Lara
Cohen

The Woman at the Infrastructure Layer

The year is 2014. Ellen DeGeneres is at the Oscars holding a phone. Behind the scenes, Lara Cohen - then Twitter's Head of Entertainment Talent - had spent months building the conditions that made what happened next possible. When Ellen's selfie with Meryl Streep, Bradley Cooper, and half of Hollywood went live, it became one of the most retweeted posts in the platform's history. Twitter crashed briefly. The internet noticed.

Cohen didn't orchestrate that single moment by accident. She had built a career-long instinct for sitting at the intersection of culture and platform infrastructure - for understanding that the tools matter as much as the talent using them. Two decades later, she's doing the same thing at a different scale entirely: Cloudflare, the company that handles a significant slice of all internet traffic, now has her building the framework for how publishers and creators protect their content from AI systems.

The job title is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships: Media, Creators & AI. The actual work is something more fundamental - figuring out whether the open web survives the AI era with creator economics intact.

Eleven Years in Entertainment Journalism

Before any of this, Cohen spent eleven years at Wenner Media and US Weekly, rising to Editorial Director. It was a long apprenticeship in understanding what celebrity culture actually is - not the performances people see, but the machinery that makes them possible. Publicists, access negotiations, relationship maintenance at scale, the careful choreography between talent and publication. These are skills that don't expire.

She graduated from the University of Rochester with a degree in Political Science - a choice that now looks prescient given that her career has consistently involved navigating competing interests between platforms, talent, creators, and capital. When she moved to Twitter in 2013 as Head of Entertainment Talent, she brought that ecosystem fluency with her.

Two Stints at Twitter - and What They Tell You

Cohen joined Twitter in 2013 when the platform was still figuring out what it wanted to be. Her job: make celebrities and media companies understand why Twitter mattered. She did. The partnerships that came out of that period - across TV, film, fashion, and digital - helped establish Twitter as the real-time pulse of entertainment culture.

The campaigns she ran during this period showed a consistent philosophy. The #SmartGirlsAsk campaign with Amy Poehler's Smart Girls Foundation. The #IHaveADream project for Martin Luther King Day. The mobilization around Leslie Jones when the actress faced coordinated harassment. These weren't just brand activations; they were demonstrations that platforms have social obligations and that the right partnership can turn infrastructure into action.

She left Twitter in 2017, spent a year at The OutCast Agency working on entertainment partnerships and influencer campaigns for clients including Amazon and Oculus, and then Twitter brought her back in 2018 as Head of Global Partnerships Solutions. The return said something about the relationship between Cohen and the platform she'd helped build. She stayed through the turbulence of the Musk acquisition in November 2022, a tenure that bookended a defining era of social media.

Linktree and the Creator Economy Argument

In 2023, Variety reported Cohen was leaving the former Twitter to join Linktree as Senior Vice President of Marketing, Creators & Business Development. Linktree was at 45 million creators at the time - the link-in-bio utility that had become the de facto address book of the creator economy. Cohen's mandate was to take that platform from utility to ecosystem.

She secured major partnerships with Amazon, Google, TikTok, and Meta. She pushed social commerce integrations with Sephora, Revolve, and Urban Outfitters. But the thing she talked about most was the gap between what creators produced and what they got paid. The Digiday Podcast episode from April 2024 caught her in mid-argument: creators were providing the content that made platforms worth visiting, and the economic terms hadn't kept up with that reality.

This wasn't rhetorical positioning. It was the operational philosophy behind every deal she built at Linktree. The platform's job, in her framing, was to give creators direct economic leverage - to be the infrastructure that made fair compensation structurally possible rather than an act of platform generosity.

Cloudflare and the AI Crawling Problem

The move to Cloudflare in 2024 was the logical extension of everything Cohen had built. If the creator economy argument is about who controls content and who profits from it, AI crawling is where that argument has arrived at its most acute point. AI systems are training on human-created content at scale, and the technical architecture that enables or blocks that access runs through companies like Cloudflare.

Cohen's work at Cloudflare focuses on AI Crawl Control - the tools that let publishers and site owners decide which AI systems can access their content, and under what terms. The phrase she coined, "Content Independence Day," signals how she frames the stakes. This isn't a compliance question; it's a property rights question. Creators built the internet's content layer. The AI systems that want to learn from it should negotiate for access, not assume it.

At Cloudflare Connect 2025, Cohen presented alongside Will Allen (VP of Product) and Arielle Weiss (Director of Strategy) on exactly this: "Media: Protection and monetization for AI crawling." The audience was publishers and enterprise clients. The message was that infrastructure-level tools now exist to enforce those rights - and that Cloudflare intends to be the layer where that enforcement lives.

The scale matters. Cloudflare handles traffic for a substantial portion of the internet. When Cohen builds partnerships here, she's not working on a social platform; she's working on something closer to foundational infrastructure. The policy frameworks she develops don't affect one platform's user base - they affect the web.

The Thread

US Weekly to Twitter to The OutCast Agency back to Twitter to Linktree to Cloudflare. The resume looks like a tour of every major shift in digital media over twenty years. Entertainment journalism gave way to platform partnerships, which gave way to creator economy infrastructure, which has now given way to internet infrastructure proper.

Each move followed the same logic: Cohen goes where the power over creators and content is being negotiated, and she works to tip those negotiations toward the people making things. Whether that's celebrities getting fair treatment on a social platform, independent creators getting monetization tools, or publishers maintaining control over their content in an AI training economy - the underlying position is consistent.

She's based in Mill Valley, California - the Marin County town north of San Francisco known for its redwoods, hiking trails, and a particular brand of Bay Area creative-professional culture. She posts actively as @Larakate on X, logging 88,000+ tweets across her career. She spoke at Adweek's Social Media Week: The Creatorverse 2023, and has appeared on the She Leads Podcast and The Creative Edition Podcast. Marketing Brew profiled her in its "Coworking with" series in November 2024.

The arc from orchestrating a celebrity selfie at the Oscars to building AI content protection frameworks isn't a pivot. It's the same argument, applied to successively larger infrastructure. The tools have changed. The position hasn't.