Jeff Ferrantino: 30 Years of Building Tech & Revenue

Most companies wait for new technology to prove itself. By the time it does, they’re behind. I’ve spent my entire career being the person who helps them move first.

The Web Era: Building Before the Market Was Ready

In 1996, I joined a startup called University Netcasting. At the time, they were selling history of college football CD-ROMs through partnerships with major brands including USC and Notre Dame. Six partners. Physical discs. That was the product. I helped take those six schools and build their official athletic websites — the very first in sports. In fact, it would be years before all the major sports leagues decided to enter the same market. I can still remember hitting Fetch and watching a cartoon dog run across the screen while content uploaded to a team site. That’s how early it was.

Those early years were spent convincing universities and advertisers that people would actually consume sports content on the Internet — that it was worth investing in, not just experimenting with. Most of them weren’t convinced. But we kept building and eventually grew to over 200 collegiate properties. By the early 2000s, I pushed to create something that didn’t exist yet: a paid subscription product for NCAA sports streaming. It became the first of its kind in college sports history, led to a $5M+ licensing deal, and eventually the company was acquired by CBS. Turns out, we were right.

The AdTech Era: Monetizing Digital Audiences

A few years later at Fan Media, the challenge was the same but the technology had shifted. I helped build SportsAdMarketplace from scratch — an ad network that grew its audience from a few thousand to over 5 million — by convincing professional and college sports teams that their digital audiences were worth real money. We brought them advertisers like Chevrolet before most sports organizations had a digital strategy at all.

Then came mobile. At Ringier Studios, I was pitching CMOs at Disney, Marriott, Hasbro, and many more on why their brands needed to live inside apps, not just on websites. The skepticism sounded familiar. So did the outcome — the company was acquired, and mobile became the standard everyone had been hesitant to adopt.

The AI Era: Navigating the Next Shift

Now it’s AI. And I’ve seen this movie before.

The technology is different, but the pattern is exactly the same. Business owners know AI matters. They just don’t know where to start, which tools to trust, or how to separate the signal from the noise. That’s where I come in — not as someone who discovered AI last year, but as someone who has spent nearly three decades helping businesses navigate exactly this kind of moment.

Here’s what makes me different from most people in this space: I get under the hood. I write code. I build websites. I configure servers. I engineer AI prompts that produce real output, not party tricks. In my decades closing deals with companies like Viacom, Time Warner, ESPN, and Verizon, I wasn’t reading off a spec sheet — I understood what could actually be built, and that’s why the deals closed. That same hands-on instinct is what I bring to every client today. I don’t hand you a strategy deck and disappear. I build with you.

That’s why I started Ferrantino Consulting — and it’s why I built and launched two AI-powered platforms: ZipPicks and Bay Area Service Hub, deploying a proprietary Decision Engine that structures qualitative data into queryable utility across the hospitality and home service markets. Not to prove a point, but because the best way to advise someone on AI is to be in the trenches building with it every day.

If you’re a business owner who knows AI is important but isn’t sure what to do next, we should talk. I’ve helped companies navigate the unknown multiple times now. The playbook works.