The first useful fact about Shachar Orren’s career is not that she became a co-founder. It is that she arrived late enough to remember being an employee. In 2013, she walked into Playbuzz as hire number six, after more than nine years in Israeli journalism. The company had a product built around quizzes, polls and playful ways to make a reader do something besides leave. Orren had edited copy, written film reviews and risen through large newsrooms. She knew what it felt like to publish for an audience. She did not yet know much about building software for one.
That awkward fit proved durable. Orren has said she felt lost at first, dropped from a content-first world into the brisk dialect of a technology startup. Yet the mismatch contained an advantage. A publisher did not have to explain to her what a deadline does to a room, why production costs matter, or how humiliating it is to surrender both traffic and advertising money to a larger platform. She had sat on the customer’s side of the table.
The sixth chair
Print was contracting when Orren left it. Her explanation is characteristically blunt: “I was too young and too ambitious” to remain in an industry that seemed to be slowly dying. The move was not a rejection of publishing. It was an attempt to get closer to the machinery that might keep publishing solvent.
At Playbuzz, her job titles read like a company discovering what it needed. She was VP of Content, then Chief Storyteller, a wonderfully suspicious title in a sector fond of Vice Presidents of Acronyms. She helped publishers and brands use interactive formats, led content and brand work, and became an evangelist for a simple editorial idea: audiences should be participants, not upholstered furniture.
Her public writing from that period circles the same theme. Video changed as social platforms changed. Camera angles, sound, interactivity and production costs were not merely creative choices; they were responses to the habits of people holding phones. The editor in Orren remained interested in form. The operator began asking whether the form could scale.
A new name for a narrower promise
Playbuzz eventually outgrew the cheerful implication of its name. Orren led the 2019 rebrand to EX.CO, short for “experience company.” The shift was not cosmetic. The business was moving from a recognizable box of interactive tricks toward infrastructure: content tools first, then a progressively sharper concentration on video management, recommendation and monetization for publishers.
Startups are often praised for changing direction as though motion itself were evidence of wisdom. EX.CO’s pivots are more interesting because one thing barely moved: the customer. The company kept returning to media owners trying to hold attention, improve an experience and earn enough from it to fund the next story. Orren’s own advice to founders follows from that history. Pick an industry you care about, she says, because the product is likely to change and you may still be there ten years later.
“It’s not exactly a sell, we make money together.”Shachar Orren on EX.CO’s publisher model
The sentence explains why an editor could become a revenue chief without undergoing a personality transplant. If EX.CO earns when its publisher customers earn, selling becomes a shared calculation rather than a theatrical persuasion. It also makes failure harder to decorate. Revenue either appears or it does not.
When the storyteller gets a quota
By 2021, EX.CO had formally named Orren a co-founder. She had joined one year after the company’s creation, stayed through the changes and led the rebrand from New York. The appointment recognized a kind of founding that happens after incorporation: shaping the company that survives, rather than signing the paper for the company that starts.
Her present job combines Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Revenue Officer. The arrangement is uncommon enough to require explanation and logical enough to make the explanation feel overdue. Marketing controls language, position and attention. Sales hears objections in their natural habitat. Put them apart and each can produce a flattering fiction about the other.
Orren began sitting in on sales calls. Her marketing team learned where decks sagged and which promises customers repeated back. EX.CO stopped treating webinars as an obligatory square on the B2B bingo card and leaned harder into events, direct mail and hybrid campaigns. These were not timeless commandments. They were what the evidence supported. Her durable rule is more useful: plan to change your plan.
She has also argued that marketers participate in their own marginalization when they resist revenue targets. If the function appears only as a cost centre, it should not be surprised when a chief executive asks what, precisely, the centre costs. A shared brief lets brand work keep its imagination while giving it a number that survives the meeting.
Video, the object that resists a summary
The current threat to publishers arrives disguised as convenience. AI search can read a page, prepare an answer and spare the user a visit. The publisher funds the reporting; the interface keeps the attention. Orren says partners have seen traffic pressure from this zero-click habit. Her counterargument begins with the stubborn physicality of video: a summary of a clip does not reproduce the experience of watching it.
That does not make video easy. Editorial production is expensive. Orren estimates that even publishers making good original clips may cover only 20 to 30 percent of their pages. Scale requires a mix of owned work, licensed libraries and automated production. Intelligence then has to match the right clip to the page and decide which advertising demand to call, how many ads fit, and whether the result has made the page richer or merely louder.
The publisher video gap
Illustrative midpoint of Orren’s 20-30% estimate for pages covered by costly original editorial video, set against the goal of broad site coverage.EX.CO’s machine-learning yield engine makes billions of predictions in programmatic auctions each day. That scale sounds remote from the former film critic. It is actually the old editorial problem in industrial clothing: what belongs here, for this person, at this moment? Relevance remains the hinge. The machines simply turn it faster.
The case for leaving fingerprints
Orren is optimistic about artificial intelligence and impatient with the notion that optimism requires swooning. AI can help publishers create and place more video, improve contextual matching and personalize an experience without leaning on the creepy end of user tracking. It can also produce a great deal of prose that is competent, gleaming and hard to remember.
She calls this the “Shakespearean LinkedIn era,” a feed full of people suddenly writing with improbable polish. Her forecast is cultural, not technical: audiences will develop a taste for visible imperfection. An old grainy photograph, an unvarnished sentence, a thought that has not been sanded into corporate mahogany. “There’s a desire for content that is slightly more authentic,” she says, “that is less polished.”
There is a pleasant contradiction here. Orren sells systems for optimization while defending the texture that optimization tends to remove. Good publishing has always lived in that tension. An editor removes noise without bleaching the voice. A video platform has to improve yield without converting the reader into an obstacle between two ad slots.
One hundred children and every screen
Orren’s second piece of founder advice concerns the person sharing the trouble. Choose the co-founder carefully. She has worked with Tom Pachys for more than a decade and compares the partnership to having 100 children together. It is the sort of metaphor that makes “alignment” sound as bloodless as it deserves to.
The pair now look beyond the browser. Connected television and digital out-of-home screens bring the same fragmented pipes and unreliable signals that web publishers have spent years learning to navigate. Orren expects airlines, hospitality companies and rideshare businesses to find advertising revenue in their screens too. “Everything will be a screen,” she says. The important question is who controls the experience, the data and the economics once it is.
Her career has a satisfying loop. Journalism taught her that attention must be earned. Marketing taught her that attention needs a story. Sales taught her that the story eventually meets a budget. Technology gave her machinery that can repeat the encounter billions of times. None of those lessons cancels the others.
Orren did not leave the newsroom so much as widen it. Her customers still publish under pressure. Their audiences are still restless. The platforms are larger, the auctions faster and the screens more numerous. She sits between the sentence and the spreadsheet, asking each to account for the other. It is an editor’s position, really. Only now, the margin note has a revenue target.