Interesting to remember that in 2015, months before the Trump campaign launched, Parscale was a workaday web marketing guy. Listicles, blog plugins, menus for local restaurants. He just happened to be Trump’s “I want a home page” guy.
That’s not a knock — he and his partner seem to have been good at it, and had built a well-regarded local marketing, web design, and hosting company.
And about year later he was running digital operations for the president of the United States.
And from there, campaign manager and Lamborghini collector.
And now… he’s The Guy Who Burnt Through A Billion Dollar War Chest And Got Fired after TikTok kpop fans tricked him into making his candidate look dumb.
No sympathy for someone who actively worked to break democracy and put a racist, authoritarian narcissist in power. But it’s impossible not to look at the arc of Parscale’s last 5 years and think, “Ouch.”
Something to watch for in business is the owner/investor/etc who always brings along their scrappy team of under-qualified but moxie-filled underdogs. The “I’ve got a guy” guy.
Sometimes it can mean they’re great at finding diamonds in the rough. But other times it means they want everyone around them to need them, and badly. They love finding someone and elevating them, because that means they owe them.