In 2009, I was working as a UX designer for Fortune 500 publisher IDG. One day, I met my cofounder — Brendan Lattrell — at a house party in Somerville, MA. At the time, we were both enthralled by YouTube.

Brendan and I connected over our appreciation for Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” ad campaign. Further, we were inspired by how Old Spice had made a bunch of subsequent YouTube videos featuring the same actor speaking directly to users. We thought this was a brilliant social media strategy and began talking about creating an advertising company that would do the same thing for other clients.

At the time, I had previously negotiated an affiliate advertising deal with a company who manufactured a toy called Frigits. I had filmed a video of the toy, it had garnered over 100k views, and I had contacted them to request an affiliate sales commission for clicks through a link to their website.

Between Old Spice’s approach of directly advertising to users, combined with my affiliate deal with Frigits, an idea was born to do product placement advertising at scale. At inception, the company was called Moving Metrics, but we later rebranded to Grapevine. We started making videos for brands in the Fishing industry, but after realizing the complications with this vertical, switched to Beauty. The rest was history.

Our initial investor pitch video, featuring Brendan talking about our focus on Beauty, our community of creators, and our software platform.

In 2011, we met Stuart Powers, who became our first CTO. Stu helped us hook into YouTube’s API to get engagement stats and write Selenium scripts to automate messages to YouTubers. Through collaborating with Stu, we began building the creator acquisition and product analytics engines of our business.

*Brendan and Stu collaborating on building our software.*

In 2012, we landed our first big corporate client, NYX. One of my favorite memories was facilitating NYX’s FACE Awards contest in 2012. We recruited dozens of amateur makeup tutorialists from YouTube to participate in a contest where we ultimately flew six of them to LA to compete in a makeup competition with runway models. Perez Hilton emceed the event and awarded the winning YouTuber a $25k check.

*We flew NYX’s YouTube finalists to LA to compete in a contest in which they applied makeup to runway models.*

By this point, we were working with dozens of makeup brands and thousands of YouTubers. Our personal brand visibility began growing with the exposure from our efforts, which led to people finding out about my past. Eventually, Brendan asked that I become an anonymous partner in the business and remove my name from all external websites and communications. In doing so, I adopted his likeness, became unknown, and channeled all of my communication through his identity.

Over the next few years, we recruited a new CEO to run the business (Grant Deken), participated in the MassChallenge and Techstars accelerator programs, raised capital, expanded our creator community to over 200,000 YouTubers, and worked with some of the largest brands in the world.

We ultimately sold the company to one of our strategic partners — a publicly-traded company called Ideanomics. Read the SEC filing for the acquisition here.