The Power of Taking the Leap: The story of a UCLA dropout changing the game in marketing

Many young founders dream of building something big — but taking the leap is a different story. It’s easy to talk about conviction, but living through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship is a whole other level of challenge.

In this edition of Next Up, I sat down with Leo Zhang, co-founder and CTO of Enttor, a fast-growing AI-powered marketing platform. From starting his first venture in high school, to dropping out of UCLA, to now leading product development at Enttor, Leo’s journey is a great example of what it really looks like to take the leap.

Before we get into Leo’s story, I wanted to dive into the work that is being done at Enttor.

Enttor is aiming to become the “Microsoft Excel of marketing” — an end-to-end, AI-powered platform that centralizes and automates marketing workflows for large enterprises.

Today, most marketing teams are juggling 5–10+ tools: Canva for design, Hootsuite for scheduling, Hubspot for CRM, and countless others for analytics, content generation, and reporting. This fragmentation results in inefficiency, data silos, and wasted human effort. While raising 400k at a 10 million dollar valuation, Enttor’s vision is to replace this patchwork with a single platform that integrates AI deeply into every workflow.

By building a platform that evolves with the latest advancements in AI (rather than competing against them), Enttor aims to transform marketing teams from being tool operators to true creatives — focusing on strategy, creativity, and storytelling.

Nowadays, building AI startups doesn’t just mean solving today’s problems, but also anticipating what the future may hold. One of the bets the Enttor team is making is that AI will get exponentially better — and they are building their product to evolve right alongside it.

As Leo explained, “When Canva first came out, it was revolutionary. Now, with the latest image generation models, you can create great-looking ads just by typing a prompt.” Similarly, Google’s new Veo model for video generation is threatening to disrupt many point solutions that previously specialized in video ads.

Rather than competing head-on with individual AI tools, Enttor is building an adaptive platform that will continuously integrate the latest AI capabilities into its core workflows.

This vision allows Enttor to stay agile and future-proof — so that as the AI landscape evolves, their platform becomes stronger rather than obsolete.

Leo grew up in Toronto and got his first taste of entrepreneurship during high school. While COVID lockdowns swept across the world, he built an ed-tech startup focused on the IB curriculum — combining tutoring and note-sharing — which scaled to over 10,000 users and $5k+ in monthly recurring revenue.

That experience showed him the thrill (and reality) of building and operating a company. After high school, Leo attended UCLA and worked as a software engineer and marketing consultant, helping large brands optimize their marketing stacks.

It was during this time that Leo’s longtime family friend Zinnie, now Enttor’s CEO, approached him with a compelling idea: the marketing tech stack was fundamentally broken — fragmented across dozens of tools that didn’t play well together. Leo instantly saw the gap and dropped all his other plans to co-found Enttor with her. “It was just one of those moments where I had built enough conviction to go all-in,” Leo said.

While Leo’s story may sound fast-moving, he was quick to point out that startup life is anything but linear — and that’s something every young founder should understand.

In Enttor’s early days, the three co-founders did everything together: product development, investor calls, sales demos, and customer interviews — often from their respective college dorm rooms.

Along the way, the product evolved based on real customer feedback. Their first client, Legacy.com, still managed its social media via Excel spreadsheets — a clear signal that even large, established companies have outdated workflows that Enttor could modernize.

This experience taught the team an important lesson:

• Be flexible in your GTM strategy

• Iterate fast

• Let real-world feedback shape your product roadmap

“You start with a big vision,” Leo said, “but you have to stay close to your customers and be willing to adjust.”

One of the most valuable moments in our conversation came when Leo reflected on his decision to drop out of UCLA:

Leo emphasized that conviction is not about an unwavering belief that everything will succeed. It’s about having the courage to act even when doubts are present.

He also shared that setbacks that feel massive in the moment often fade with time. In his words:

Leo’s story is a perfect example of how taking the leap doesn’t require having it all figured out. It requires recognizing opportunity, having the courage to move forward despite uncertainty, and trusting that learning happens along the way.

As Enttor continues its mission to reshape marketing tech — and as Leo navigates the startup journey as a young dropout founder — there’s no doubt that this is just the beginning of an inspiring story.

If there’s one takeaway for our readers this week, it’s this: Don’t wait for perfect certainty. Take the leap.