It started in 1998. Jeff Kingsford and Jake Fassnacht were working together at Talk.com, watching the web go from novelty to inevitability. The same year, they co-founded JFM Ideas, one of the first online printing and marketing companies, and ran it out of Jeff's condo in Innisbrook, Florida with a single phone line and a pair of fold-out tables borrowed from Jake's mom. That was the company.

Jeff left Talk.com and went full time on the business in September 2002. Jake followed in March 2003. What started on two borrowed tables turned into twenty years of compounding work, building and buying 15 brands under One Brand Marketing, and eventually selling the company to Valassis in 2018.

After the exit, we started thinking about what came next. Sponge Labs is the answer. The tools had gotten powerful enough that a small team could run the full marketing and software stack for a portfolio of businesses, not agency work handed off and forgotten, but real operating leverage. Today, we own and invest in companies across tech, security, healthcare, events, staffing, and services, along with a growing roster of managed clients who want the Sponge Labs engine pointed at their own business.

The pattern we keep coming back to: simple systems, obsessive tracking, and operators who have actually run the plays they're recommending.