Sarah Levinson Rothman and the advantage of sharing the room

On June 8, 2018, Sarah Levinson Rothman became the subject of the sort of announcement she usually helped other people make. She was leaving 42West. So were Amanda Silverman and Meredith O’Sullivan. The three publicists were starting a company, and the company did not yet have many details to announce. Their former bosses wished them luck. A new business had acquired its first public story before it had fully introduced itself.

Rothman had joined 42West in 2008, following years at Miramax and The Weinstein Company. Leaving meant giving up a position inside an established operation to become responsible for an operation of her own. The difference between advising a business and owning one can be expressed quite simply: eventually, somebody has to decide who pays for the printer.

The venture became The Lede Company. Christine Su joined the founding partnership, bringing brand expertise to a business with roots in talent and corporate communications. Four women would share the chief executive title. For Rothman, the arrangement put her specialty into conversation with three other ways of seeing the same assignment. The interesting part of her story is what becomes possible when those perspectives share a room.

The company behind the movie

Before the agency ownership came the corporate work. At The Weinstein Company, Rothman headed corporate communications from the company’s inception. In November 2007, she was moving from vice president into a consulting and advisory role as a new chief communications officer came in. Earlier, she had worked at Miramax. These were jobs inside the businesses that brought entertainment to the public.

A film company has a peculiar communications problem. Its most visible product may be a story about somebody entirely imaginary, while its own story concerns executives, financing, distribution and commercial decisions. Audiences meet characters. Business reporters ask about companies. Both conversations can begin with the same movie and end in quite different places.

That distinction helps explain Rothman’s place in the eventual Lede partnership. Corporate experience gives a publicist practice in explaining the organization around the creative work. A production company, a fashion house and a musician’s new venture each have decisions to make about how they present themselves. The public sees the result. Someone has to consider how the separate decisions will read together.

Reputation has a balance sheet

By the spring of 2018, Rothman was appearing on the programme of Worth’s Reality of Risk summit as a managing director at 42West. Her panel addressed reputational exposure in the digital age. Fellow participants included NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith, reputation adviser Mike Paul and lawyer Christina Sarchio. The company she was keeping was professional, institutional and concerned with consequences.

The panel title gives a useful glimpse of her working territory. Publicity can sound like a contest to secure attention. Reputation introduces a longer interval: what people understand about an organization before the announcement, during it and after the excitement has moved elsewhere. A headline is a moment. A business has to wake up the following morning.

There was a particularly concrete illustration of the value of agency relationships after the founders left. In a securities filing, 42West’s parent, Dolphin Entertainment, said the departure of three senior publicists and related staff contributed to a roughly $1.5 million revenue decrease in the third quarter of 2018 against the same period a year earlier. That was an aggregate effect, rather than a valuation of any individual’s contribution. Still, it put a number beside a business often described in terms of access.

Personal relationships can look intangible right up until they move. For a new agency, the corresponding challenge is to turn confidence in particular people into confidence in the organization they are building. Clients may arrive because they know a founder. Staying requires a team that can deliver.

Four signatures on the door

Lede’s first year gave the partnership an early public marker. In December 2018, Observer placed the firm second on its PR Power List and listed 32 employees. A new company had arrived with experienced people behind it. The distinction matters: founding dates tell you when the business began, while saying relatively little about how long its founders have been earning trust.

The four-founder structure was practical as well as unusual. Silverman and O’Sullivan brought talent expertise; Su brought brands; Rothman brought corporate communications. A client’s ambitions could cross those boundaries without fitting neatly into any one person’s previous job description. Inside the agency, the partners could ask each other questions before asking a client to make a decision.

Consider the ordinary complications of a collaboration. The artist wants the work to feel like theirs. The brand wants the association to make sense. The company wants an explanation that survives beyond the launch photograph. Each concern is reasonable. A partnership has to accommodate all three, preferably before somebody orders the invitations.

Rothman has described a preference for staying behind the scenes and an enthusiasm for working with other agencies. The invitation to contribute expertise is built into the way her own company began.

“Collaborating with other people makes you stronger.”

Sarah Levinson Rothman

Growth, with names attached

Expansion became visible in the people joining the business. In May 2024, Kimberly Bernhardt arrived as a senior executive in strategic communications, reporting directly to Rothman. Bernhardt brought experience from The Messenger, Bustle Digital Group, Condé Nast, Edelman and Golin. Adding an executive with that background extended the team’s experience across media organizations and communications consultancies.

A co-chief executive title can conceal the everyday substance of a job. A reporting line makes part of it legible. Rothman was building the practice around her, adding people with experience of the industries it served. The appointment also provides a more precise picture of her responsibilities than borrowing the fame of everyone on an agency’s client list.

Elsewhere, Lede was putting specialist leadership around work that could once have sat inside broader departments. In November 2024, it introduced an events division led by Emma Parker and Brendan Ordonez, reporting to the four co-founders. Ordonez had been vice president of brand at the firm since 2020. The new division gave events a dedicated place in the organization.

It is an easy category to underestimate. An event has guests, timings, vendors, a location and a hundred opportunities for an attractive plan to encounter an uncooperative reality. Giving that work its own leadership acknowledges the distance between suggesting a cultural moment and arranging for everyone to turn up at the right door.

The ownership story gets another chapter

Behind the public campaigns, Lede developed an investment history of its own. RIT Capital Partners invested in July 2021. Its 2024 annual report described an approximately 70 percent increase in the business’s EBITDA before RIT sold most of its stake in July 2024. RIT retained a small position. Shamrock Capital identifies 2024 as the year of its investment in Lede.

Those details belong to the company rather than to Rothman’s personal finances. They nevertheless show another dimension of the move she made in 2018. The agency was becoming a business in which outside investors took stakes and tracked operating performance. Creative judgment and commercial discipline had to inhabit the same enterprise.

In June 2025, Lede acquired Element Brand Group. Founder Heather Leeds Greenfield joined as partner and head of brand partnerships, along with her team. Element’s experience included work for Airbnb, Audible, Coca-Cola and the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee. The deal added people whose specialty was bringing organizations together around programmes and campaigns.

The logic resembles the original partnership at a larger scale: find an adjacent skill, bring in the people who know it and give that knowledge a place inside the business. A fuller list of services is useful only if somebody can actually do the work. Acquisitions carry that test into the next chapter.

A bigger room still needs people

The geographical expansion followed its own sequence. London opened in 2022; the acquisition of Paris agency OBCM followed in 2023. By September 2025, Lede was extending its talent division to Paris, supporting local talent, brands and existing clients working in Europe. The proposition required people who understood the market as well as an address in it.

Today, the company’s careers page lists New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Nashville, and describes a workforce of more than 240. It also spells out paid parental leave, hybrid arrangements for many roles and employer retirement contributions. Those are small-print decisions with considerable influence over what working at a company feels like.

That is where the ownership story returns to human scale. The founders chose their partners. As the business grew, other people chose to work for them. A firm built around judgment and relationships has to make itself a place where both can develop. The organization that advises clients about their public identity has an internal identity to maintain, too.

Lede takes its name from the opening of a news story. Rothman’s career invites attention to the decisions that precede that opening: which organization to join, which colleagues to trust, which specialist to hire, when to make room for another perspective. In 2018 she put her own name into the announcement. The business that followed has kept adding names.