Rustin Kretz and the business of staying in the race

Rustin Kretz went to the Kentucky Derby in 2010 and came home with an expensive new interest. Before long, he had bought his first thoroughbred, Westwood Pride. He already had a company called Scorpion, founded in 2001, and a taste for competition. Now there was another place to exercise it. A business can postpone its reckoning until the next quarter. A horse gets a finish line.

There is an appealing neatness to that pairing: the entrepreneur and the racehorse owner, both studying a field of competitors. Real life is less obliging. Software does not need a jockey, and horses have yet to develop much enthusiasm for quarterly planning. Still, following Kretz through these worlds reveals a career built around particular markets, recurring relationships and the difficulty of staying useful while the rules change.

The first customer had to find the lawyer

Before Scorpion, Kretz worked on an SBC-funded venture developing online scheduling software for small and medium-sized businesses. That detail gives his later career a practical starting point. A scheduling tool meets a business at the moment when interest becomes an appointment. Years before Scorpion offered a broad collection of marketing services, he had encountered one of the small transactions on which a business depends.

Scorpion began in 2001. Its early work included websites and online marketing for lawyers, a field where being found could bring a new client. Kretz was selling into a profession with established marketing suppliers and considerable differences between specialties. A consumer looking for legal help needed a way to discover the firm, understand its work and make contact. The website sat in the middle of that process.

The company’s work acquired a public record. The Web Marketing Association’s 2010 WebAward entry for Cellino & Barnes credits Scorpion Design and lists Kretz as CEO, alongside Jeffrey Kretz, Eric Reuveni and designer Jeffrey Licas. It is a useful early snapshot: a named client, a finished website and a team whose work could be inspected.

By 2018, Scorpion was announcing a redesigned corporate website, a new version of its marketing platform and a planned YouTube series called Get to Work. It said it served more than 10,000 clients. Those were company-reported figures, but the direction was clear. The business had expanded beyond individual website projects into a continuing combination of services, software and client support.

A team with a neighborhood history

Former chief marketing officer Corey Quinn has described an early Scorpion team assembled through Kretz’s personal connections: friends, family, people from his neighborhood and high school. Quinn joined in 2015, bringing outside agency experience. His recollection puts a human shape on a familiar organizational problem. The people who help a founder begin are not an abstract workforce. They have histories together, often much longer than their job descriptions.

Quinn’s account of the culture also describes a gradual approach to introducing more formal hiring and training practices. He recalled mistakes and a willingness to accept some risk to preserve flexibility. This is one former executive’s experience, with all the specificity that implies. It gives the expansion story a useful complication: growing the company meant changing how people worked together without assuming every existing habit needed replacing.

“Simply focus on your employees and their happiness.”

Rustin Kretz, accepting his 2017 entrepreneur award

That advice came when the Santa Clarita Valley Business Journal named Kretz its Entrepreneur of the Year. At the September 2017 event, he directed attention toward employees. The occasion provided the flattering trophy; he supplied a fairly ordinary instruction. Its ordinariness is part of its appeal. People still have to arrive the next morning and work with one another after the applause has finished.

The office catches up with the ambition

The same autumn brought a physical expression of Scorpion’s growth: a newly built Valencia headquarters, near Six Flags Magic Mountain. The October opening gathered employees, local officials and business leaders. Former 49ers quarterback Steve Young attended as a guest speaker. For a founder whose company biography lists the 49ers among his sporting loyalties, the guest list had an agreeable personal detail.

The building’s backstory was less ceremonial. Scorpion had considered the land years earlier, when a 100,000-square-foot property seemed beyond what the company could occupy. Finance chief Matthew Shepherd later described a search constrained by size, location and the needs of employees who lived nearby. Office space can be an ungainly measure of ambition. You cannot occupy an inspiring forecast, however persuasive the presentation.

