occupies less space in that account than appetite and experimentation. He describes struggling at school while remaining determined to do something with his life. Bitcoin arrived early in his search for opportunity; social media became a fascination of its own.
He attended Brandman University, studying business administration during the years his public timeline lists as 2015 to 2020. At the same time, building an online presence gave him another way to study how people responded. The internet offered immediate evidence: something was noticed, shared, ignored, or forgotten. For someone interested in branding, that is a rather unforgiving classroom. The audience has no obligation to be encouraging.
By the time he started Ascend, he had begun studying businesses already offering similar services. He remembers looking at two competitors and thinking, I can do a much better job.
It is a familiar founder sentiment, though considerably less diplomatic than the language usually printed in a company mission. The useful part is what followed: turning dissatisfaction with an existing service into a specific promise for his own customers.
The promise gets a price
In Ascend’s early days, pitching stories brought limited success. Jadali has described a subsequent move toward consulting with clients about how their brands presented themselves, alongside building relationships with publishers. Those relationships mattered because they changed what the agency could reliably deliver. A company buying a defined placement had a different expectation from one paying for a sustained campaign of outreach.
In his description of the Ascend Model, the offer has three parts: placement, visibility, and value for the customer’s money. Publisher partnerships made the model workable. In 2023 he named Hearst, A360 Media, McClatchy, and Tribune Publishing among the groups with which the business had developed relationships. The strategic attraction is clear: repeated access can make a service easier to organize than starting every assignment with a fresh round of introductions.
By 2025, Jadali was expressing the idea in a compact sentence: For me, it wasn’t enough to promise effort; we needed to promise outcomes.
The relevant outcome needs a precise definition. Ascend’s work includes paid and sponsored media placements. Purchasing that distribution is different from persuading an independent newsroom to report a story on its own initiative. The distinction belongs inside an honest account of the business, because it explains how the promise can be made.
The next step belongs to the reader: attention, interest, trust.
That leaves plenty of work after publication. A placement does not oblige anyone to read, remember, or buy. Jadali himself has emphasized engagement as the point of visibility. This is where the business becomes more interesting than a simple guarantee suggests. It can make the appearance of a page more predictable. The reader remains gloriously free to close it.
The right name in the right room
Long before the later growth rankings, Jadali described branding through three Ps: perception, placement, and personality. Perception concerned how a business looked to someone encountering it. Placement concerned the setting and authority of the introduction. Personality concerned the human character a brand allowed its audience to see. The framework puts an ordinary social experience into business language: people interpret you partly through where you appear and who appears beside you.
His example of placement was a hypothetical software contract. Imagine receiving a recommendation from Floyd Mayweather, then imagine receiving one from Bill Gates. Both names would attract attention, but their relevance to software would differ. He was making an analogy, rather than naming clients. A celebrated introduction can open a door; the right introduction gives the person on the other side a reason to listen.
“The internet is the great leveler”
Jonathan Jadali, on how businesses are perceived online
In his early discussion of branding, he also urged companies to understand their customers before expecting loyalty. He treated a brand’s purpose as something that ought to show up consistently in design, staff behavior, and communication. There is a practical connection to his own work here. A company can purchase an appearance in public. The impression it makes depends partly on what it has prepared before arriving.
A founder becomes a colleague
The agency’s expansion also changed the scale of Jadali’s job. The leadership group around him has included Brauch Owens, Amir Bakian, George Nellist, and Evan Arroyo. In 2024, the business described a 2022 merger with Owens’s OSX Marketing and a push into cost-per-click advertising. Each additional service created another reason for coordination to matter. The original sales proposition had to survive contact with a growing number of assignments.
His description of leadership is more conversational than the language of guarantees. He calls his style very communicative and trusting
, and says he wants colleagues to feel equipped for their roles while contributing ideas. That is a revealing preference in a business whose promise is delivery. If a customer buys certainty, someone inside the company has to handle all the questions that make certainty possible.
His public fifth anniversary reflection dwelled on the team he had built the business alongside. He also has advisory roles beyond the agency, including VotingSmarter and the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center. These details make the career less solitary than the usual founder shorthand. There are colleagues, partners, and organizations around the name on the company profile, each requiring a different kind of attention.
Music offered another application of the distribution idea. By early 2023, Ascend Music was offering services to independent artists, with Owens involved in its direction. Branding, releases, and playlist promotion moved the agency into another crowded setting where being available is only the first step toward being heard. A song uploaded to a platform has arrived somewhere. Reaching an audience is a separate assignment.
A chart needs its dates
Recognition followed. Jadali was included in the 2024 Forbes 30 Under 30 Marketing & Advertising class. Ascend reached No. 18 on the 2024 Inc. 5000 and No. 2 on that year’s Pacific regional list. Those are milestones in a company founded four years earlier, and they help explain why its founder began receiving more attention himself.
Overall list positions. These are ranks, not revenue figures; each annual list measures its own growth period.
The dates matter. Ascend’s subsequent overall positions were No. 1,061 in 2025 and No. 3,030 in 2026. The 2026 listing records 101 percent growth over three years. A growth ranking captures a particular stretch of a business’s life; it is a poor substitute for the whole biography. Keeping the later numbers beside the early one gives the story room to continue.
There is another recent measure. In April 2026, Ascend entered O’Dwyer’s ranking at No. 42, with reported 2025 fees of $15.4 million, up 25.6 percent. Jadali described the preceding year in terms of improving systems and strengthening client partnerships. That emphasis brings the story back to the everyday work behind a guarantee: maintaining the relationships and processes that let an agency keep delivering.
The audience still gets a vote
His ambitions have extended beyond the initial agency. In 2023, he discussed a $50 million revenue goal and an interest in owning publications. Those were statements about where he wanted to go. They show how a founder focused on access might become interested in controlling more of the distribution itself. Owning a platform presents a different set of responsibilities from arranging an introduction to it.
His writing adds another dimension. He has argued for PR that continues beyond a launch and for companies that listen to customer feedback. In writing about influencers, he has emphasized empathy. These positions fit a recurring concern in his career: an audience is made up of people with preferences, rather than empty spaces waiting for a message. Persistence may earn another appearance. Understanding someone gives the appearance a purpose.
The teenager watching money-making videos and the executive discussing publishing systems belong to the same story. Both are concerned with how opportunity travels from one person to another. Jadali has made a business of arranging part of that journey. He can put a clearer price and a firmer delivery promise around getting a story into public view. What happens when somebody reads it remains the most human part of the transaction.