Why you're getting this: You've interacted with Haven or AdTribe before, and this is my weekly-ish update on what I’m working on to build an agency I actually enjoy running. Zero pressure to stick around, just click unsubscribe if you don't want to get it

Alright, let’s get into it.

Spent a few days in SF last week. It's a different world over there right now.

Every billboard is about AI. Every conversation at a bar ends up being about AI. Feels like a gold rush, except instead of people moving west to find gold, everyone's trying to build the next AI thing and raise money before someone else does.

A few things that stuck with me.

I talked to an Amazon exec who mentioned the company now pushes developers to spend 10% of their salary on AI tokens. If you don't hit your quota, you get fired. No PIP, just gone.

I tried Waymo for the first time. Honestly? Better than most human drivers I've ridden with. Smooth, calm, no weird lane changes. I think we're maybe less than 5 years away from all taxis being self-driving. Elon is building the same thing with Robotaxi, so the race is on.

A friend of mine used to run an agency here in Vancouver. He recently raised $7 million from VCs to build an AI ad platform called Gravity and moved to SF. I’m planning to test it out for my agency.

Also got out to Napa for a day and walked around the city a bit. San Francisco is a special place. Definitely going back.

Last week we asked every full-time media buyer on our team to track every task they do, down to the minute, for five days straight.

Here’s what we found.

The single biggest category was internal meetings at 6.6 hours per buyer per week. Bigger than reporting, bigger than strategy, bigger than anything client-facing.

This isn't unique to us. Talk to any agency and you'll find the same thing. The actual optimization work, the judgment calls that directly move results for clients, came in at 1.5 hours per week. Not because the team isn't working hard, but because the week gets filled with things that feel necessary but probably aren't.

The second surprise was the reporting gap. Every buyer writes weekly client reports. One buyer does it in 12 minutes using Claude Code, speech-to-text, and a Shopify data pull he built himself. The slowest on the team takes 72 minutes for the exact same report.

5.8x difference. Same task. Nothing to do with talent. Just tooling.

If we get everyone to the 12-minute benchmark, we recover 15.4 hours of team time every week.

We also found that every buyer operates completely differently despite having the same job title. Some spend most of their time on strategy, some on creative, some are essentially firefighters. No real standard, which makes it hard to know where the bottlenecks actually are.

What we're changing this month:

My long-term goal is for media buyers to manage at least 30 accounts each. With AI handling more of the repetitive work and creatives coming off their plates entirely, I think it's realistic. I actually had a call recently with a media buyer who manages 158 accounts by himself, so the ceiling is higher than most people think.

Today our average is 9 accounts per buyer. The math shows we can get to 15 just by fixing reporting and cutting internal meeting time.

I'll share how it goes.

Talk soon,

Dmitry