Philadelphia has always built people who built things. Peter Tayoun Sharma is building the next one.
Jimmy Tayoun never did one thing at a time.
In 87 years, the son of Lebanese Christian immigrants from South Philadelphia was a Daily News sportswriter, and while serving in the Korean War a receiver of the Presidential citation, he was a Korean War correspondent published in Stars and Stripes, a restaurateur whose Middle East Restaurant pulled Old City out of the industrial dark and into the beginning of its nightlife renaissance, a state representative, a Philadelphia city councilman, a federal inmate who ran the prison kitchen while he was inside, Author who publish a guide to help people who are sentenced to prison a what to expect guide, a newspaper publisher who founded the Philadelphia Public Record in 1999, and, by every account of anyone who knew him, an irrepressible force of nature.
“Sharp, occasionally bruising, definitely flawed, and never boring,” City Council President Darrell Clarke said after Jimmy passed in November 2017. “A long, lively chapter in Philadelphia politics has come to a close.”
He died the way he lived — suddenly, outside his house on South Broad Street, on his way somewhere. He left behind his wife Dolores, six children, and fifteen grandchildren.
One of them is Peter “PJ” Sharma.
A Philadelphia Inheritance
PJ doesn’t lead with the Tayoun name on his business card. His company is Triangle AI Systems. His personal brand is @pjsharmaaa. His partnership with Cosmic Kev — Philly’s #1 hip-hop DJ for more than three decades — has turned The Come Up Show Live into a multi-million-view YouTube brand and a radio and digital platform that has broken careers over the decades for Jay Z, 50 Cent, Cardi B, Meek Mill, Kanye West, Future, Kendrick Lamar, Young Jeezy, Fabolous, Big Sean, Rick Ross, Freeway, Lola Brooke, and a hundred others.
The name on the LLC changed. The instincts didn’t.
Jimmy Tayoun built three businesses from scratch in this city. A flagship restaurant that helped define a neighborhood. A political operation in a ward he ran for 21 years. A weekly newspaper that covered Philadelphia politics on its own terms for 17 years before he sold it to a New York media company in 2016. Different enterprises on the surface. Same pattern underneath: walk into a broken system, build the thing nobody else is willing to build, and keep building it after everyone else has quit.
Jimmy did it three times in one city across six decades. His grandson is doing it again, this time in marketing.
The Craft That Doesn’t Have a Name
For most of PJ’s career, the work has been quiet on purpose.
From a Center City office on 15th & Market Street, Peter has spent more than a decade doing the kind of work other agencies charge tens of thousands of dollars a month to copy from the outside. He has managed more than $30 million in paid ad spend and helped generate over $100 million in client revenue across 23 industries. The clients range from insurance brokers booking 80 appointments a month to HVAC companies that stopped depending on seasonal demand spikes to mortgage brokers who pulled 135 qualified applications out of $1,873 in ad spend.
But his most recognizable Philadelphia work isn’t just in the B2B world. It’s in hip-hop.
When Cosmic Kev needed to turn The Come Up Show into something bigger than a radio segment — a YouTube empire, a live touring product, a brand — it was PJ’s systems Kev’s circle connected him to. When tour promoters needed to fill venues to capacity for world-touring artists, it was PJ’s ad architecture producing 45x ROAS. When coaches and course creators needed to turn cold audiences into high-ticket buyers at scale, it was PJ’s funnels doing the lifting.
Most of it ran without his name attached to anything. That was the point.
The Moment He Realized He Couldn’t Stay Quiet
By 2026, something started to bother him about his own industry.
Agencies were everywhere. TikTok was flooded with twenty-something media buyers promising 10x returns on a Canva-built funnel. Coaches were selling templates for $497 and calling it a system. Underneath all of it, the real work — the infrastructure that turns marketing into revenue — was being ignored by the people loudest about doing it.
“I watched business owner after business owner pay agencies $15K, $25K, $50K a month to run ads,” PJ says. “Then I’d look at their back-end and there was nothing there. No CRM. No follow-up that fired in under 60 seconds. No attribution. No retention play. No reporting layer. They had the top of the funnel and nothing underneath it.”
“The reason their ads weren’t working wasn’t the ads. It was that the ads were the only thing working. Every dollar they spent was flowing into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.”
That observation became the thesis for Triangle AI Systems. Not another agency. An operating system. The Triangle OS Revenue Stack, installed as six connected layers on the client’s own infrastructure: Foundation, Capture, Conversion, Fulfillment, Retention, Intelligence. One system, installed in 30 days, owned by the client for good.
And Triangle’s guarantee — in an industry that hedges every promise: up to 3x more booked appointments in 90 days, or Triangle works free until the client hits the number.
In November 2025, Triangle was named Best Marketing Agency of 2025 by Insider Weekly.
Not quietly this time.
The Thing Tayouns Do
An old Inquirer writer once described Jimmy this way: “James ‘Jimmy’ Tayoun was the kind of character an author would have needed to dream up to write about Philadelphia if he didn’t already exist.”
The line lands because it’s true. Jimmy ran a restaurant that helped turn Old City from an industrial graveyard into a neighborhood people actually wanted to be in. He ran a newspaper that covered the city on terms the city’s daily paper couldn’t always match. And when his political career ended in 1991 — pleading guilty to federal corruption charges, serving nearly four years — he did the one thing Philadelphia respects above almost everything else. He didn’t stay down.
He went inside, ran the kitchen, wrote two books from a prison typewriter, and came home. Within a decade he had launched the Public Record. By the end he was back on Broad Street taking calls from constituents who weren’t his constituents anymore, from politicians who didn’t need his vote, from reporters who just wanted to hear him talk. Because he was always the guy who was going to keep going.
PJ isn’t building restaurants or running for council. But what he is building — a Philadelphia-based, family-rooted marketing infrastructure firm that has quietly worked on the biggest names in hip-hop, filled convention centers for world-touring artists, and is now stepping into the open with a product and a guarantee no competitor will match — is the same pattern, transposed onto a different century and a different craft.
Walk into a broken system. Build the thing nobody else is willing to build. Keep building it after everyone else has quit.
The Tayouns have been doing it in South Philly since Jimmy’s immigrant parents opened a small place off the Italian Market nearly a hundred years ago. The location changed. The city changed. The product changed.
The pattern hasn’t.
