Jay Bhatti

Technology Advisor

Jay was a co-founder of BrandProject and currently CEO of 49 Alpha. Jay and his tech team work closely with BrandProject portfolio companies to help architect, build, and implement best-in-class direct-to-consumer tech.

From building the first version of Freshly’s website in 2014 to completing the tech build-out of PORTA in 2022, Jay has built over a dozen direct-to-consumer sites on various platforms (e.g., Phyton, Ruby, PHP, Shopify, Woo, etc.) at scale in the past decade, making him a leading expert on tech-enabled DTC in the industry. Jay also works closely with BrandProject’s portfolio companies on their digital marketing, specifically focused on creating a multi-channel approach to marketing (paid search, paid social, affiliate, referral, loyalty, analytics attribution, etc).

Prior to BrandProject, Jay was the cofounder of Spock.com in 2006, a leading search engine that generated over 100 million searches per month by powering social networks like Friendster, Hi5, Bebo and Tagged. At Spock, Jay worked closely with Google to implement ad solutions and Spock was one of Google’s biggest ad partners. This experience gave Jay a deep knowledge of paid marketing and the importance of analytics, A/B testing, and creativity in paid digital performance. Prior to Spock, Jay worked at Microsoft in Redmond, WA for 5 years, his dream job since high school in New Jersey.

Outside of work, Jay was co-chair of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy’s transition team in Tech + Innovation and has been on several task forces for the State of New Jersey, including the Future of Work in New Jersey and the role technology plays in it. On the personal side, Jay lives in New Jersey with his wife, Harleen, and their two young girls. As such, Jay has watched the following Disney movies at least 10 times with his kids – Frozen (1+2), Moana, Encanto, Coco, and Tangled. With Moana being his favorite.