This is the 107th article in Bears Doing Big Things, a weekly column celebrating the stories of notable M-A alumni.
“When you find a way to care, trust is created, and you can do cool things, you can do things that haven’t been done,” Brent Vartan ’94 said. Vartan is the managing partner and co-founder of Bullish, a venture capital and brand-building firm.
Attending M-A wasn’t always the plan for Vartan. “I have a learning disability so we looked at a lot of different schools, but my sister went to M-A,” Vartan explained. “My family was a big believer in public schools, and there’s a great sports program, so that felt like the right thing to do.”
At M-A, Vartan ran track, and played soccer and football. “I used to be really fast and a pretty good athlete, and that got me on the field and on the track in lots of different sports. For a kid who really had to learn how to learn throughout high school and even in college, it was great,” he said. Vartan was also later inducted into the M-A Hall of Fame for track and field.
“I thought M-A was a really well-rounded place to be, and it made me feel like anything was possible,” Vartan said.
After graduating from M-A, Vartan played football at UC Berkeley. “I wanted to be close to where I grew up, and UC Berkeley was a no-brainer in terms of the chance to play sports and be at a great school,” he said.
Vartan majored in literary theory due to the diversity of subjects in the field. “I felt quite strong about going to Berkeley and being challenged on both sides of the equation,” he said. “Having come from M-A, I looked at Berkeley as a hyperbolic version of M-A.”
Coming out of college, Vartan knew he wanted to do something that involved working with others. “Being part of a team was the stuff I loved most about being in sports, and I knew whatever I did professionally, it was important that it had a team aspect,” he said.
Vartan had two options in his mind: being a firefighter or going into advertising. “It [firefighting] felt like a team that was doing a lot of good. But, I realized I was terrified of fire, so I went into marketing, and I loved it,” he said. “I thought of advertising because I had a lot of exposure to it as my dad was a marketing consultant.”
Vartan began his career as a media planner for Goldberg Moser, an advertising agency in San Francisco. While there, he became one of the first communication planners in the country, concentrating on strategically delivering messages based on specific audiences. “Unfortunately, the dot-com boom became an implosion, and my agency couldn’t survive,” he said.
In need of a change, Vartan set his sights on New York. “I accepted a job on a Thursday, and I had moved and started my new job in New York on a Monday,” he said.
In New York, Vartan worked for BBDO, a global advertising agency, as a senior planner. In the role, he met with clients and led marketing projects with various brands. “They were really good to me, but I started to get more and more conviction about what I was doing,” he said.
After four years at BBDO, Vartan joined Deutsch New York, another advertising agency. He started off as a planning director and quickly rose up, eventually becoming a partner and chief strategy officer. “The seeds of my company were already being sown at Deutsch,” Vartan said. “I met my current partner, Michael Duda, there. The first inklings of our company were being talked about as an idea in his head, and I was one of the few people who understood what it could be.”
In 2015, Vartan and Duda launched Bullish, a marketing operating partner that acts partially as a brand agency and partially as a consumer investment firm. Bullish works with startups and established companies to help them structure and develop their businesses. “Mike and I both are big believers in the power of consumer insight, marketing, creativity, and business, and we thought the best place to practice this is at the earlier stages,” Vartan said.
Currently, Vartan is a managing partner for Bullish, where he guides the day-to-day operations and works to build the company through its partnerships with various brands. “We hire a lot of really talented people at Bullish, and that’s one of the things I’m most proud of. The people we hire as interns or in the summer are in their second or third year out of school,” Vartan said. “Me at 23, could not get a job at my company.”
Vartan’s advice to current M-A students: “If you work hard, you can get what you want. You might be born with some advantages, you might be born with some disadvantages, but no one knows that, and you have the chance to make what you want a reality.”
To those interested in marketing: “Read books. Everything I’m doing, from venture capital to marketing, is extremely well documented in books, books that go back 60 years, and are built on principles.”
