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Shachar Orren Left the Newsroom - Then Built the Business Meant to Keep Newsrooms in Business
After nearly a decade editing other people’s stories, Shachar Orren joined a six-person startup and learned to sell. Twelve years, one rebrand and several pivots later, she is still working on the same stubborn question: how can publishers turn attention into a business without making the audience pay the price?
Tom Pachys
Tom Pachys is the co-founder and CEO of EX.CO, a Disney-backed video technology and monetization platform used by publishers including Hearst, CBSi, Time, Nasdaq, and VICE. He started building websites at 12, served in an elite Israeli intelligence-technology unit, was an early leader at SundaySky, and co-founded the machine-learning startup Whimado before co-founding Playbuzz in 2012, which he rebranded into EX.CO in 2019. He now leads roughly 160 people worldwide, betting that AI and supply-path optimization can rescue the economics of online video for the open web.