Podcast guest & speaker
Tony Lee treats a media budget, a poker hand, and a golf shot the same way: as a bet with a measurable edge.
Thirteen years in growth and media: in-house at Shopify and Starz, plus agency work for brands like Google, A24 and Searchlight. Before any of that, four years playing poker professionally, and a Division I golf career he still tracks like a stat sheet. The question is always the same: did this work, or did it just look like it did?
- 13 years
- Growth and media across tech, entertainment and retail
- 5×
- Shopify’s paid spend, on a mandate toward $100M
- 4 years
- Professional poker, ages 18–22
Topics
What we can talk about.
Six conversations with real stories behind them. Sample questions are included, so hosts can go in with zero prep.
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01
Friction by Design
The deliberate-friction experiment at Shopify: adding a qualifying step before the landing page, on purpose, to filter traffic before it converted. It produced the highest session-to-lead conversion rate on record.
Sample questions- Wait — you made it harder to convert, on purpose?
- When does removing friction actually destroy value?
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02
Would They Have Bought Anyway?
Questioning what retargeting actually proves at Yamibuy, and what happened to CAC and acquisition volume once the budget moved toward net-new customers.
Sample questions- What’s the most misleading metric in growth marketing?
- How do you tell if a channel is creating demand, or just claiming credit for it?
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03
The Poker Table Before the Boardroom
Four years playing poker professionally, from 18 to 22, before a single day in marketing. What bankroll management and bet sizing taught him about budget allocation, risk, and the difference between a good decision and a good outcome.
Sample questions- What’s the difference between a good decision and a good outcome?
- What’s a mistake you see marketers make that a poker player never would?
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04
70/20/10: How I Allocate a Growth Budget
His fixed rule for dividing a growth budget — 70% proven work, 20% promising ideas, 10% new experiments — and why leadership has to protect the experimental slice or it quietly becomes zero.
Sample questions- How do you kill a channel the CEO loves?
- What happens to a marketing org that never protects its testing budget?
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05
Did This Work?
Measurement beyond attribution: holdout tests, incrementality, and the uncomfortable gap between a result that looks real and a result that is real.
Sample questions- What’s a result you were proud of that you later found out wasn’t real?
- Why isn’t attribution the same thing as proof?
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06
Zero to Twelve
Joining a media company as its first U.S. employee and building the account base from zero to twelve in eighteen months — the operating model, not just the wins.
Sample questions- What actually breaks when you’re the only person in the building?
- What’s the difference between winning an account and being able to serve it?
About
The short biography.
Tony Lee has spent thirteen years running growth and media: in-house at Shopify and Starz, plus agency work for brands like Google, A24 and Searchlight. He started in journalism — a crime blotter turned into a column, and later The Intrepid, an online college newspaper he founded and ran as editor-in-chief. The instinct never left: ask the plain question first, then go find the number that answers it.
Before marketing, he played poker professionally for four years. He plays competitive fantasy baseball, has studied sabermetrics, and played Division I golf at St. Bonaventure. He still tracks his own game (index 2.8) the way he’d track a media plan: strokes gained by category, not just the final score.
He speaks and writes about growth economics, budget allocation, and measurement that survives a hard question.
Why book Tony
- Operator, not theorist. Every framework here comes from a budget or a bet he actually made, not a slide deck.
- Analytical by nature, not just by trade. The instinct that runs his media budgets is the one he built at the poker table and studying sabermetrics: reading an edge, sizing a bet, sitting with variance.
- Comfortable on camera and on mic. Featured in Meta for Business’s Social Skills series on how brands find customers.
- Zero-prep friendly. Sample questions for every topic are above, and the host kit below has bios and headshots.
Appearances
Recent conversations.
Logistics
- Format
- Audio and video, remote from Los Angeles (PT). Professional home setup.
- Episode length
- 30–60 minutes typical; flexible.
- Speaking capacity
- Appears in a personal capacity. Current client work stays confidential, as is standard in agency relationships.
- Lead time
- Usually available within 1–2 weeks.
- Contact
- booking@sheckii.com
Host kit
Everything for the show notes.
Tony Lee is a growth and performance marketer with thirteen years in-house at Shopify and Starz and agency-side for brands like Google, A24 and Searchlight. A former professional poker player and Division I golfer, he talks about budget allocation, measurement, and the gap between a good decision and a good outcome.
Tony Lee has spent thirteen years running growth and media, in-house at Shopify and Starz and agency-side for brands like Google, A24 and Searchlight. At Shopify he designed Friction by Design, which produced the highest session-to-lead conversion rate on record. He started in journalism, founding and editing The Intrepid, an online college newspaper, and played Division I golf at St. Bonaventure. Before marketing, he played poker professionally for four years. Featured in Meta for Business’s Social Skills series, he writes Growth Sold Separately and lives in Los Angeles.
Book a call
Pick a time.
A short intro call to talk through your show, your audience and the angle that fits. Pick any open slot.