subscription-media
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Sarah Personette
Sarah Personette is the CEO of Puck, the journalist-owned media company often described as 'Vanity Fair for the Substack era.' She took the top job in January 2024 after a career spent on the revenue side of media's biggest platforms - head of ad sales and Chief Customer Officer at Twitter through its 2022 sale, VP of global business marketing at Facebook, COO of Refinery29, and U.S. president of Universal McCann. At Puck she is betting that journalists are the original influencers, fusing the financial incentives of the creator economy with old-school reporting rigor, and pushing the company toward profitability while expanding into fashion, sports, and live events.
JaeKwon Son
JaeKwon Son is the founder and CEO of The Miilk (더밀크), a Silicon Valley-based subscription media and tech-intelligence platform that delivers technology, economy, and investment insight to Korean readers worldwide. After 17-plus years as a tech and business reporter in Korea and a stint as Maeil Business Newspaper's Silicon Valley correspondent, he immigrated to the U.S. and launched The Miilk in 2019 to bridge American innovation and Korean enterprise. Under his leadership the company raised roughly $4.8 billion KRW (about $3.8M) in Series A funding, broke the exclusive that Tesla was entering humanoid robotics, and built an ad-free subscription model focused on perspective over raw news.
Hamish McKenzie
Hamish McKenzie is the New Zealand-born co-founder and Chief Writing Officer of Substack, the subscription newsletter platform that has fundamentally reshaped how writers monetize their work. A former journalist and Tesla lead writer who wrote a book about Elon Musk's EV revolution, McKenzie pivoted from covering disruption to causing it - co-founding Substack in 2017 with Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi. Today the platform hosts over 50,000 earning creators and has raised $213 million total funding including a $100M Series C. McKenzie hosts The Active Voice podcast, delivered a TED2025 talk on the future of media, and is writing a book called 'How to Save the Media' due in 2026.