At the grand opening, the company showed off spaces including a basketball court. The building made the team’s working environment visible in a way a headcount could not. It also attached expansion to a community. This was a company growing among people with commutes, families and established reasons to remain in the Santa Clarita Valley.

The founder changes chairs

In April 2021, Scorpion announced a $100 million investment from Bregal Sagemount. It also named Daniel Street CEO and said Kretz would become chief product officer and chairman. The announcement combined money, executive appointments, a planned Utah headquarters and the acquisition of SEO software company CanIRank. After roughly twenty years, the founder’s assignment was being redrawn.

Street described Kretz as a product person and explained that a large company demanded a different kind of chief executive’s attention. There were more constituencies to manage and more organizational work to do. In his telling, the investment would support product development, particularly AI developers, as well as a larger sales and marketing presence. The money was attached to identifiable work and a division of responsibilities.

On February 18, 2022, Scorpion announced Kretz’s return as CEO, with the chairmanship retained. Its announcement credited collaboration between him and Street and described a company serving more than 14,000 small businesses. The sequence is worth keeping intact. Founder, product chief, returning chief executive: a long career can contain more movement than the familiar phrase “at the helm” allows.

Later that year, Scorpion appointed Bridgette Moore chief people officer, reporting to Kretz. Her responsibilities included culture, leadership development and organizational design. The subjects echoed the employee advice of 2017, now expressed through a formal executive role. An enterprise that began through personal connections had acquired the machinery needed to support a much larger group.

A different kind of starting gate

The racing story developed alongside the company. Kretz’s sports loyalties even supplied a horse’s name: Harbaugh, after the 49ers coach. In a 2014 interview, he said he had been born in San Francisco and moved to Los Angeles when young. He had paid $105,000 for the then-unnamed horse at auction. Some fans buy a jersey. Kretz’s version required a trainer.

Trainer George Papaprodromou became a recurring figure in Kretz Racing’s results. In 2019, American Theorem won on debut at Del Mar under his care. At the time, Papaprodromou ran a smaller stable than the sport’s more prominent operations. Kretz’s decision to place the horse with him established another relationship whose progress could be followed through the runner’s career.

On July 30, 2022, American Theorem won the Grade I Bing Crosby Stakes at Del Mar, beating eight rivals over six furlongs. The victory earned a Breeders’ Cup Sprint berth. This was a result with its own clear terms: a named race, a distance, an order of finish. Whatever else an owner might hope for, the afternoon had delivered something concrete.

Seven wins from twenty starts

At the close of Santa Anita’s 2025-26 Classic Meet, Kretz Racing won its first owner title. The operation recorded seven wins from twenty starters. Captain Choochies contributed four victories from four starts at the meet. By then, Papaprodromou described a relationship with the operation stretching back close to fifteen years. The stable’s success had a considerable amount of shared time behind it.

The number is satisfying precisely because its scope is limited. It describes one stable at one meet. It cannot explain a founder’s management style or predict the next season. What it does establish is that the racing interest lasted. The enthusiasm that followed a Derby visit had become an operation with enduring professional relationships and a record of its own.

The customer is still out there

Back at Scorpion, Kretz’s current explanations focus on another change in discovery: AI systems assembling answers about businesses from information across the web. In September 2026, he used a spider web as his comparison, with the business at the center. The image suits a product problem that extends across websites, reviews, listings and other public descriptions. His task is to explain why those connections matter to a local owner.

On October 19, 2026, Scorpion announced the acquisition of Coalmarch Marketing, a Raleigh agency specializing in pest control and lawn care. It added another set of industry relationships and experience to the company. The acquisition makes the continuing strategy visible: serve recognizable categories of businesses whose daily needs reward familiarity with how the work actually gets sold.

Kretz has now spent a quarter-century with the company he started. The founder’s title has changed along the way, as have the products, the office locations and the ways customers search. His public career keeps returning to the practical question beneath those changes: how does a business get chosen? There are more places to ask it now. The next customer still has to arrive.