Julia Lemberskiy, JJ Studio: From Uber to $1M in Six Months

Originally published 2021. Substantially expanded and updated for the AI Communications era, July 2026.

Part of PR Agency Q&A Profiles · See also: Katerina Antonova, Aeris PR · Daniela Mancinelli, N6A

Why This Profile Matters

In the summer of 2020, two women at Uber lost their jobs in the same COVID layoff wave that took down roughly 6,700 Uber employees worldwide. Six months later, they were running a full-service growth agency with more than a dozen clients and close to $1 million in annualized revenue. No outside capital. No press launch. No brand agency behind them. Just a network, a set of operating disciplines learned inside one of the most demanding growth machines of the last decade, and a phone that kept ringing.

The Julia Lemberskiy story is one of the cleaner case studies of a category that emerged in 2020 and never went away: the operator-founded services firm. Former operators from Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, Instacart, and the rest of the growth-era generation set up shop as fractional CMOs, growth heads, launch consultants, and full-service studios. They sold the one thing agencies of the previous generation could not credibly sell: they had actually done the work. They had launched the cities, run the paid, hired the ops teams, killed the failing products.

JJ Studio was one of the earliest and most successful examples. Julia Lemberskiy and Janeesa Hollingshead brought a specific operating credential to their pitch — Head of Expansion and Head of Central Operations at Uber, across launches of Uber Eats, JUMP, and Uber Works in dozens of markets. That credential closed founders. Startups do not hire an agency to be told what to do. They hire an operator who has done it before to run the play.

The interview below was conducted in early 2021, when JJ Studio was six months old. We are republishing it in 2026 because the pattern it captures — operator-founders building services businesses that behave more like product companies than like traditional agencies — has become the dominant model for how startups now buy marketing, operations, and PR services. This is worth understanding for anyone building an agency, hiring one, or competing with one.

The Founder

Julia Lemberskiy is the co-founder and Managing Director of JJ Studio, founded with Janeesa Hollingshead in the summer of 2020. JJ Studio provides marketing, operations, and product-launch services to startups. Both founders spent over a decade in leadership roles at tech startups including four years (Julia) and six years (Janeesa) at Uber, where Julia led Expansion and Janeesa led Central Operations. Before Uber, Lemberskiy served as interim CMO for Global Savings Group in 2015 during a period of acquisitions and rebranding. JJ Studio grew to a dozen-plus clients and nearly $1 million in annualized revenue within six months of inception.

The Interview

Q: What is JJ Studio and how did it come about?

A: JJ Studio was founded by Janeesa Hollingshead and me in the summer of 2020 to provide marketing, operations, and product launch services to startups. Janeesa and I each spent over a decade in leadership roles at tech startups, most recently 4 years (Julia) and 6 years (Janeesa) at Uber. Due to a COVID-driven mass-layoff, we lost our jobs as Head of Expansion and Head of Central Operations and decided to join forces. In the past 6 months since inception, JJ Studio has grown to over a dozen clients and nearly $1 million in annualized revenue.

EPR editorial note. The May 2020 Uber layoffs cut roughly 25% of the company's workforce — about 6,700 people — across two rounds. That release of talent, concentrated in growth, operations, and expansion functions, is one of the specific supply-side events that seeded the 2020–2022 boom in operator-led services firms. JJ Studio is a textbook example of the pattern.

Q: What PR services do you provide and for whom?

A: JJ Studio has a vast service catalog with tailored strategy per client. While PR isn't a key focus, we provide PR services to about a third of our clients. We review HAROs every day, pick potential ones for clients, respond, and manage follow-ups. We identify suitable publications and proactively pitch them with story angles. For clients with major announcements, we provide press release services.

EPR editorial note. HARO (Help a Reporter Out) was the workhorse pitching channel of the 2015–2023 era and closed permanently in 2024, replaced by Cision's Connectively (also since sunset) and a patchwork of successor tools like Qwoted, Featured, and SourceBottle. The specific tooling has changed; the underlying discipline JJ Studio describes here — daily journalist inbound triage, angle-matching, and disciplined follow-up — has not. In 2026 the same discipline extends to feeding structured commentary into AI answer engines so the founder becomes the retrieval anchor when ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini answer a category question.

