search-marketing
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Garrett Mehrguth and the customer who disappeared
His first restaurant client closed before paying him. Garrett Mehrguth went on to build Directive around a question that still follows every campaign: did it bring in a customer?
Michael Mothner and the question that cost Goldman Sachs a recruit
A $10 search-engine service gave Michael Mothner a reason to walk away from banking. After two decades building Wpromote and a move to its board, he is back with another answer to a small-business problem.
Oren Netzer and the Ad That Missed a Country
A Target ad in a Tel Aviv apartment gave Oren Netzer a question worth building a company around. From DoubleVerify to search marketing and machine learning, he has kept looking for the gap between what a system reports and what actually happens.
Troy Lerner and the Long Way to an Overnight Success
He sold lawn care with better flyers than mowing, helped turn a fading pay-per-click business into an agency, then spent thirteen years earning the right to buy it. Troy Lerner's favorite strategy is less glamorous and more useful: put one foot in front of the other.
Sam Michelson Learned to Read the Internet Before It Learned to Answer Back
He began with VoIP ads and a misspelling tool. Two decades later, the Five Blocks founder is studying the stories that search engines and AI tell when nobody is in the room to correct them.
Jeffrey Herzog Built for Google. Now He’s Betting on the Answer Machine.
The founder who caught search before it became an industry is back at the same old puzzle in a new disguise: how does a business become the answer people trust?
Evyatar Sagie Turned Search Discipline Into a Cybersecurity Growth Playbook
Before he marketed an AI-native security platform, Evyatar Sagie learned growth one query, campaign and conversion at a time. His career explains why Guardz speaks to MSPs in the language of useful outcomes rather than cyber theater.
Glenn Lombardi Has Spent Two Decades Turning Search Results Into Front Doors
Before local search became an industry, Glenn Lombardi was teaching medical practices to treat a website like a working front door. Now, at Goldn, he is applying the same practical obsession to senior housing: be findable, earn trust and measure what happens next.
Adrien Menard
He noticed that half the internet's pages were invisible to Google. Then he built a company to fix it - and now he is betting it can do the same for the AI agents rewriting how the world searches.
Thenuka Karunaratne
Thenuka Karunaratne is the CEO and co-founder of daydream, a San Francisco startup building an AI-native agency for organic search that pairs SEO agents with human growth experts. He started making money from affiliate websites in high school, bootstrapped a streaming-search business called Flixed through college using programmatic SEO, and in September 2023 launched daydream with co-founder Shravan Rajinikanth. The company raised a $15M Series A in April 2026 led by WndrCo, bringing total funding to roughly $21M.
Nick Eubanks
Nick Eubanks is a serial entrepreneur, digital marketing executive, and distribution-first strategist who has built and sold multiple businesses, scaled agencies to 100+ clients serving the UFC and Nestle, co-founded Traffic Think Tank (acquired by Semrush for $1.8M), and now serves as Global CMO at Digistore24 while operating two investment vehicles. His core thesis - that distribution is the last competitive advantage that survives AI - is reshaping how founders and marketers think about sustainable growth.