
A cold email to Mark Cuban opened the door. A recommendation engine supplied the evidence. Reggie Renner used both to build an Indiana media company that now measures attention across 33 brands without pretending a spreadsheet can write the story.
A professional basketball player became a VR founder, then found his sharpest position in venture capital: helping investors turn buried judgment into media people choose to read.
Jacob Cohen Donnelly is the founder of A Media Operator, a subscription publication, podcast, and conference for the people who run digital media companies. He started it in August 2019 as a weekend Substack while holding down full-time roles at CoinDesk and then Morning Brew, where he became Publisher. In 2024 he went all-in, rebuilt AMO into a five-person media business doing roughly $1 million in revenue, and turned the annual AMO Summit into the room media executives consider essential to be inside.