Hasta La Creative!

Two years ago, PR agency boss Scott Allison met with a prospective client in its “dilapidated little office in Mountain View,” as he recalls it now. The company, a startup offering a social communications tool that no one in the U.S. had heard of, counted about 20 staffers, including a pair of founders who met at Yahoo and had then spent a few years failing to score gigs at other Silicon Valley players like Facebook. And it could only afford to pay the agency a relatively low fee.

But Mr. Allison signed it as a client, encouraged by its simple and smart idea and an early round of funding from Sequoia. This February, Facebook agreed to pay $19 billion in cash and stock for the startup: WhatsApp, still an Allison & Partners client.

Startups without multiple rounds of funding haven’t had the biggest marketing budgets or the best track record for paying the agencies they’ve hired on time. But as some agencies’ early bets on Silicon Valley clients pay out, they’re proving that the risk can be worth the reward.

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