Anil Yasyerli often tells people entrepreneurship is one of the hardest things you can do, “Working at a startup is flying a plane while you’re building it in midair and the jet is on fire,” he likes to say.
Anil personally experienced one of these jet fires in March 2020, when his co-living startup, Pad Split, started circling the drain as Covid turned people off sharing flats.
“We were looking at spreadsheets and thinking, ‘Are we firing half of the company or two-thirds of the company?’” says Anil.
Out of desperation, he started outsourcing jobs to other parts of the world at a fraction of the cost. Pad Split survived the pandemic because of Anil’s fast thinking and, two and a half years later, Anil was managing a team of 25 for the business with only three based in the US.
What started as damage control quickly became an opportunity. Anil saw that global remote work was here for good and capitalized on it. He founded Brite, a recruiting agency that helps US-based startups and marketing agencies hire top-tier marketers from Latin America.
“The initial thinking for Brite was, ‘Talent is everywhere,’” Anil says.
Although he worked for nearly a decade in corporate jobs, Anil says he learned more and in less time by working at startups.
“Before I started this I didn’t understand the mental aspect of entrepreneurship,” says Anil. “What I do is not rocket science, but on a day-to-day basis, you struggle with your own psychology and your mindset. Call it imposter syndrome, call it insecurities, or what have you.”
Read on to learn how Anil moved from upper management of tech giants to running his own business in just a few short years. And read his views on exactly what type of traits you need to become a successful entrepreneur.
CMO By 40 Years Old
After moving from Turkey to the US and getting an MBA, Anil had one goal in mind: climb the corporate ladder. “I had set myself a goal in my early thirties that, before I reached forty, I wanted to become the CMO of a medium-sized company,” Anil says.
And climb he did, diligently working at two smaller B2B SaaS companies before moving to Amazon’s Kindle customer acquisition team. There, Anil had a mix of the “best and worst experiences” of his life. On one hand, his team was the highest caliber he’d ever worked with. On the other hand, he felt burned out by toxic management in his department.
Subsequently, Anil realized that corporate work culture wasn’t for him. “Too much of my time was going into the unproductive part of the corporate game,” he says. “I was spending too much time on politics and managing perceptions over actual contribution.”
Anil’s distaste for corporate politics motivated him to switch to VC-backed tech startups, where he could focus on marketing without needing to sway a corporate boardroom. He quickly found leadership roles at companies like Delta Dental of Washington and Surterra Wellness.
At age 38, Anil’s hard work paid off and he gained the title he’d been dreaming of: CMO at Pad Split two years ahead of his schedule. But instead of feeling the accomplishment or relief he expected, he thought: So what?
On paper, he’d done everything he’d dreamed of, however, Anil had kept his head down for so long that he forgot to look where he was going. “It was the same grind, different day,” Anil says. “I started to question whether I was on the right journey or whether this was something that I wanted to continue.”
Anil’s decision to seek a different path came down to wanting more control over his life, rather than a big paycheck.
“I realized my priorities had shifted,” he says. “I came to the conclusion that I value independence and being in charge of my own destiny more over the status of being an executive at a startup that raises tens of millions of dollars.”
Getting Off the VC Hamster Wheel
Anil had only been the Head of Marketing at Pad Split for three months before the pandemic made the company’s central value proposition nearly impossible.
Pad Split was a platform that allowed homeowners to turn single-family homes into shared rentals, allowing users to find affordable rooms with pre-screened housemates. However, in March 2020, general interest in shared room rentals plummeted almost overnight.
The results for Pad Split were disastrous. “We were raising a series A round and funding fell through,” Anil explains.
At that moment, Anil faced a dilemma: he needed to make substantial layoffs while simultaneously growing his business. He met this need by hiring talent abroad, which cut costs while keeping Pad Split afloat.
“I needed a team, and I simply didn’t have the resources to hire them in the US,” Anil says. “So I said, ‘I’m going to start hiring globally, and we’ll do what we can with the resources we have.’”
By hiring workers from across the world, Anil hired an amazing team at a fraction of the cost. Soon, he started helping people in his network who were also looking to fill roles on a lower budget.
“I actually did my first deal with no website and no entity through my personal Gmail address,” Anil says. “We hired two amazing digital marketers for fifty percent of their initial budget.”
For Anil, everything went so smoothly that he knew this could be a great business. But filtering out top talent from developing regions in Latin America wasn’t always easy. When he founded Brite, Anil decided to focus on guaranteeing the best quality employees by implementing a competitive interview process and screening applicants with subject matter experts.
“What differentiates us is that we do four rounds of interviews before we recommend any candidate to our clients,” Anil says. “So we end up recommending less than one percent of people that we see in our talent pipeline.”
Anil’s vision was set. Only one fork in the road remained: chase VC funding or bootstrap?
“For someone like me who worked at companies like Amazon and then in startups in leadership roles, you’re expected to raise money when you go in on your own venture,” Anil says.
However, Anil was all too familiar with the VC cycle of getting funding, hiring, and then asking for more funds. He wanted sustainable growth and freedom from investor pressure.
“Don’t get me wrong, I believe in risk capital and its role in our entrepreneurial ecosystem,” he says. “And I gave the VC route genuinely serious consideration. I just decided it wasn’t the right fit for me.”
But he never considered Brite a so-called lifestyle business, either.
“The term lifestyle is demeaning,” he says. “It’s a ‘That’s cute, good for you’ type of reaction. We are doing over a million a year less than two years into the journey. It’s a real business.”
All in all, less than a year elapsed between Anil’s first Gmail deal to making Brite his full-time job. During the interim, he spent a year as VP of Growth at a YC-backed startup called Pesto before quitting to focus full-time on his new business in May of 2023.
Today in February of 2025, Anil employs 19 marketing experts from Latin America, 17 of whom work for Brite’s clients. Anil calls it “drinking his own champagne”– he doesn’t just sell global talent, he hires the talent to grow Brite itself.
There’s No Substitute for Grit
Anil learned important lessons from his years with VC-backed startups. At the top of his list? Sell, sell, sell.
“I basically tell other entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs and founders that ninety-plus percent of the job is sales,” Anil says.
Anil’s time at startups also brought him face-to-face with the reality that the world of entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart.
“Being the founder, you have everybody looking at you; you need to figure things out,” Anil says. “I would say that for most people, that’s just too much.”
Despite the hardship, Anil believes that facing the struggles of an entrepreneur is one of the most instructive life experiences you can have.
“From my VC experience, I came to the conclusion that there are no silver bullets, no playbooks, shortcuts, or hacks,” Anil says. “I was helped along the way by hard work and grit, and there’s no substitute for it.”
He contrasts this reality with the way founders are glorified; as if bootstrapping were a seamless get-rich-quick scheme. The reality, Anil says, is more like a meat grinder—and it’s certainly not for everyone.
“I think a common myth about entrepreneurship is that we can all do it. I think both startups and entrepreneurship are the right fit for very few, and there is nothing wrong with that.”
If you’re like Anil, though, you don’t just stop at one company. Anil recently founded AdRhino, a performance marketing agency, with founder-influencer Nick Huber. This year, Anil is hoping to hit $3 million in annual recurring revenue between both companies.
For such a big milestone, you might think his family would celebrate. And they might, Anil says, if they knew what digital marketing was.
“After 15-plus years, I’m pretty sure most of my family still thinks I’m a door-to-door salesman,” Anil laughs. “But they’ve always been very supportive of me and been very proud of the fact that I can basically support my family with a business that I started from the ground up. But if you ask them, they’ll probably still say I should have become a doctor.”
