Jonah Peretti is Founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, the first true social news organization that provides a pioneering mix of breaking news, entertainment and shareable content. Mr. Peretti, known for creating viral hits, tracking online social behavior and building technology to amplify buzz is also a co-founder of The Huffington Post. He has been called a "viral marketing hotdog" by the New York Times, "the poster boy of guerilla media" by AlterNet and a "computer-whiz" by The New Yorker. Fast Company named Mr. Peretti one of the "New Faces of Social Media" and Business Insider listed him as one of the "11 Rising Tech Stars to Watch in 2012."
Mr. Peretti is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab and has taught at NYU and the Parsons School of Design. His work has been covered by Time, the Economist, Fortune, and Business Insider and he has appeared as a guest on the Today Show, Good Morning America and CNN.
In 2012, Mr. Peretti launched a new BuzzFeed political section and hired Ben Smith of POLITICO to lead as Editor-in-Chief. BuzzFeed reaches over 25 million monthly unique visitors and gets the majority of its traffic from social sources like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and more.
Kenneth Lerer is a Manager of Lerer Ventures. He was the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Huffington Post. Mr. Lerer is Chairman of Betaworks, Bedrocket and BuzzFeed. He is a member of Pilot Group LLC, a private investment firm.
Mr. Lerer is Chairman Emeritus of the Public Theater in New York City and serves on the boards of directors of several nonprofit organizations, including Association to Benefit Children (ABC) and Bank Street College of Education. In 2008-09, Mr. Lerer served as the Hearst New Media Professional-in-Residence at Columbia Journalism School.
Jon Steinberg is the President of BuzzFeed in NYC. He was previously Strategic Partner Development Manager on Google’s SMB (Small Medium Business) Partnerships team. Prior to Google, Jon was the Director of Business Development at Majestic Research and the founder of iBuilding, a commercial real estate software company backed by Tishman Speyer Properties, Benchmark Capital, and 12 Entrepreneuring. He is a graduate of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and holds an MBA from Columbia University. He lives with his wife and two little kids on the Upper East Side.
John Johnson is the Director of the Harmony Institute, a research organization that studies the social impact of entertainment media. He consults with media creatives, socially conscious film funds and production companies to help their work achieve concrete, positive change in specific target constituencies.
He is co-founder of buzzfeed.com, a trend detector and platform for transmitting contagious media and is the founder of Eyebeam, a MacArthur and NEA funded non-profit art and technology laboratory in New York City.
John is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute and is author of a book in production titled The Atlas of Art and Capital, a visual exploration of the financial, social and cultural capital models of legendary art enterprises from Burning Man to Andy Warhol’s Factory.
Andy Wiedlin is a respected Internet veteran and responsible for leading BuzzFeed’s revenue growth strategy and audience outreach. Prior to joining BuzzFeed, he was the SVP of Sales at Huffington Post where he pioneered the idea of social news, built a successful sales team, developed a market strategy and defined social marketing products. Andy got his start in the social space in 2008 at MySpace as Vice President of Sales. From 2003 to 2008, Andy worked at Yahoo as Vice President of the Northwest Region. Previously he served as Executive Director at iVillage and Vice President of Sales at WeddingChannel.com. Before diving into online in 1999, Andy spent five years with AT&T International/Bell Labs. He spent 10 years working abroad, primarily in Japan and Australia. Andy has a Master’s Degree in Pacific International Affairs (with a focus on Marketing and Japanese Language) from the University of California, San Diego.
Ben Smith joined BuzzFeed as Editor-in-Chief in January 2012. He is responsible for overseeing and expanding editorial coverage and producing original content for the first true social news organization. Prior to BuzzFeed, Smith was senior political writer for POLITICO from 2007 to 2011, where he wrote a daily blog that Time Magazine named as one of the "Five Essential Blogs in 2010."
In 2008, Smith covered the Democratic presidential primary, with a focus on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Before POLITICO, he wrote a column and a blog for the New York Daily News. He also started New York’s first political blog, The Politicker, for the New York Observer, as well as the political site, Room Eight, after working as City Hall Bureau Chief for the New York Sun.
