What are we if not the sum of our anecdotes? The stories, fragments and moments that pop to mind when someone says our name.
John Gentry died on January 14 after a long battle with cancer. He was the CEO of OpenX for six years. He was at the helm when OpenX sued Google over the summer for monopolizing the digital ad market. Before that, he was president of a self-serve TV ad platform called Spot Runner and chief revenue officer of a financial tech company called Green Dot. He had a BA in political science from UCLA and an MBA in marketing and finance from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
But John – or “JG” to those who knew him well – was also obsessed with puppies, loved a good gossip session and, when he was in New York, he’d get a goofy kick out of using his Ring cam to playfully startle his kids from afar.
“For JG, the work always mattered to him,” said Tiffany Tai, OpenX’s VP of communications. “But it was the people who always mattered more.”
Yoga balls!
JG’s mischievous energy extended to the office.
One evening, back in 2015, Tucker Hennemuth – then a senior solutions architect at OpenX and now the company’s global head of customer success engineering – was working late with a bunch of colleagues at the Pasadena office, and “we decided to have a little fun,” he said.
They collected a bunch of yoga balls from around the office, lined them up in the hallway and took turns diving across.
“JG came around the corner and saw my shenanigans,” Tucker recalled. “I thought I would be in trouble, but no. He egged me on, asked how many I thought I could dive across and began gathering as many as he could find.”
The next day, JG sent a company-wide email announcing that Tucker would perform a yoga ball stunt in the main lobby at lunch later that week and that everyone should come. When the day arrived, he presented Tucker with an OpenX-branded cape, helped arrange the yoga balls and even stood at the front to hold the first few steady to keep it safe, alongside then CEO Tim Cadogan.
“The stunt was a success. I made it across the balls and somehow lived to tell the story,” Tucker said. “That’s who JG was to me – a leader who inspired trust, encouraged fun and made people feel seen.”
‘I’m the food’
JG also made a point of creating room inside the company for people’s lives outside of work.
Shortly after Amanda Forrester, OpenX’s SVP of marketing and communications, gave birth to her second child, Stella, the company was planning an important leadership off-site in Arizona. JG asked Amanda if she wanted to attend – and she did.
But she was breastfeeding and couldn’t leave Stella, who was four months old at the time.
“I wanted to be there,” Amanda said, “but I was also ‘the food.’”
JG’s response was simple: He flew her entire family out so she didn’t have to choose between her daughter and being in the room. She could participate, then step out to breastfeed as needed.
“That support made it possible for me to continue contributing at the highest level while still being present as a mom,” Amanda said.
Tiffany, who joined OpenX only a few months before JG died, felt that same mix of care and candor even during her job interview.
She went in expecting a standard conversation about her résumé and the role. Instead, JG wanted to talk about her upcoming move to LA’s South Bay, her rescue dog and what her interests were outside of work – the same way he always made a point of inquiring about people’s kids and lives before diving into business.
Toward the end of the interview, JG flipped the script.
“He asked me to grade my experience with him,” Tiffany said. “I told him, ‘B-plus,’ and he got a kick out of that. He told Amanda later that he liked that I was honest with him and not an brown noser!”
‘Sit right here by me’
Moments like that were JG’s way of signaling that titles and hierarchy mattered less to him than real, human interaction.
Which is why, to friends and co-workers, he was simply “JG.” And whenever he met new colleagues, junior or senior, he’d always quickly wave off formality and say, “Just call me JG.”
Rebecca Bonell, now regional VP of publisher development for North America and LATAM at OpenX, recalls when she was an account manager and JG gave her a seat at the table at industry events she was technically too junior to attend “because we were friends and he loved to gossip.”
“He’d quote Alice Roosevelt Longworth, ‘If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me,’ and then proceed to let me into rooms I had no business being in yet,” she reminisced in a post on LinkedIn.
Rebecca met her husband, Bram, at OpenX, and a few months into their relationship, they had to disclose it to JG and their managers.
“We got on a Webex with JG and our supervisors to share the news,” Rebecca said. “His response? ‘I knew it! Let me throw your wedding.’ He was so pissed when we eloped. So he threw us a baby shower instead – an epic 100-person event with the entire NYC office and our families.”
Rebecca and Bram had what was the first “OpenX baby,” and when a company off-site also fell during Rebecca’s last week of maternity leave, JG made she sure could be there – and, of course, he brought the whole family along.
“He’d hold the baby so Bram could get a drink,” Rebecca said. “It didn’t even matter that Bram had moved to a competitor by then, because once you worked at OpenX, you were always family.”
‘A lucky and thankful man’
And the person who made everyone feel like family at off-sites and baby showers was the same man people saw in the hardest business moments.
“John was a force of nature,” said Jason Fairchild, CEO and co-founder of tvScientific and a co-founder of OpenX. “A force centered on doing the right thing – the right thing for the company and the right thing for the individual.”
Sometimes that care showed up quietly.
Brian Chisholm, SVP of strategic partnerships at OpenX, said that over 25 years of working together, JG never ended a call without asking how his family was doing.
In the days after JG died, a former colleague who’d worked with him for years before being laid off during COVID shared a story with Brian. He remembered asking if he could keep his company laptop since it was his only computer and he needed it for job hunting. JG regretfully had to say no. Company policy required that all laptops had to be returned.
“The following week, he received a brand-new laptop in the mail that JG had bought for him out of his own pocket,” Brian said.
In the office, there are smaller but just as touching reminders of him.
After five years at OpenX, employees receive a custom bobblehead. JG’s bobble had its own spot in the Pasadena office, and colleagues are now talking about how to preserve it as a part of the company’s history.
But for the people who worked with JG most closely, what endures goes far beyond the artifacts.
For Julie Rooney, chief privacy officer at OpenX, it was his leadership, which was defined by a combination of humanity and steadiness.
“I saw you answer hard questions – late at night, early in the morning, on calls with 20 lawyers, in front of hundreds of people, during deeply difficult moments – with humility, passion, intelligence and eloquence,” Julie said. “I also saw you sing karaoke, talk about reality TV and gush over puppies. You were brave. You were candid. You were generous. You were fun. You were one of the most genuine people I’ve met.”
And even in preparing for his own death, JG kept the focus on gratitude and other people.
In his final LinkedIn message, written with his family as his illness progressed and posted after his passing, he opened with: “If you are reading this, it means that I’m no longer around and lost my fight with cancer. While I am dying earlier than most, I outlived myself by 28 years, thanks to a kidney transplant and modern medicine, and I’ve had a wonderful life. I am a lucky and thankful man.”
