media-founder
(12)
Joe Purzycki and the business of belonging
At Puck, Joe Purzycki helped put writers inside the ownership circle. At Pro Shop, he is testing how far a shared obsession with golf can carry a media company.
Alice Ma and the unlikely business of making people care
Before she made shows about bodega cats, Alice Ma built tools for investigative reporters and helped an internet crowd bid for the U.S. Constitution. At Mad Realities, she is testing what happens when the audience gets closer to the making of television.
Arianna Huffington Has Changed the Subject Again
She built a publication around the internet's appetite for more. Her second company is built around a harder proposition: that progress can begin with less, done deliberately.
Danielle Weisberg Built a Media Habit - Then Knew When to Leave It
She and Carly Zakin turned a 6 a.m. email into a company, a community and an exit. The useful lesson is smaller: meet people inside the life they already have.
Tariana Little Put Public Health Behind the Camera
A failed qualifying exam loosened one plan. A 90-day Craigslist experiment supplied another. Tariana Little turned research, a camera and an insistence on community voice into an agency built to make complex work feel human.
Brandon Spano Is Building a Sports Network You Can Walk Into
He learned media by paying for airtime, then turned a Denver website into a five-city network of shows, memberships, merchandise, events, and one very literal sports bar.
Stephanie Wachs Built a Media Company for the Conversations We Usually Avoid
She turned a rejected podcast pitch into Lemonada Media. Now, as CEO, Stephanie Wittels Wachs is betting that intimate, un-Googleable conversations can carry an audio company into its next act.
Stephanie Drachkovitch Has Spent 42 Years Asking: What Happens If?
From a spare-bedroom startup to prison documentaries, celebrity formats and scripted drama, the 44 Blue co-founder has built a career on curiosity, access and the discipline to keep adapting.
Ravid Razak Turned a GoPro Editing Problem Into a Global Video Company
A post-trip editing headache gave Ravid Razak the idea for DreamItReel. More than a decade later, he is still applying a consultant's eye to the unruly business of making video at scale.
Shane Smith Built VICE Twice - Once Into an Empire, Then Back Into a Question
VICE began as a free Montreal magazine, became a multibillion-dollar wager on youth media, and collapsed under the weight of that wager. Its co-founder is back behind a microphone, chasing the one asset no bankruptcy court can sell: attention earned by curiosity.
Mandy Teefey Has Always Bet on the Story Everyone Else Left by the Curb
Before she became Wondermind’s co-founder and CEO, Mandy Teefey learned production from the floor up, turned an abandoned-couch family joke into a company name, and carried one young-adult novel through years of Hollywood limbo. Her career is a study in stubborn attention - and what it costs when conviction meets the operating realities of a startup.
Alice Ma
Alice Ma is the co-founder, CEO and Creative Director of Mad Realities, a New York media company building 'the MTV of the internet generation.' She designs unscripted shows made natively for social feeds - Shop Cats, Hollywood IQ, Proof of Love, Keep the Meter Running - that have racked up more than a billion views across just eight shows. Before TV, she helped run ConstitutionDAO, which raised $53 million in seven days, studied computer science, political economy and Arabic at UC Berkeley, and published the first investigation into terrorist crowdfunding on Bitcoin. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, she is trying to bootstrap a new Hollywood ecosystem out of the participation mechanics of K-pop and crypto.