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Mass Appeal
Mass Appeal is a New York-based media and content company that calls itself the elevated voice of hip-hop. Founded as a graffiti fanzine in 1996 and revived in 2013 by rapper Nas, CEO Peter Bittenbender and the late journalist-filmmaker Sacha Jenkins, it spans a record label, film and TV production, digital series, a creative agency and direct-to-consumer commerce. The company is best known for the Hip Hop 50 initiative marking the genre's 50th anniversary, Grammy- and award-winning documentaries, and a music catalog built around legacy artists and their new work.
StoneFly, Inc.
StoneFly, Inc. is a Castro Valley, California enterprise storage company founded in 1996 that helped turn iSCSI into an industry standard - it registered iSCSI.com in March 1996 and shipped one of the first iSCSI storage appliances in 2002. Today it builds NAS, SAN, unified scale-out (USO), backup and disaster-recovery appliances, and cloud storage, all powered by its patented StoneFusion operating system and Air-Gapped Vault immutable, ransomware-resistant technology. A subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory (DNF), StoneFly serves 10,000+ customers from SMBs to Fortune 500 and government - including deployments aboard US Navy Littoral Combat Ships and Virginia-class submarines.
Peter Bittenbender
Peter Bittenbender is co-founder and CEO of Mass Appeal, the New York-based hip-hop media, label, and creative agency he relaunched in 2013 with Nas and the late Sacha Jenkins. Before Mass Appeal he co-founded Decon, the independent label and creative shop that seeded the modern hybrid label-agency model. He spent 2023 leading Hip Hop 50, then 2025's 'Legend Has It' rollout of seven classic-artist albums, and won the 2022 Billboard Indie Power Players nod along the way.