About Dennis Yu

The search engine engineer who built a framework for growing businesses and people.

I spent 10 years inside the machine. At Yahoo, I was a search engine engineer building the analytics that powered one of the largest platforms on the internet. At American Airlines, I started at $36,500 a year and learned how a quarter-billion-dollar 777 gets delivered, how fuel hedging works, and why pilots go on strike.

But the most important thing I learned didn’t come from code or algorithms. It came from a man named Al Casey.

What the CEO of American Airlines taught me
Al Casey ran the LA Times, the US Postal Service with a million employees, American Airlines, and the Resolution Trust Corporation during the S&L banking crisis. Any one of those would be a full career. He did all of them, and he revolutionized each one.

I used to walk into his office and ask him questions that probably sounded ridiculous. How did you decide to raise the price of a stamp from 27 cents to 28 cents? How do you know what to do when you have a million people depending on you? How do you run an airline when you’ve never flown a plane?

His answer was simple. Every business has three functions: marketing, operations, and finance. Plus a corporate wastebasket for everything else like HR and legal. That’s it. No matter the industry, no matter the size.

That lesson became one of the nine triangles.

From corporate to mission
After a decade in corporate, I started BlitzMetrics with a different kind of goal. Not to build the biggest agency. Not to chase revenue. To solve two problems that I believe are the biggest in the economy.

Young adults coming out of school can’t get jobs. A diploma doesn’t convert into a career at a drive-through window. And businesses, even the best ones, can’t figure out digital marketing. There’s a massive gap between education and execution.

So we built a system that connects the two. Businesses pay for digital marketing services. Young adults learn by doing real work for real clients. And as they level up through our 9-level system, they go from generating reports at $9 an hour to running their own businesses.

We’ve had a 99% dropout rate in the early years. That failure taught me more than any success. It taught me that knowledge isn’t enough. People need mentorship, they need to feel cared for, and they need a system that catches them when fear takes over.

The 9 Triangles
Everything I learned from Al Casey, from Yahoo, from training thousands of young adults, and from working with companies like Ashley Furniture, the Golden State Warriors, and Nike distilled into this one framework.

Nine interlocking triangles that cover strategy, execution, and systems. They explain how to build a marketing engine, how to develop people through learn, do, teach, and how to systematize a business so it doesn’t depend on any one person.

The framework has been taught at workshops across the country. It’s the same whether you’re a pest control company in Florida or a tech startup in San Francisco. The principles don’t change because they’re based on how trust, reputation, and human relationships actually work.

What I believe
I believe digital marketing is a mirror. It reflects what’s already happening in the real world. If you do great work, we can polish that mirror and amplify it. If the underlying business is broken, no amount of SEO or ads will fix it.

I believe the quality of your ingredients matters more than the tools you use. The best kitchen equipment in the world won’t help a bad chef. And the best AI tools won’t replace genuine expertise built through years of doing the work.

I believe that a good mentor sees more in you than you see in yourself. And the mark of a genius isn’t hitting a target everyone can see, it’s hitting a target nobody else even knows exists.

I’ve read 4,000 books. I spent six hours a day reading for the first 30 years of my life. I had no friends. I represented California in the National Spelling Bee in 1988. I didn’t speak English until I was seven. Kids made fun of me, and my way of getting back at them was to blow them out on every test.

That chip on my shoulder turned into a career spent helping other underdogs prove what they’re capable of.

The mission
Train young adults. Build systems that scale. Work with businesses that have integrity. Share everything we know for free so that anyone with the drive can learn it.

That’s what the 9 Triangles is about. Not tricks. Not tools. Not the latest algorithm update. First principles that will still be valid 10 years from now.