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

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

From START by Fondo

March 27, 2026 · 8 min · Episode 58

About this episode

Matthew Chen discusses how Laurence uses a quantitative system to improve Amazon advertising performance.

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

People in this episode

Guest: Matthew Chen

Topics covered

  • Amazon advertising
  • performance marketing
  • data-driven decision making
  • reinforcement learning
  • ad optimization

Keywords

  • Amazon
  • advertising
  • performance marketing
  • data
  • decision making
  • reinforcement learning
  • ad copy

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Laurence, Amazon

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