Right Side Up Talent Spotlight: John Gauthier

The Right Side Up Talent Spotlight series highlights the incredible talent within our team, from full-time employees to growth marketing consultants in our collective. This month, we’re excited to introduce John Gauthier, a director on our project strategy team.

Growing up, John Gauthier—a director on our project strategy team—had aspirations of becoming a big-time detective. And, in many ways, he has. While he’s not fighting crime (during the day at least), he is helping brands solve their toughest marketing puzzles by using his sharp problem-solving instincts.

With a deep background in paid social and performance marketing, John has built a reputation for helping companies unlock scalable, sustainable growth. His journey includes a transformative chapter at Uber, where he scaled Uber Eats’s paid social program from its first 30 markets into hundreds—including international expansion.

These days, he’s helping Right Side Up clients ask the right questions and staff the right people—all from a home office thoughtfully tailored for productivity. (“Living with an interior designer has its benefits,” he jokes.)

Let’s learn more about John’s story—his family, his love of sci-fi, and his take on the future of AI-powered marketing.

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Where do you call home and what is your work environment like?

Home is in Pleasant Hill, about 20 minutes east of the Bay Bridge on the other side of the Berkeley Hills—where the weather’s better and the parking’s easier. I’m a California guy through and through. I’ve lived all over the state: Sacramento, Santa Cruz (Go Slugs!), Redondo Beach, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley.

These days I live with my wife, our daughter Eva, our cat MacGruber, and our ever-enthusiastic boxer, Ramses.

I’ve been working from home for a few years now, and my home office is pretty dialed in. At this point, I’m so optimized I feel lost with just a laptop. I’ve got a sit-stand desk, an espresso machine, a wall of whiteboards—everything is set up to keep me organized, productive, and ergonomic. I love the flexibility of remote work, but I’ve learned that I thrive with structure and a well-run space. Living with an interior designer has its benefits, even if it means too many pillows.

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Tell us a little more about your role and time at Right Side Up.

I’m a director on the project strategy team. I partner with clients to advise on growth marketing strategy and team structure. At the core, our job is to bring the full weight of our marketing expertise—the patterns we’ve seen across hundreds of marketers and clients—to help companies ask the right questions and staff the right people for what they actually need. Sometimes that’s one strategic hire, sometimes it’s a team. Every engagement is different.

We work with seed-stage startups all the way to enterprise brands, across every industry—so no two days are the same. It’s a dynamic role that gives us a front-row seat to what’s happening in marketing, and also what’s shifting in tech more broadly.

I’ve been on the team for about 4.5 years. Before that, I was a consultant with Right Side Up, supporting clients directly. I had such a positive experience working with Tyler, Ryan, Mike, and the rest of the team that joining Project Strategy felt like a natural next step. It’s rare to find a team this sharp and low-ego in one place. That’s what really sealed it for me.

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Could you dive into your professional background and any achievements you’re proud of or notable brands you’ve worked with?

I’m a performance marketer with deep expertise in paid social. I got my start at Spruce Media, a boutique agency focused on Facebook during the early days—when paid social was still the Wild West and advertisers were just starting to wrap their heads around the value of paying for clicks and likes.

From there, I joined Marin Software, a PPC management platform, where I helped the team build some of the first enterprise tools for scaling Facebook ads. I advised the product team on features like creative rotation, custom audiences, and bid/budget automation to make Facebook a viable performance channel for Marin’s search-first clients.

Eventually, I joined Uber to lead paid social for Uber Eats. I scaled the program from its first 30 markets into hundreds, including international expansion into LATAM, APAC, and EMEA. Like anyone who was at Uber during that hyper-growth phase, I could talk for hours about the experience—but it was truly a unique opportunity to solve some of the most novel marketing challenges out there.

A few big ones that stand out:

• Building early incrementality testing frameworks for paid channels
• Partnering on multi-touch attribution (MTA) modeling
• Navigating display network click fraud
• Using paid marketing to balance supply and demand across hundreds of markets in real time

That foundation led me to where I am today—advising companies on how to build effective growth strategies and marketing teams in my role as a director at Right Side Up. I get to apply everything I’ve learned—across startups, platforms, and global brands—to help our clients find the right talent and structure for what they’re trying to grow.

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Give us your take on growth marketing today: What excites you, how have things changed since you got started, and where do you think it’s headed?

I still remember how hooked I was the first time someone explained how SEO worked. My first manager (shoutout to Phi) sat me down in front of a whiteboard and broke it all down—web crawlers, metadata, site structure, backlinks, PageRank (“link juice,” as he called it), and paid ads. That moment pulled me in. Growth marketing had it all: complexity, depth, strategy, numbers, and creativity. I’ve been obsessed ever since.

These days, I’m no longer hands-on with campaign execution—and I do miss that sometimes—but I stay close enough to the work to still feel energized by solving the same kinds of challenges. Now I get to help clients think bigger, faster, and more strategically.

As for the future of growth marketing? It’s undeniably AI-driven. I’ll focus on creative because that’s where things are getting really interesting. We’re starting to see entire ad campaigns—videos, voiceovers, visuals—built entirely with AI and no human actors. It’s impressive, and we’re only at the beginning.

My hot take? We’ll probably take it too far, and in a few years people will crave something more human, tangible, and relatable again.

A few things I see coming:

• Creative quality will get worse before it gets exponentially better (have you seen some of the YouTube ads lately?)
• Influencer and affiliate will continue to thrive as high-impact, cost-effective growth channels
  Performance marketing will become highly automated, with much better measurement and attribution
• Online and offline will become more connected—and hopefully, we’ll rethink and reinvest in the brick-and-mortar experience in smarter ways

The field keeps evolving, and that’s part of what keeps it fun. There’s always a new layer to explore, a new tool to master, and a new challenge to figure out.

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What has the flexibility of Right Side Up’s remote-first model allowed you to do outside of work?

This one's easy. Starting a family.

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A few fun questions to conclude: First, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a detective. If I’m being honest, I really wanted to be James Bond—but I figured detective was the more realistic version. The idea of outsmarting and outmaneuvering the bad guys for a living sounded like the ultimate job.

With age, that dream evolved into a race car driver, a stuntman, or a fighter jet pilot.

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What do you do for fun where you live?

I like to roll up about halfway through an Oakland sideshow and set up a little lemonade stand for the drivers. Some nights I do pretty well—especially when I spike the recipe with a little melatonin. Community wellness matters.

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What’s a TV show, podcast, book, video game, recipe, etc. that you’re loving right now?

I’m currently working my way through James Clavell’s Asian Saga series. Shōgun has been my favorite so far—epic storytelling, incredible characters—but honestly, they’ve all been great reads.

If you’re into sci-fi and haven’t seen The Expanse on Amazon (or read the novels by James S. A. Corey), do yourself a favor. Watch it. Read it. Then join me in lobbying Amazon to make a series covering the final three books.

And if you’re really into sci-fi? Read Hyperion.

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Who would play you in a movie? Why?

Jeremy Renner. There’s some resemblance, but it’s more than that—my friends swear he basically plays a version of me in the movie Tag. Slightly intense, a little competitive, but ultimately well-meaning and loyal. I’ll take it.

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Lastly, tell us about the favorite place you’ve traveled to.

Vietnam. The people, the food, the endless streams of motorbikes weaving through traffic, the beauty of both the towns and countryside—it’s unforgettable. It’s one of those rare places where chaos and kindness somehow find harmony, and it just works.

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‍Looking to hire full-time or fractional marketing talent? Drop us a line. Are you interested in joining the Right Side Up team? Reach out at talent@rightsideup.co.