Sarah Rothman and the work before the headline

Sarah Rothman helped start a publicity company by leaving one. In June 2018, she, Amanda Silverman and Meredith O'Sullivan departed 42West to set up their own firm. For people paid to arrange the next move, becoming the news themselves was a peculiar change of position. Their employer publicly wished them well. Their new business still had to earn its place.

“We were nervous as hell,” Rothman recalled. The admission has the advantage of sounding like someone who actually had a job to give up. A founder's story can become suspiciously tidy once the business has survived long enough to commission photographs. At the beginning, there is still the awkward matter of Monday morning.

The company became Lede. Rothman brought corporate communications; Silverman and O'Sullivan brought talent expertise. Christine Su joined as the fourth founder, bringing brand experience. That arrangement gave the new agency several ways into a client's business. An actor could have a production company. A musician could have a fashion collaboration. The company behind the entertainment needed a public identity of its own.

Rothman's part in that arrangement is easy to overlook if you read a publicity firm's client list as a seating chart for an awards dinner. Corporate communications sounds less photogenic than celebrity publicity. It also gets you closer to the decisions about what an organization is doing, why it matters, and how to explain it to people who have quite reasonably been thinking about something else.

A film company has a story, too

Before Lede, Rothman worked at Miramax and The Weinstein Company. By November 2007, she was moving from vice president of corporate communications at the latter to a consulting role. She had headed its corporate communications since its inception. She joined 42West in 2008, arriving with years of film-company experience rather than learning the business from the outside.

There are several stories inside any film release. One belongs to the director and cast. Another belongs to the audience deciding whether to buy a ticket. There is also the story of the company financing, producing or distributing the work. Those stories share a screen, but the people asking questions about them may have very different interests.

Rothman's earlier work offers a small, useful example. In January 2010, she appeared as a 42West contact on Sony's announcement of Crackle's The Bannen Way. The project was both an entertainment release and a demonstration of an online video business. The announcement explained the show while introducing readers to the network distributing it.

That was an early streaming proposition, years before the current abundance of services made choosing something to watch resemble a modest administrative task. The corporate story and the creative story were already arriving together. Following Rothman's career through those announcements gives her later partnership at Lede a clear professional continuity: entertainment companies had been part of her work for years.

Four people, more than one entrance

The June 2018 departure announcement named three established publicists and supplied few details about their planned enterprise. There was no elaborate public blueprint. Readers knew who was leaving, knew their experience, and knew they intended to start a firm. The founders had to turn those professional histories into a functioning organization.

The fourth founder made the combination more interesting. Su had worked in global communications at Converse. In a company serving performers as well as brands, that experience meant someone could approach a proposed collaboration from the organization's side of the table. Rothman's corporate background added another perspective. The promise of the partnership lay in the conversations between those specialties.

You can see why the design would appeal to clients. A brand partnership involves several people who each understand a different piece of the assignment. The talent team knows the person. The brand team knows the product and its audience. Corporate communications considers the business and its public position. Putting those capabilities together gives them a chance to resolve competing priorities before the campaign reaches the public.

There is a less glamorous benefit, too: someone has to translate. An attractive creative idea may create practical questions for a company. A carefully written corporate message may give a talent representative very little to work with. Rothman's specialty occupies a useful position in that exchange. The organization needs to sound like it understands the world in which its work will appear.

A plumber's boots enter the conversation

One Lede project took that exchange quite literally. For The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Rothman brought in Su's team. Red Wing made a physical version of Mario's boots, and the collaboration reached Nintendo's New York store. The corporate film assignment had found a way into the world of a footwear maker and a game character.

The boots themselves were made from Red Wing leather, with a reinforced toe and a mushroom-infused heel pad. They were displayed in New York for Mario Day in March 2023. A fictional plumber had acquired a rather serious pair of work boots. It was an agreeable joke because the craftsmanship was real.

Consider the simplicity of the object. A visitor did not need an explanation of the relationship between animation, games and consumer brands. The boots made the relationship visible. They offered something to photograph, discuss and recognize. A marketing brief that might otherwise have required several slides had become an object you could point at.

Rothman's documented contribution was bringing the brand team into the film work. The idea and execution belonged to a collaboration. That distinction matters in a profile of an agency executive: good judgment includes knowing whose expertise to invite. There is no need to assign every interesting idea to the person with the most prominent title.

The business behind the guest list

Lede's growth also produced evidence well beyond a famous roster. RIT Capital Partners invested in July 2021. In its 2024 annual report, it described the company as profitable and debt-free at investment, and reported roughly 70 percent growth in EBITDA before its July 2024 exit. RIT sold most of its stake and retained a small position.

EBITDA is a business earnings measure, before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. It is a useful change of subject in a profile surrounded by film premieres and fashion. A communications agency has payroll, clients and an operating model. Keeping those working together is part of the founders' achievement, even when it yields no especially entertaining photograph.

The figure belongs to Lede as a business and to the period RIT describes. It cannot tell us which founder supplied which portion of the result. Shared leadership is precisely the point here. Rothman helped build a firm whose financial performance could be discussed alongside its cultural work, and whose four co-CEOs remained identified with the business.

New addresses, new colleagues

The firm opened in London in 2022. Paris followed in 2023 through the acquisition of OBCM. Shamrock Capital's investment dates to 2024. In June 2025, Lede acquired Element Brand Group, bringing founder Heather Leeds Greenfield into the company as partner and head of brand partnerships.

Those moves expanded the setting in which Rothman and her colleagues worked. A local office provides people who know a market; an acquired team brings relationships and experience. In a business built around communication, geography means more than a new address on a presentation. It changes who can make the introduction and who understands the question when it arrives.

The Element acquisition also gave the firm's existing work a more explicit partnerships capability. Greenfield's team joined with her. The transaction fits a practical pattern: add people whose specialty connects with work clients already need. More services are useful when the people delivering them can work together.

By 2026, Lede ranked fifth on Observer's PR Power List. Its 2025 work included Vogue World: Hollywood and press leadership for the Academy Museum Gala. The same firm serving entertainment clients was handling events that brought fashion, film and other cultural figures into a shared public setting.

The pleasure of staying offstage

For all the public visibility of that work, Rothman describes a shared preference among the founders: “we all want to be behind the scenes.” It is a useful temperament for this profession. The person making the introduction does not have to remain in the middle of the photograph.

“Collaborating with other people makes you stronger.”

Sarah Levinson Rothman

There is something refreshingly practical about that ambition. Rothman's career runs from film companies to an established agency to ownership of a growing firm. Each move changed her position in the business. The work kept bringing her back to organizations, the people inside them, and the task of making their stories understandable outside the room.

Lede takes its name from the opening of a news story. For Rothman, the interesting part is how much has to happen before anyone writes that first paragraph: the decision to leave, the choice of partners, the introduction between teams, the agreement that makes an idea possible. By the time the story is public, the company she helped build has already been at work.