🎧 START pod: Matthew Chen, Founder & CEO, Laurence "Autonomous performance marketing"

By
·
March 27, 2026

Amazon sellers do not have a data problem.

They have a decision problem.

They already have the clicks
The conversions
The impressions
The keyword history

What they do not have is a system that knows what to do with it.

So brands pay agencies $5,000 to $50,000 a month - and still lose money on ads

Matthew Chen built Laurence to change that.

A quantitative system for Amazon advertising.
Built for continuous decision-making under profit constraints.
Using existing ad copy, reinforcement learning, and custom models to run ads on autopilot.

When confidence is high, it acts
When data is sparse, it borrows signal from similar keywords

The result: about 40% better performance for customers.

Amazon is the wedge.
Autonomous performance marketing is the bigger vision.

🎧 START pod: Matthew Chen, Founder & CEO, Laurence "Autonomous performance marketing"

00:23 What Laurence does
02:12 How the company found the wedge
02:47 The customer quote that changed the company
03:15 The flaw in the standard Amazon ad model
05:25 The move from Amazon to the wider internet
06:12 How Laurence uses transformers today