Josh Garellek

I started out studying psychology at Concordia. Then I transferred to Yeshiva University in New York to study marketing, because I wanted to understand people and I wanted to build things, and marketing let me do both. To pay my way through New York, I bartended, waited tables, and worked as a maître d'. Nobody teaches you how to read a room, close a sale, or stay calm when the whole night's on fire quite like a Friday dinner rush. That floor taught me more about people and pressure than any classroom did.

After graduating, I put in time on the corporate side: a biotech company in the green cleaning space, a small e‑commerce business of my own, an internet marketing agency. Solid experience, but it wasn't what I wanted long-term. So I bet on myself and founded Arctic Empire, a small independent game studio built around one idea for a social game.

That idea didn't stay small for long. In 2017, my business partner Jon Coy and I built Arctic Empire into Arctic Leaf, a full-service design and development agency. Today it's a 70-plus person team across North America, building for brands worth tens of millions and billions. Along the way, we hit a real problem inside our own company: no good way to track partner referrals. So we solved it. That internal fix became PartnerPortal.io, which I co-founded, raised funding for, and grew into a modern partner-enablement platform. Relevize acquired it in 2024.

I also got involved with Purecolo, a data-center colocation company, as an investor, advisor, and eventually board member. I helped steer that company to its acquisition by CCDS in December 2025.

Outside of the business world, I box. I train, I spar, I've stepped into the ring for charity. It's the clearest my head ever gets, and that same discipline, no excuses, just execution, is the whole philosophy behind Hardline Collective, the peak-performance brand I'm building for the long term. It's also why one of my side projects is Corner OS, an operating system built for boxing gyms. Alongside that, I'm working on ChoreQuest, which turns kids' chores into an adventure, and my first book, No Easy Road.

Off the clock, I mentor founders, sit on boards, and take on things like 75 Hard because I want to know exactly what I'm capable of.