Brock Kirby, Jeff Dryer, Scott Sullivan and Mollie Partesotti spent years as the people agencies called when they needed the work done right. Between them, they’ve got Cannes Grand Prix wins, Titanium Lions, Emmy Awards and Super Bowl campaigns. They’ve run Nike Global accounts, launched “Shot on iPhone” and shaped brands at Wieden+Kennedy, Droga5, TBWA\Media Arts Lab and FCB. Now they’ve stopped being the hired guns and started their own band.
KDSP—named after the first letter of each founder’s last name—is a deliberately small creative agency built on a simple premise: the people you hire are the people who do the work. No layers. No handoffs. No B-team. Just four senior pros who embed with clients directly.
“We’re exactly like the band Toto if you think about it,” Kirby explains. “We spent years as the hired guns, crafting hits from the shadows. Now we’re ready to start our own band.”
The backstory: Friends before colleagues
The four founders knew each other before they ever worked together. Kirby and Sullivan met at University of Oregon, bonding over their love of sport and competing against each other. Dryer and Partesotti went to graduate school together at Virginia Commonwealth University. Their professional paths crossed at Wieden+Kennedy in the early 2010s—Kirby and Sullivan in Portland on Nike Global and Nike North America, Dryer and Partesotti in New York.
They stayed close even as careers took them different directions. Dryer and Partesotti later worked together at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Partesotti became Chief Strategy Officer at FCB Chicago. Sullivan went to Skillshare and Droga5. Through it all, they kept the friendship going.
From freelance duo to four-legged table
About eighteen months ago, Kirby and Dryer were working as a freelance creative team when a client approached them about taking on a bigger assignment. They brought Sullivan in from the start to handle the business side.
“We’ve been using freelance strategists, and we realized strategy needed to be a core part of our offering,” Kirby told Campaign US. That’s when Partesotti joined.
“I don’t consider us to have started until we brought Mollie on,” Sullivan says. “We were a three-legged stool at that point, missing our fourth leg to be this strong table.”
The model: Skip the BS
Dryer and Kirby went through “six to seven thousand” potential agency names before landing on the obvious answer—their own names. “We like it a lot because we are the four people that are doing the work,” Dryer explains. “We are literally putting our name on the work. If the work isn’t great, then it’s our names on the line.”
The agency operates from four cities—Portland, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago—but the structure stays flat. When clients work with KDSP, they get Kirby, Dryer, Sullivan and Partesotti. In their Slack. On their texts. On their calls. No org chart to climb, no internal politics to navigate.
“Our thought was, let’s skip all the BS and do what’s best for the work and what the market demands right now, which is fast, flat and highly collaborative,” Partesotti explains. “No handoffs, no B-team and no unnecessary layers.”
The clients: Already proving the model
KDSP already has Angry Orchard, The Farmer’s Dog and TRULY Hard Seltzer on the roster. Their client work for Angry Orchard—directed by Fatal Farm through Neighborhood Watch—embraced unabashed yelling and chaos to make “angry” desirable. The spots pushed boundaries that traditional agencies might have played safe on.
“With KDSP, it’s never just an ad, it’s an idea that reshapes how we think about our brand,” says Matt Withington, Head of Marketing at Boston Beer Co. “Their model means we’re working directly with the people making the work, which lets us get to better ideas, faster—and do it together.”
The pitch: We’re the team they were going to hire
The founders describe KDSP as “the team the agency you were going to hire was going to hire.” It’s not bravado—it’s what they were doing for years. They were the freelancers that agencies brought in for pitches and high-stakes projects, often without clients knowing.
“At large, we felt like we were doing a pretty significant amount of the lifting on some of these assignments,” Kirby says.
Now they’ve cut out the middleman. The chemistry is built in. The trust is earned. And the work speaks for itself.
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KDSP
Brock Kirby LinkedIn
Jeff Dryer LinkedIn
Scott Sullivan LinkedIn
Mollie Partesotti LinkedIn
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