For over two decades, Gary “Bolo” Sargeant has been one of the unseen architects of modern culture. From radio campaigns that helped elevate Beyoncé and Usher to global prominence, to cultural activations that connected hip-hop with fashion for Young Thug, Gunna, and Megan Thee Stallion, Sargeant has operated at the point where influence, timing, and cultural energy converge.
Today, he is applying that experience to a new challenge: how brands and creators launch in the age of AI.
Sargeant is a co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Cliqk, a rapidly growing New York startup built with CEO Rohan Gurram, CTO Alvin Pan, and CMO Ilias Anwar. Cliqk is a one-click marketing platform that launches your brand everywhere at once: billboards, social ads, UGC, events, newsletters, and press runs. The platform is building the next generation of AI GTM technology built around Vibe Marketing and a Marketing Co-Pilot that automates cultural distribution.
The premise is straightforward. Creativity is not scarce. Distribution is the bottleneck. Cliqk exists to remove that bottleneck.
Sargeant’s foundation in the industry began at the Institute of Audio Research in New York. After graduating, he earned an internship at Arista Records, which led to his early career at Columbia Records as Director of Radio Promotions and Lifestyle Marketing. He later joined 300 Entertainment as Vice President of Promotions and Lifestyle Marketing, where he helped shape breakout careers by recognizing momentum before charts or data confirmed it.
Over time, Sargeant realized the center of cultural momentum had moved.
“It was not about radio rotation anymore,” he says. “Momentum shifted online. It lives with creators and online communities. The way brands rise had changed. The strategy had to change with it.”
This shift led to his partnership with Rohan Gurram, a Yale-trained systems thinker focused on scalable community coordination. Together, they began designing a launch engine built for the modern attention economy.
Sargeant now works alongside CTO Alvin Pan, a former neurosurgery AI researcher who developed reinforcement learning and video-intelligence systems at NYU Langone and Columbia, and CMO Ilias Anwar, a creator and community architect whose media and event ecosystems have generated over one billion impressions.
The team’s combined expertise forms the core of Cliqk’s platform.
Instead of brands needing separate agencies for PR, influencer relations, paid ads, content operations, audience development, event execution, and storytelling, Cliqk functions as the unified go-to-market system. A brand inputs its identity and goals. Cliqk generates a coordinated, cross-channel launch map and executes it across digital and real-world environments automatically.
“Artists used to fight for radio time. Now brands and creators compete for algorithm cycles,” Sargeant says. “Cliqk gives them a structural advantage. It knows how attention moves.”
Industry analysts view Sargeant’s shift as a signal of a larger realignment. When executives who shaped mainstream music decide to build software instead of campaigns, it suggests the next era of culture will be coordinated by intelligent distribution systems rather than isolated teams.
“Gary’s decision confirms the model we are building,” says Gurram. “The future of go-to-market sits where cultural intuition and machine intelligence meet.”
As Cliqk expands, Sargeant remains focused on the values that carried him through his career: community, culture, and the hunger of emerging creators.
“I have seen every cycle in this industry,” Sargeant says. “The hunger never changes. Only the tools do. We are building the tools that match the moment.”