media-entrepreneur
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Erick Goss Learned the Streaming Wars at Amazon - Then Built for the Families They Missed
A Navy cockpit taught him discipline. Early Amazon taught him distribution. Three daughters taught him the question that mattered: what happens after a child presses play?
Rafat Ali Built a Travel Media Company by Refusing to Stay in His Lane
An engineer became a reporter, a blogger became a publisher, and a two-year trip became Skift. Rafat Ali’s real product is a way of seeing industries before their borders disappear.
Stephen O'Shaughnessy
Stephen O'Shaughnessy is the founder and CEO of VideoElephant, a Dublin- and New York-based company that aggregates millions of professionally produced video clips from providers like Reuters, Bloomberg and Al Jazeera and licenses them to publishers, broadcasters and ad-tech platforms. He started the company in 2012 after shooting 500 travel videos of his own and finding there was no single marketplace to sell them. He has spent roughly 25 years building businesses in music, digital publishing, digital advertising and video production, and raised a EUR 5.5m Series A in 2019 led by Act Venture Capital to chase his stated goal of running the biggest video library in the world.
Janice Min
Janice Min is the CEO, editor-in-chief and co-owner of Ankler Media, the Hollywood insider newsletter-turned-media-company she built with Richard Rushfield starting in 2021. Before The Ankler, she spent two decades reshaping celebrity and entertainment coverage: as editor-in-chief of Us Weekly (2002-2009) she turned a struggling weekly into a cultural juggernaut, and as editorial director and later co-president of The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard she engineered one of the most celebrated print relaunches of the era. She has won an Emmy and multiple National Magazine Awards, and CNN named her one of the most consequential media figures of 2023.
Alex Ragir
Alex Ragir is the co-founder and co-CEO of Glimmer (formerly Storyhunter), the global content-production platform he grew from zero to a vetted network of more than 40,000 filmmakers and creators across 192 countries. Before building software, he was an investigative journalist and foreign correspondent for Bloomberg News and the Associated Press in Brazil, where he won the 2010 Overseas Press Club award for his reporting on financial crime in Latin America. He works at the seam between journalism, film, and enterprise technology, helping Fortune 500 companies hire and pay creators anywhere in the world.
Jarret Myer
Jarret Myer is the founder and CEO of UPROXX Studios, the independent youth-culture media company he rebuilt by buying UPROXX, HipHopDX and Dime Magazine back out of Warner Music Group in 2024 alongside will.i.am and former Complex chief Rich Antoniello. Three decades earlier he co-founded Rawkus Records, the late-'90s independent label that signed Mos Def and Talib Kweli and became the home of conscious, underground hip hop. Between those bookends he built and sold Uproxx Media and launched the YouTube talent shop Big Frame, making him one of the rare operators to ship culture-defining ventures across records, web publishing and online video.
Steve Gatena
Steve Gatena is the founder and CEO of Pray.com, the world's #1 app for daily prayer and faith-based audio content. A former NCAA football champion who won a Rose Bowl at USC, he built and sold a fast-growing video agency (REP Interactive) and ran a $150M aerial production company (Helinet) before the death of his business partner in a plane crash redirected his life toward faith. Launched in 2016, Pray.com became a leading destination for prayer, sermons, Bible stories narrated by celebrities, and faith community, raising more than $30M from investors including TPG Growth, Greylock Partners, Spark Capital, and Science Inc. In 2025 Gatena received the LA Times Executive Leadership Award.
Brian Morrissey
Brian Morrissey is the founder and editor of The Rebooting, a 92,000+ subscriber newsletter and podcast business dissecting the economics of modern media. After a decade shaping Digiday into the defining trade publication of digital media, he walked away in 2020 to build something leaner and smarter - a one-person editorial operation that doubles as a lab for sustainable media models. He also co-hosts People vs Algorithms with Troy Young and Alex Schleifer.
Matt Swider
Matt Swider is a consumer tech journalist, media entrepreneur, and founder of The Shortcut - the #1 consumer tech publication on Substack. With 25+ years in technology journalism, he went viral during the 2020-2021 PS5 shortage by tracking console restocks, growing his Twitter following from 8,000 to over 1 million in under two years and helping an estimated 400,000 people buy a console. He left TechRadar after nine years as US Editor-in-Chief to launch The Shortcut on November 8, 2021, which now boasts 155,000+ subscribers, a 40% open rate, and 1.5 million monthly website views.