He spends his days answering one deceptively hard question: where should the next marketing dollar go?
Will Holtz. The finance-to-DTC-to-AI pipeline, wearing a name badge that keeps changing titles.
Will Holtz leads strategy and operations at Prescient AI, a company with a blunt promise: tell brands what their marketing is actually doing, and do it fresh every single day. The company's page lists him as Interim CEO. Recent profiles call him VP of Strategy & Operations. Both are accurate, and the gap between them is the whole point - at a Series A startup, the org chart is a suggestion, not a law.
His job sits on top of an ugly problem. Last-click attribution hands credit to whatever channel a shopper touched most recently, which is a bit like crediting the doorbell for the dinner party. Halo effects go uncounted. Channels saturate quietly. Spend spills across platforms in ways no dashboard bothers to reconcile. Prescient AI's marketing mix modeling exists to fold all of that mess into a single, current answer - and Holtz is one of the people making sure the answer arrives, and that brands trust it enough to move money on it.
That line, posted to LinkedIn in 2025, is about as demonstrative as he gets in public. Holtz is not a hype merchant. He is an operator, and operators tend to save their enthusiasm for the moment something finally works the way it was supposed to.
Start at Cornell, where Holtz studied economics and psychology - one discipline for how markets move, the other for why people do the irrational things that move them. It is a suspiciously perfect combination for someone who would end up modeling buying behavior for a living, though nobody plans a career that neatly.
Then finance: Morgan Stanley, then Soros Fund Management, where he worked as a strategic consultant and private equity associate. It is the sort of pedigree that usually calcifies into a comfortable career in capital. Holtz went the other direction. He got a Wharton MBA and walked straight into the chaos of direct-to-consumer brands.
What followed was a decade of doing the unglamorous work: e-commerce and regulatory strategy at Recess, the functional-beverage brand, operations at Grove Collaborative, his own ventures in Rightside Brands and YNG Ventures, then Head of Operations at SourceMedium. This is the part of the story that matters most. Before Holtz ever sold marketing measurement software, he was the customer - the operator staring at conflicting dashboards at midnight, trying to decide what was real.
That scar tissue is the qualification. When he talks to brands now about where their money is leaking, he is not reciting a pitch deck. He is describing his own former Tuesday.
He co-founded and hosts a podcast named after the spreadsheet function programmers love to hate. It is about how the best operators actually read their data - not how they pretend to.
A Wharton MBA and startup executive who describes himself in the language of a weekend hobbyist. The honesty is the personality.
Markets and minds, studied side by side at Cornell. It turns out to be the exact toolkit for modeling why people buy what they buy.
On the Prescient blog he argues YouTube is an overlooked powerhouse in the marketing mix - benchmark-driven cases for channels attribution systematically undercounts.
Listed as Interim CEO in one place, VP of Strategy & Operations in another. At a Series A, that is not confusion. That is the job description.
Finance, DTC, software - the titles change, the instinct doesn't. He is drawn to the messy middle where decisions actually get made.
Will Holtz runs strategy and operations at Prescient AI, the marketing mix modeling platform that tells omnichannel brands where the next dollar should go. He listed as Interim CEO on the company page and VP of Strategy & Operations across recent profiles - a range of hats at a fast-moving Series A startup. A Cornell economics-and-psychology grad with a Wharton MBA, he started in finance at Morgan Stanley and Soros Fund Management before spending a decade in the trenches of DTC operations at Recess, Grove Collaborative, SourceMedium and his own ventures. On the side he co-founded and hosts Don't V*LOOKUP, a podcast about how the best operators actually use their data.
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