Smith has written for many leading publications including the Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, The New York Post, The New Republic, Legal Affairs, Reason and In These Times.
Smith graduated Summa Cum Laude from Yale University with a degree in Linguistics. He was born and raised in Manhattan, and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
Internet legend Ze Frank joined BuzzFeed in September 2012 as the Executive Vice President of Video where he is focused on finding new formats in social video. A web pioneer since 2001, Mr. Frank is known for creating viral projects like “Earth Sandwich,” “Young Me/Now Me,” and “Chillout Song.” In 2006, he created “The Show with Ze Frank,” which was an early template for the modern video blog and he recently relaunched a videoblog called AShow with ZeFrank with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign. He has been named a top virologist in in Newsweek’s Digital Power Index and his website was listed as one of TIME’s “50 Coolest Websites.” He is also a frequent TED talk speaker and a Webby award winner.
Doree Shafrir is BuzzFeed’s Executive Editor, overseeing the site’s acclaimed culture, entertainment and lifestyle coverage. Shafrir was key in developing the Los Angeles Bureau and is the point person for all culture-related company initiatives. Shafrir formerly edited music news and features as senior editor at RollingStone.com, and covered a wide range of topics from culture to technology as Contributing Editor at New York Magazine. She is also a former editor at the New York Observer and Gawker, and has contributed to the New Yorker, the New York Times, Details, Marie Claire, Slate and The Daily Beast. She is based in Los Angeles.
Scott Lamb is the Editorial Director of BuzzFeed. Lamb joined the company in 2007 as a senior editor, became managing editor in 2009 and now leads BuzzFeed’s team of viral content editors and writers. His focus and expertise is in engaging readers and creating content people share. In the last year, he grew the company’s presence by launching a new team in Los Angeles, and, most recently, a UK-version of the website in London. He was the originator of the Disaster Girl meme, and in 2011, Gizmodo named him one of the Internet’s most viral people. Lamb previously worked at Der Spiegel’s English-language website. From 2005 to 2007, he was an associate editor at Salon.com, where he launched their music blog and podcasting initiative. He’s also written for Details, the LA Weekly, and the East Bay Express. Before that, he was in the band We Are Scientists. Lamb is a graduate of Pomona College and has a Master’s degree in Journalism from NYU. He was a recipient of a Fulbright for journalism in 2005.
Mark Frackt is BuzzFeed’s Chief Financial Officer and oversees the company’s finance, accounting, legal and HR functions and has been with the company since September 2011. He has previously held strategic Finance and Accounting roles with both publicly traded and venture backed companies including Sirius Satellite Radio, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Peek Inc. He was also a Senior Auditor with PricewaterhouseCoopers’ technology practice in New York City. Mark is a graduate of Syracuse University’s School of Management with a BS in Accounting, is a Certified Public Accountant in the State of New York and lives in Monmouth County New Jersey with his wife and three kids.
Mark Wilkie is the Chief Technology Officer for BuzzFeed. He has built and grown the team, software and technology that helped make BuzzFeed a state of the art, technology driven media company. Mark has over 20 years of experience, and prior to joining BuzzFed in 2006, he led the technology team for Kinja Media, a startup founded by Nick Denton/Gawker Media. He was a Senior Software Architect at United Health Technologies defining best practices and technology standards for United Health Care. Mark lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
Eric Harris is BuzzFeed’s Executive Vice President of Business Operations and is responsible for all business operations and partnerships. Eric was one of the company’s first employees and has been a key figure in developing the its business model, new ventures and growing the site’s relationships with publishers and brands. Eric leads a team of strategists, planners, account managers, and advertising operations professionals who work with FORTUNE 500 brands. Before joining BuzzFeed, Eric was VP of Product Management at Operative Media where he helped to build their best of breed Advertising Management platform. Prior to Operative, Eric was Director of Operations at washingtonpost.com and spent several years doing consulting work at Price Waterhouse. Eric has an MBA from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and lives with his wife and two children in Brooklyn.
