Joel Gross is Founder and CEO of Coalition Technologies, the Los Angeles digital-marketing agency he started as a one-person shop in Venice Beach in 2009. He still leads the firm with his brother and co-founder Jordan Brannon, with a public focus on ecommerce and lead-generation SEO, PPC, and web work.
From Seattle to Venice Beach
Gross was raised in the Pacific Northwest and studied business and finance at the University of Washington. After college he worked in search marketing for a funded Seattle startup, then decided he did not want to keep working for someone else.
In a Voyage LA interview, he described packing what he owned into a Ford Contour, leaving family, friends, and a well-paying job, and driving to Venice Beach to start Coalition. The company began in his apartment in September 2009.
Building Coalition Technologies
Coalition's own about page says Gross hired early remote specialists in 2010 and was joined the next year by his brother Jordan Brannon, now co-founder and president. The name "Coalition" was meant to signal specialists wherever they lived, not only a single office roster.
The firm moved from Venice to a Marina Del Rey live-work space and later Culver City, and public materials now describe a few hundred full-time specialists serving ecommerce and lead-gen brands. Gross writes Gross Takes, the agency's weekly newsletter on business, technology, and digital marketing, and he has built internal tools such as RomyLMS and Scoretask to support delivery.
Ecommerce SEO at Coalition
Gross told Voyage LA that Coalition is best known for SEO campaigns for ecommerce websites, with platform partnerships and a large public case-study library. That ecommerce focus still shapes how the agency presents designers, developers, copywriters, and strategists under one roof.