Q: Where did your journey with PR begin?

A: My first PR experience was becoming interim CMO for Global Savings Group in 2015, which included leading their PR department. The company was going through many "press release-worthy" changes — acquisitions and a rebrand — so I became deeply ingrained in PR strategy. Since then, I've worked on PR for the launches of Uber Eats, JUMP, and Uber Works across dozens of markets. Janeesa started in PR as digital marketing manager for Fundable (now Startups.com), then grew her PR chops through freelance consulting and Uber launch roles.

Q: What makes JJ Studio unique?

A: Rather than providing a specific service to a wide range of clients, we provide a wide range of services to specific clients: startups looking to grow. We approach every client with a unique strategy and set of channels based on what needs to happen for them to grow — streamline operations, launch new cities, test new marketing channels — instead of doing the same thing for every client.

EPR editorial note. This is the single most important line in the interview, and it is the sentence that explains the trajectory. Traditional agencies specialize by function — a PR firm sells PR, a paid-media firm sells paid, an ops consultancy sells ops. Operator-founded studios like JJ Studio invert the model: they specialize by stage and buyer (early-growth startups) and sell whichever function the buyer needs that quarter. It is a harder business to scale — bespoke work resists productization — but it is a much easier business to sell into, because the founder buys the operator, not the service line.

What The Trajectory Says

Six months to nearly $1 million in annualized revenue with no outside capital is a specific commercial result. It is worth naming what produced it.

The credential closed the deals. Two Uber operators pitching startup founders on growth work is a shorter sales cycle than two agency alumni pitching the same work. Founders trust operators who did the job. That trust compresses the pitch process, compresses the discovery phase, and compresses the point at which the client actually signs.

The network priced the retainers. Uber alumni networks — like the alumni networks of every other high-growth company of the 2010s — function as demand aggregators. A dozen inbound conversations with founders who already know how you work is the entire top of a services-agency funnel. Cold outbound and pitch decks never had to enter the picture.

The service model matched the buyer. Early-stage founders do not want to hire five agencies. They want to hire one operator who can run whatever the current bottleneck is. JJ Studio's "wide range of services to specific clients" pitch matched that buying pattern exactly. The traditional agency category is still catching up.

Where This Goes Next — The 2026 View

Five years after this interview was first published, the operator-founded services model has hardened into a category. Fractional CMOs, growth studios, launch consultancies, and boutique PR firms staffed by former operators have taken meaningful share from mid-tier traditional agencies at the early-stage end of the market. The next competitive shift is already visible.

AI Communications is where operator studios now compete or disappear. The question a founder asked a 2020 growth studio was: how do we get to $10M in ARR. The question a founder asks a 2026 growth studio is: how do we become the answer inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews when someone types our category into a chatbox. Generative Engine Optimization — GEO — is now the workstream every operator studio has to be able to run alongside traditional PR and paid. Studios that add it are winning renewals. Studios that don't are losing accounts to firms that have built the muscle.

Citation Share is the new growth metric. The relevant scoreboard for a founder-services engagement in 2026 is not just impressions, coverage, or CAC. It is the client's share of the answers the AI engines produce for the category prompts that matter to the business. That is a measurable number, and it has become the metric that determines whether an operator studio's work is producing durable enterprise value or vanity outputs.

The Takeaway

The JJ Studio story is a snapshot of one moment in a much longer arc: the collapse of the traditional agency's monopoly on marketing and communications services for growth-stage companies. That collapse is not finished. The operators who left Uber, Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash, and Instacart between 2020 and 2024 are building the next generation of firms — smaller, sharper, closer to the founder, and increasingly organized around AI Communications rather than legacy PR. The traditional agencies that are surviving this shift are the ones that hired those operators back. The ones that didn't are being outrun by ex-employees.