About · Jeremy Brooks · Austin
I’ve been building things since I read RFCs on paper.
My career started in Austin in 2001 with a startup and a lot of Perl. Since then I’ve founded a search marketing firm, a consumer brand and a hospitality business, sold two of them, and run engineering at two more companies that were later acquired.
Along the way the job grew from writing the code, to leading the teams who write it, to sitting with CEOs to decide what the business and its technology need to become. Now I work in the gap between the CEO and the builders, as a running partner to founder-led companies.
2001 to 2014
Learning what customers actually pay for
My first company, Mobile-O, put corporate email, calendars and contacts on the flip phones of 2001. It was early and it was humbling, and at the same time I was running Solaris servers for BroadJump, a broadband software company in Austin.
In 2002 I started BRC, a search marketing and e-commerce firm. I watched our people spend their days adjusting pay-per-click bids by hand, so we built a system that did most of it for them, and when I sold BRC in 2010 that technology became AgileBid. I co-founded Ideagility as CTO to take it to market, and we grew it from zero to a million dollars a year in recurring revenue, with customers like ServiceMaster Clean, Merry Maids and the Portland Trail Blazers.
Built with my teams at BRC and Ideagility
2009 to 2020
Making something you can hold
Primo Chalk, which I founded, started as a better grip chalk for climbers and lifters. I developed the formula and designed most of the manufacturing process and machinery, and the Primo team and I scaled production and got Primo Chalk sold through Rogue, EliteFTS and Amazon.
In the spring of 2015 we went through SKU, Austin’s accelerator for consumer products companies. We sold the company in 2020, and the brand is still on shelves.
Built with the Primo team
2017 to 2022
Innovation and pivots
Hideaway Report had just sold its travel and advertising businesses when I came in as VP of Technology, and what was left had to grow on memberships. With CEO Crista Bailey, we rebuilt the engineering team, built a modern data stack with Fishtown Analytics, now dbt Labs, started scoring visitors with machine learning, and paved the way for a 100X increase in the visitor to paid-subscriber conversion rate. TLG acquired Hideaway Report in 2020.
A few weeks before COVID shut down travel, I joined Shep, an Austin corporate travel startup, as head of engineering. I led the machine learning work that let its browser extension read travel sites it had never been coded for, and we turned it into safety guidance for corporate travelers, and Flight Centre Travel Group acquired the company in December 2021. Alongside my advisory work for Shep, I led seven engineers as head of engineering at Mercado Labs, an import supply-chain startup.
Built with Crista Bailey, Daniel Senyard, Rey Garcia and the teams at Hideaway Report, Shep and Mercado Labs
2021 to now
A business built from raw land
Lost Horizon started as a piece of wooded Hill Country ranch land with no power and no water. I designed the stays and the systems, and we built the solar power, our own battery bank, rainwater collection and the controls that run it all, then added a safari tent shipped over from South Africa and a container tiny home with a Japanese soaking tub.
Then came the parts nobody sees in the photos: launching on Hipcamp and Airbnb, marketing it, pricing it, and running it as a real business. It’s profitable, both stays are Airbnb Guest Favorites, and an AI agent I set up now proposes and tracks its pricing tests while I make the calls.
2021 to now
Moving closer to the CEO
For a couple of years I led data projects for other companies. One moved a mortgage lender’s loan and hedging math out of spreadsheets into numbers refreshed several times a day, and another took a health sciences company onto a new data warehouse.
In 2022 I started Signal Scout to work with CEOs directly.
Now
What I’m building
I’m co-founder of Faana with Autumn Manning, where I lead the platform, architecture and data systems. I’m technical lead at Kreneon, working again with Mike Ulwelling, my partner from a decade ago, on the registry that turns metered water production into signed, trustworthy records. And I’m the founder and inventor of Debt Hacker, for people who owe more on their credit cards than they can pay down fast.
Built with Autumn Manning, Mike Ulwelling and the teams at Faana and Kreneon
Community and outside work
September 2026
A week at Mission: Wolf
In September 2026 I spent a week at Mission: Wolf, a wolf sanctuary in Colorado. I went to be of service to a cause, and I spent my days helping care for the wolves and pitching in on building and upkeep around the sanctuary.
A drawing made from my photos of that week.
April 2026
Judging the Made @ U of A Pitch Competition
I judged the Made @ U of A Pitch Competition, run by the Walton College Office of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the University of Arkansas, where student teams pitched their businesses and took the judges’ questions.
Free tools for founders
I built the Brand Video Kit for Faana’s community, a free set of tools that helps founders plan, direct, edit and publish their own videos with AI, and nothing gets posted until the person on camera approves it. Anyone can use it under an MIT license.
What I care about
I care about who the work helps and what it leaves behind, for the people doing it now and the ones who come after us. I invented Debt Hacker for people who owe more on their credit cards than they can pay down, and at Kreneon I’m technical lead on the registry behind contracts designed to pay for new water supply. I designed Lost Horizon’s two stays on raw Hill Country land around solar power and rainwater collection, and I make the case to every CEO I work with for keeping their engineers and growing the next ones while AI does more of the typing.
Humans don’t accomplish anything lasting, alone.
“Jeremy is someone you want by your side when you’re challenging the status quo, in growth mode, and looking for a problem-solving running partner.”
Crista Bailey, my CEO at Hideaway Report
“Jeremy is the rare combination of a high level technologist who understands not only how technology translates to real life commercial value and real life opportunities but also combines the skill to build the tech… Hire him if you can.”
Rahm McDaniel, who built a business with me
“Making teams stronger with his presence whether he’s building a team or part of one.”
Kincade Park, an engineering peer