Bootstrapped to Exit, Raised Money and Exited Again

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Wendy CEO Lance Neuhauser bootstrapped his first company to an exit.?He venture funded his second company and exited after 10 years. He is about to launch his third. Read on, great story.

Sramana Mitra: All right, Lance, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of backgrounds? What brings us to the entrepreneurial journey?

Lance Newhauser: Thank you for having me here. I really appreciate the opportunity. Your mission is admirable, and I love that you’re helping companies grow across the world.

My story begins as the son of two entrepreneurs. My father has always pursued various entrepreneurial ventures, and after my older sister was born, my mother transitioned into entrepreneurship as well. She wanted the flexibility that running her own business could offer her as a “stay-at-home mom”. I grew up in the Chicago area.

For most of my life, I aspired to be an architect. I didn’t initially set out to be an entrepreneur, despite my parents always saying that since I could walk, I was constantly trying to start businesses. But I had my sights set on architecture. I attended the University of Illinois, where I studied architecture, and even then, I was attempting to start businesses on the side.

I’m a product of the dot-com boom and bust era. I graduated from the University of Illinois, and I started working almost full-time before I even finished my degree. I remember telling myself, “I want to go out and do this internet thing.” At the time, I didn’t even fully understand what that meant—I just knew I wanted to be a part of it.

Sramana Mitra: As I’m listening to your story, there are a lot of things that we have in common. I am also an entrepreneur’s daughter. My father was building a shipping company when I was growing up in India.

I also was starting to think the same way of I want to figure out the internet thing and start a company. It’s just a bit earlier than you. I was a grad student at MIT from 1993-95. In 1994, actually just as Netscape was going public, I was having that same thought, exact same thought without really knowing what the internet was going to be.

Lance Newhauser: I really enjoy meeting others like ourselves. Let me tell you, there’s something about the early days of the internet that feels strikingly similar to what’s happening now. We’ll get into that more, but back then, it felt like any conversation between two people could spark an idea or insight that might lead to a world-changing company. That’s how I saw it, and I wanted to be part of those conversations, where changing the world felt tangible and within reach.

After graduating, my first two years in the workforce were intense—I worked for five different companies in eight different roles, but I only technically changed jobs once. There were mergers, bankruptcies, acquisitions—you name it. I’d love to say I planned it that way, but it was really more a matter of circumstance. However, I ended up learning something profound during that time. Without realizing it, I gained an understanding of how digital communication functions, the type of information that’s collected, and the data that’s transferred. I didn’t know then just how foundational this knowledge would become in my career.

In fact, I later found myself teaching a class on communication strategies in a digital environment at the graduate level at IIT’s business school, the Illinois Institute of Technology, here in Chicago. At the age of 27, there were very few people like us who both wanted to dive into this field and actually understood what was going on.

Sramana Mitra: What is the genesis of your first company?

Lance Newhauser: After working those five different jobs in eight roles, I realized that my career felt controlled by others. Unintentionally, I’d started at a small internet service provider that was later acquired multiple times. Next thing I know, I’m working at this large telecom. On a Friday, they gathered the entire department in a conference room and told us that by Monday, all but two of us would be let go. I was one of the two who stayed, not because of anything extraordinary, but because I was young, performing well, and was the least expensive on staff.

In that moment, I felt like my career was out of my hands. That day, I spent hours riding the L train in Chicago, processing what had happened. I passed a billboard advertising a part-time, nighttime MBA in “e-business”—a term that’s practically obsolete now. I thought, That’s what I want to do. Six weeks later, I was registered, took the GMAT, and enrolled in the program. But I knew this was only half of what I needed. I realized I lacked a well-rounded business education, especially in areas like accounting, finance, and operations, but I also needed practical experience in building an organization.

Around that time, three others and I spotted an emerging opportunity in search engine marketing in 2003, before Google even had a defined business model. The leading model at the time was from Overture, a company Yahoo eventually acquired, which pioneered pay-per-click advertising. We noticed that you could pay for specific search terms, directing people right to their point of need, and track the exact return on investment. For example, if a click cost 50 cents, you could see if it generated a sale worth more than that. It was an incredible service, and very few understood how to leverage it.

So, the four of us founded Resolution Media, which eventually became the largest search engine marketing agency worldwide after being acquired by Omnicom just two years in. It was a whirlwind journey—from cold-calling clients to manage their pay-per-click ads to eventually having a single client spending $50 million annually on search. It was a wild ride.

Our conversation continues here.

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