Jim Cota

President & CEO

Jim co-founded Rare Bird in 1998 after spending eight years as Creative Director at an award-winning regional agency. There, he developed a knack for quickly sizing up what clients actually needed, then building strategies that improved their marketing and won them market share.

In 1998, he launched Rare Bird with Ben Rothe and Troy Chandler to prove the web could make the Davids of the world competitive with Goliath. Ben’s in Iowa now, running one of the firm’s oldest clients. Jim and Troy are still here, doing the work. What surprises them now isn’t just their longevity, but the clients who trusted them when trust wasn’t easy, the problems that seemed impossible until they weren’t, and the work that mattered—and still matters.

His LinkedIn profile gets more traffic than anyone else’s at Rare Bird, which may or may not place his profile high in the running for most popular worldwide. But you should know that if he ever needed to disappear—become part of the Federal Witness Protection Program, let’s say—his Starbucks dependency alone would give him away within 72 hours.

What’s your favorite movie line?
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”—The Princess Bride

Don’t tell anyone, but ___________________ always makes me cry.
Watching my kids excel at, well, pretty much anything.

Name one thing you’d like to invent.
A never-ending glass of single malt Scotch.