The beginning of working in the Big Apple

I was sitting in the middle of San Francisco International Airport, staring at the notes on my iPhone and trying to figure out the next step in my career, when my flight home left without me.

It was my first knowledge transfer after XL Marketing bought Adchemy Actions in November 2013. I had spent the trip at Adchemy's office in Foster City, learning the machine learning platform we had bought. I was a front-end developer, and I was on that trip because by then half the company already brought their problems to me.

The taxi ride to the airport was about 10 miles, roughly 15 minutes north on Highway 101 with the bay on the right and planes coming down over the water toward SFO.

A summer walk to Madison

In the summer of 2012 I took the bus from New Jersey into Port Authority for two interviews on the same day. The first was at a publisher: fluorescent lights, cubicles, a WordPress shop that had already settled into itself.

The second was XL Marketing, at 185 Madison Avenue on the corner of 34th Street, a block east of the Empire State Building at 350 Fifth Avenue. I walked across Midtown toward it thinking, wow, I could do this every day. Outside the building I stopped to gather myself and took a few deep breaths, then checked in at the foyer and took the elevator to the 5th floor.

185 Madison Avenue at East 34th Street, where XL Marketing had its office. Street View imagery © 2026 Google, April 2026.

Upstairs it was small and young, with glass walls, and the engineering manager walked me into the meeting room next to the COO's office. I showed him the Drupal site from my NJIT website revamp, and we talked about content types and how I structured them.

It was a Friday, which meant catered lunch, and I could not stop looking at the Essen sandwiches on the counter. He noticed and offered me one. So I ate a sandwich during my interview while he told me the company had been co-founded by John Sculley, the former CEO of Pepsi and Apple.

Friday lunch from Essen, July 27, 2012, the same place my interview sandwich came from. By then I worked there.

I was an Apple fanatic and a history buff. I had bought my first iPhone off Craigslist, the 3G, and was reading the Steve Jobs biography that summer. I knew how that story connected. Sculley pushed Jobs out of Apple in 1985, and Jobs went on to start NeXT and buy Pixar before Apple brought him back. I'd never been fine with knowing only how something ended. I wanted the why, the behind-the-scenes cause and effect that a headline or a summary leaves out. Now I was interviewing at a company Sculley had co-founded.

Then he mentioned a budget for my computer, and I could pick whatever I wanted. I told him I was an Apple guy, and he said they could set me up on a Mac if I came to work there. First the sandwich, then a custom setup. I could tell he was selling me and it was working, and I remember thinking, so this is what working in the real world is like. Catered lunches and custom gadgets.

After him I had one more interview, with Adam, the lead software engineer, who would become my mentor.

Walking back to Port Authority, still in my dress shirt with my backpack on, I passed two guys smoking outside a building and recognized one from Impractical Jokers, which had just started on truTV. I made up a question about how to get to Port Authority so I had a reason to talk to him. It was Murr, and the guy next to him was another of the Jokers. They were humble, seemed to get a kick out of being recognized, and said yes to a picture.

Posted to Facebook June 27, 2012. Two of the Impractical Jokers, on my walk back to Port Authority.

The interview process was quick, and the next week I heard I got the job. It felt like all the quiet hard work I had put in at NJIT and in my federal work-study job at Instructional Media Services had matched me with the right opportunity.

I made the decision thinking with my stomach. Hungry to make an impact. The sandwiches, the custom setup and the opportunity all pulled me in, and I was starting my career in the Big Apple. What stayed with me were the relationships, people who actually supported each other.

July 31, 2012. My Facebook post that day said "Love my new job! :)"

Every workday I took the bus into Port Authority and walked to 185 Madison Avenue, past the Empire State Building, then walked it back at night. I took the scenic routes on purpose to take in all the energy the city had to offer. Some days I cut through Herald Square by Macy's, some days I went down Eighth Avenue past Madison Square Garden or over along Ninth, and some days I walked up Madison, just to see more of the city. That whole stretch felt magical to me. Those walks widened my lens.

The person in every room

I was hired as a front-end developer. My job was taking landing pages from design to HTML templates on AMP, our programmatic platform. AMP tied campaign IDs to analytics and to the landing pages and templates, but most of the work around it was still manual, so we built our own CMS on top of it. It was the same content-type thinking I had shown in my interview.

Working late, September 20, 2012. Building templates for our landing pages across devices.

Because I built the landing pages and campaigns, I had access to the whole platform. So when sales, product, creative, marketing, legal or the email team needed something, they came to me. Most of those asks started in the elevator or at the water cooler. I would open another tab, find where their data had to go, and either put it in myself or take it to engineering as a feature request to make it automatic.

It was a very collaborative environment where everyone was friendly, and you could see people cared about what they did. I would share what I was learning in case it helped someone, and they would share theirs back, so every conversation taught me another part of the platform, and every part I learned made me useful to another team. I kept learning outside of work too, and I brought what I found to the table the next morning.

October 15, 2012. My Facebook post that day said "Yes. We get paper from Dunder Mifflin."

Adam was my feedback loop. He lived in Brooklyn, and I moved there to stay close to the job and focus on it. He was the more technical engineer and I was the hybrid, so he coached me on code and on how the systems connected. Work that started as his slowly became mine, because I cared about where design, creative and engineering met and could see the patterns in how to build for all three.

Adam at the whiteboard, mapping how a publisher page like the Washington Post calls an ad server, with the IMG, IFRAME and SCRIPT tags that carry the ad.