Chris Johanesen is BuzzFeed’s Vice President of Product and was the company’s second employee and first designer. Working under Founder & CEO Jonah Peretti he has guided product from the first BuzzFeed.com site launch through the development of its groundbreaking social CMS, analytics, and advertising products — building out BuzzFeed’s world-class product team along the way. A tech generalist, Chris has spent time on product design, programming, user experience, and visual design. Before BuzzFeed he helped with design and development for other NY organizations such as AIGA, Apartment Therapy, and The Brooklyn Rail. He has a BA in Visual Art from Rutgers and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.
Jonathan Perelman is the VP of Agency Strategy and Industry Development at BuzzFeed. At BuzzFeed he works closely on all aspects of the business, with a focus on educating advertising agencies on the BuzzFeed platform and ad products. Prior to BuzzFeed, Jonathan spent six years at Google, most recently as the Global Lead for Industry Relations. Prior to Google, Jonathan worked at Financial Services firm, Unifund, and also was the Deputy Finance Director on Cory Booker’s 2002 Mayoral run in Newark, NJ. Jonathan is a Sr. Fellow at the Center for the Digital Future, at the USC Annenberg School. He’s currently an advisor to Cory Booker (Mayor of Newark, NJ), several start-ups and a number of international think tanks. Jonathan is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in political science. He lives in New York City with his wife, Alexandra, and two sons.
Nancy Newman is the VP of Marketing and Learning and is responsible for the development and execution of marketing initiatives, research, and branding. She also leads all learning initiatives both internally and externally to engage and educate the market on the topic of social content and social advertising. Prior to joining BuzzFeed, Newman was a key player in building successful teams in the digital industry for some of the world’s most influential brands including Yahoo!, SoftBank, Ziff Davis and Guggenheim.com. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Boston University with a Bachelor’s of Science.
Dao Nguyen is BuzzFeed’s Director of Growth and is responsible for using technology to increase the site’s audience and sharing. Prior to joining BuzzFeed in October 2012, Dao was Director of Product Management at FINS.com, a Dow Jones venture. From 2001 to 2008, she worked at Le Monde Interactif, publisher of the leading news site lemonde.fr, where she served as its Chief Executive Officer starting in 2006. During her time as CEO, the site’s audience tripled, its revenue doubled, and it turned a healthy profit. While at Le Monde Interactif, she also launched Le Post, a news site whose original tagline was "info, buzz, debat" (news, buzz, talk) that had its share of animals posts. Before moving to France, she was Executive Producer at Concrete Media, a small web agency, and a consultant at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). She has a degree in Applied Mathematics / Computer Science from Harvard.
Ashley McCollum is BuzzFeed’s Senior Press Director and is responsible for communications, strategic positioning, media coverage and is the chief spokesperson for the company. Ashley has significantly grown the company’s brand awareness and press coverage, is responsible for promotion of BuzzFeed’s editorial team on television and radio, leading rollout of fifteen content verticals in and promoting the company’s executives. Before joining BuzzFeed, Ashley worked on the Marketing & Communications team at NBC News and focused on digital and social initiatives. She studied Economics at Presbyterian College and lives in New York City.
Melissa Rosenthal is BuzzFeed’s Managing Creative Strategist where she leads a growing team of creatives who build native social content for advertisers. Melissa and her team work with Fortune 500 brands to create compelling, engaging and social branded content for the social web. Joining the staff in 2010 and working with President & COO Jon Steinberg, Rosenthal was a key contributor to the early success of BuzzFeed’s branded content advertising model and created the site’s first ads. She currently resides on the Upper East Side in Manhattan with her adorable cat, Wendy.
Francis Thai is BuzzFeed’s Senior Director of Social Discovery and leads the ongoing development of the site’s social content distribution and media strategy. Joining the company in April 2011, Francis has an extensive background in digital media and has worked at IPG/MediaBrands and Havas Digital developing SEM and Digital strategy for high-profile agency clients from 2007-2011. Francis studied Business Management at Stony Brook University. He was born and raised in New York City and lives with his wife in Battery Park City.
