Jake Renner's path from Google to ACV and Detroit to Buffalo.
For most of his career, Jake Renner chased growth wherever it was happening.
That meant stops at Google during the company’s boom years, a marketing role at American Express, and startup runs through Blue Apron and Trade Coffee. His career took him from Detroit to Ann Arbor to California to New York City, building experience inside both corporate giants and venture-backed startups.
Buffalo wasn’t part of the original plan. Marrying a Buffalo girl and having kids has a way of changing plans.
“I was extremely worried about finding a comparable job,” Renner said.
But in 2019, a conversation with ACV CEO George Chamoun changed that.
Renner, now the Vice President of Marketing at ACV Auctions, had been introduced to Chamoun through a mutual connection from his time at Trade Coffee. The two met for coffee to discuss Buffalo’s startup ecosystem and ACV’s growth trajectory.
“A lot of startups talk about disruption, but it’s usually around things that don’t really need disrupting,” Renner said. “What ACV was doing felt different.”
The wholesale auto industry was inefficient, uneven, and lacked transparency. Those were, in his mind, the kind of problems a tech startup could meaningfully improve and disrupt.
Halfway through the meeting, ACV co-founder Joe Neiman and the company’s head of HR joined the discussion and brought Renner back to company headquarters on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. A few weeks later, he had an offer.
Still, relocating to Western New York was a leap.
“I like to move fast. I like to have impact,” he said. “I don’t love being in situations where I can’t see the fruits of my labor.”
When Renner arrived in Buffalo in February 2019, ACV was still scaling aggressively. Since then, the company has gone public and expanded nationally, while Renner has built out a marketing organization that now includes roughly 15 people.
“The talent market here really favors people who are good at networking,” he said. “The tech community is tight-knit. That can be a real strength.”
Renner and his family initially lived in South Buffalo to stay close to relatives before eventually moving to East Aurora, where he now spends time coaching his son’s tee-ball team (the Detroit Tigers, of course) and becoming more involved in the local community.
For someone who once wondered whether Buffalo could support the kind of career he wanted, the answer has become fairly clear.
“It’s a great place to raise kids and build a family,” he said.