Over time I became the person translating what each department needed into software that worked for them. The culture let me do it, and a junior developer with an opinion got heard. I trained our team in Hyderabad on the same workflows. The templates and the numbers behind that work are in Progress Through Trust, Creativity, and Collaboration.

The Dream Team, August 29, 2012, our engineering and creative team.

So when the company bought a new platform, they sent the person who already talked to everyone, the one closest to the platform, who saw all the different workflows.

The acquisition

In November 2013, XL Marketing bought Adchemy Actions, the customer acquisition half of a Bay Area company founded by Murthy Nukala. Adchemy's platform used machine learning to split audiences into small segments, value each one, bid on media in real time, and adjust ads and landing pages as results came in.

XL planned to move most of its own customer acquisition onto that platform. Thirty-four engineers joined from Adchemy and opened a Silicon Valley office.

XL Marketing later became Zeta Global, went public on the NYSE in 2021, and in 2026 sells an AI agent called Athena to enterprise marketers. It built Athena with OpenAI and, in June 2026, signed a seven-year deal to run its data on Palantir's Foundry. Nothing public says how much of Adchemy's code survives in it.

My job on that trip was to learn the platform from the Adchemy lead, then go back to New York and show our teams how to connect our front end and our data to it. Adchemy's platform worked differently from ours, but it carried the same fundamentals.

It was the first time we met. I walked in as a 25-year-old kid from the company that had just bought his, and I knew that could look like I was there to take his job. So I sat next to him and shadowed him while he built out their campaigns and pages, watching where their builds differed from ours and where each one was better or worse. I was learning what our front end needed to plug into theirs, and how to build templates to their standards. It was like learning how to learn a different language. Later he flew to New York, and we went back and forth from there.

Back in New York, the real work was getting sales, creative, marketing and engineering to change how they worked around the new platform. It was the job I had already been doing, now with more room to run.

Companies adopting AI today run into the same problem. The tools work, and the hard part is fitting them into how each department actually works, then building verification and analytics into the creative itself, now that so much of it is generative media.

San Francisco International Airport at night. Photo by Andrew Choy, 2005, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The flight I missed

Inside the terminal I grabbed a Blue Moon draft at a bar in the middle of the airport and stared at the notes on my iPhone. In 18 months I had gone from junior engineer to media operations to creative development manager. Somewhere along the way the job changed. I was managing our team in India instead of building, and the creative work I enjoyed most now went to the team I managed. I was moving away from the thing I was good at.

XL was a data-driven company, and leadership's focus was the product: the programmatic dashboard connecting measurement to publisher sites, the CAKE admin, and the CMS that ran the programmatic ads and surveys. Totally understandable, with revenue growing month over month. The next step up for me was the Adchemy lead's job, and after sitting beside him and learning his platform, I didn't want to get ahead by pushing him out. It was all happening so fast that I didn't feel like I had any choices, and I was looking for more of them.

I kept coming back to Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement speech. Every morning he looked in the mirror and asked himself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" When the answer was no for too many days in a row, he changed something, and mine had been no for a while.

So I opened Safari and went to Indeed.com.

I was so far in my head that I mixed up my departure time and my boarding time. When I walked over to the gate, it was closed and nobody was around. I thought I was early. I was about 10 minutes late, and the plane was already on the runway. The next flight was in 12 hours.

Twelve hours, I had a lot of time to think about what my high school principal told me before he signed the permission slip for my first job: "Promise me, Jeff, never stop learning, and think long term about what success means to you."

I sat with it. I pictured what staying would mean and worked through the opportunity, the risk and the reward. Then a posting came up that looked too good to be true. It was a creative developer role at Undertone, up the street at 340 Madison by Grand Central. The work had more room to be creative and innovative, more room to run, and it still felt like a startup, with a ping-pong table, snacks, breakfast, a boardroom, the whole works.

I wrote my resignation by hand, a long letter of appreciation, and I got emotional writing it. I took it to my creative director's office, the corner one with glass walls. He wasn't there, so I sat down to wait. Through the glass I watched him walk down the hall with a sheet of paper in his hand and a smile on his face.

"Hey Jeff," he said. "I finally got you what you were asking for. I even got you a little more." He had been fighting for me.

"Hey, that's great, man. I really appreciate it," I said. I was holding my own paper, but I had already decided. "I'm sorry. I think this is too late." I handed him the note and watched his smile drop.

Our relationship changed right then. The next couple of weeks were weird, and every time I walked into the office I felt it. It was my first job and my first time leaving one, and I didn't know if I was making the right decision. It had all happened as fast as I had risen there.

On my last day I stopped at a liquor store down the block from a diamond shop and picked up a bottle of Russian vodka for my creative director, who was Russian. We took a shot together in his office, both of us trying to keep it together. I knew he was happy for me, and it was still bittersweet.

Our engineering team had moved into the glass office the COO gave up when he went upstairs, and my desk was by the window under a framed poster that said "It's not done until it ships," a saying from the Macintosh team's September 1982 retreat. One of the last things I did was take it down. My whole team was in the room. We had a group hug and promised to keep in touch, and I walked out with the poster in my hand.

I walked into that company through a story about John Sculley, whose 1985 split with Jobs led to NeXT, Pixar and Jobs' return to Apple, and walked out carrying a Steve Jobs quote. That poster went home with me to Brooklyn. What it meant at Undertone is the next story, It's not done until it ships.

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