The phone calls were often for Thane Kerner. In Silverchair’s early office, Lisa Cunningham scanned pictures, assembled book pages in QuarkXPress, and answered the telephone. On the other end, sometimes, was Dave Matthews Band’s manager. Kerner was doing graphic design for the band. Dave Matthews himself occasionally came by and stayed a while. A publishing company can have an unexpectedly good visitor list.
That detail belongs near the beginning of Kerner’s story because it changes the picture. The co-founder and former CEO of Silverchair also worked on the appearance of records people took home, opened, and studied. The design credits and the publishing career occupied the same working life. In Charlottesville, the distance between scholarly production and a rock band could be as short as a telephone extension.
Cunningham’s recollection captures the practical setting: a scanner, page layouts, incoming calls. The work involved putting material into a form someone else could use. Over the years, the equipment and the audience changed considerably. Kerner’s career makes an interesting route through those changes, from the physical package to the publishing platform and, later, the data generated when a reader arrives.
A record sleeve has a reader, too
Kerner’s name appears in the credits for Dave Matthews Band’s Crash, released in 1996, for art direction, design, and illustrations. The 2001 video collection The Videos 1994-2001 credits him and Catherine Dee with art direction and design. These were contributions to the objects surrounding the music: another way an audience encountered the band.
An album’s packaging makes a small demand on a large subject. It has to give the music a visible address. A credit tucked inside a concert film or video collection can make that work look rather dry, a name beside a technical responsibility. The listener’s experience is less administrative. A sleeve is held, unfolded, left on a desk. Design gets close to the person who has chosen to pay attention.
Design and publishing both ask how a body of work becomes approachable. An album illustration and a software strategy answer that question in different ways. Kerner’s record includes both kinds of work. He pursued both, and the band’s calls came into the same office where books were being assembled. The overlap was already there before anyone needed a theory for it.
Publishing and music design ran alongside each other.
A company named for losing the way
Kerner and Elizabeth Willingham founded Silverchair in 1993. Its first address was his apartment in Charlottesville’s Old Michie Building. The name came from The Silver Chair, part of a book series he loved, The Chronicles of Narnia. The appeal was persistence amid mistakes and confusion. For a new business, this was a refreshingly practical literary inheritance.
A company name tends to promise competence. This one carried an interest in continuing when the route becomes unclear. Its Narnia references eventually extended to team names and office locations. The company also acquired a small naming problem: people confused it with the Australian band. One applicant for an editorial assistant job offered experience as Soundgarden’s office manager. That application did not produce a hire.
The joke has a pleasing complication. Silverchair was unrelated to that band, yet one of its founders really was working with another band. A mistaken application could therefore be wrong in a strangely reasonable direction. The company’s name, Kerner’s music work, and its publishing business make a much less orderly origin story than the usual retrospective in which everything points straight toward the eventual product.
Room to work, light to work by
By 2008, Silverchair had about 70 people working onsite and needed more room. Kerner and Willingham wanted to remain in downtown Charlottesville. He saw possibilities in the upper floors of the historic Hardware Store building. Willingham worried about the darkness. Their office search had reached the useful stage where an attractive idea must survive contact with windows.
The space came with the remains of its earlier lives: old tool price tags and aging mustard packets. Architects Robert and Cecilia Nichols of FormWork worked with a building that was narrow and exceptionally long. Glass partitions and skylights helped open it up. The challenge was to make room for concentration without recreating a collection of isolated offices.
There is a modest, concrete version of company building in that episode. Employees need daylight. Colleagues need to be able to find one another. Founders can agree on a city and still assess the same room differently. Kerner’s enthusiasm for the space and Willingham’s concern about its light were both part of the decision. A business that dealt in digital information still had floors, walls, and people who had to spend their working day inside them.
Books and journals on the same screen
As Silverchair’s software business developed, the format of a publication became an increasingly interesting constraint. A university press might have journals in one place and books in another, even when a scholar’s question cut across both. Bringing them together required decisions about the experience of research as well as the delivery of files.
The 2017 partnership with Duke University Press put that question into a specific project. Duke’s collection included more than 50 journals, five digital collections, and over 2,000 books available online. Its humanities and social sciences journals and ebooks were to move onto Silverchair’s platform with a shared reading and research experience. Kerner emphasized the opportunity to experiment with services for scholars and libraries.
Other partnerships widened the setting. AIP Publishing’s 2022 agreement covered Scitation, including more than 800,000 articles and proceedings, books, Physics Today, and content from ten publishing partners. The American Accounting Association also selected Silverchair in 2022, with its 17 journals. For that partnership, Kerner stressed publishers’ ability to control product creation and layouts through tools they could use themselves.
Those examples give the platform business a human scale. A publisher wants room to make choices. A reader wants the relevant material. Between them sit interfaces, permissions, formats, and the unglamorous job of moving collections without making them harder to find. This is where a publishing technology company earns its place in the relationship.
Journals
Collections→Shared
platform→The
reader
The person outside the membership list
On his Zapnito profile, Kerner describes his work as “creating and evolving business strategies” for knowledge services. He puts the technical systems needed to carry out those strategies alongside them. The pairing is revealing: a plan for reaching an audience requires an actual mechanism for doing so.
His 2021 argument for Hum, the audience intelligence company he co-founded, focused on individual readers and on people beyond a society’s paid membership. He suggested that publishers could understand interests across their different activities and offer more suitable experiences. The audience could be larger than the list of people already paying the annual fee.
His numerical illustration was simple: ten times as many people paying one tenth as much would generate revenue equal to the existing membership base. It was explicitly a simplified example, rather than a reported result. Its usefulness lies in asking an organization to reconsider whom it counts. A person with a narrower interest may still be worth serving.
That makes an unexpectedly personal question out of audience data. Who has arrived? What do they want to do? What would make a return visit worthwhile? The commercial proposition depends on paying closer attention to the individual. In this part of Kerner’s work, the reader comes into view as someone with particular interests, including interests that do not fit neatly inside a membership package.
“creating and evolving business strategies”
Thane Kerner / Zapnito profile
Independence, then a different chair
The ownership of publishing infrastructure matters to the publishers who depend on it. In 2022, Thompson Street Capital Partners took a majority position in Silverchair. The company remained separate from the large publishers that might otherwise have bought it. Hum, previously its sister company, was under separate ownership and leadership by then.
For Kerner, the next visible change was his own title. On September 22, 2023, Silverchair appointed Will Schweitzer CEO and named Kerner chair of the board. His responsibilities continued to include vision, strategy, and innovation. He retained an ownership stake in the company.
Schweitzer had joined in 2019, then held product and customer leadership roles before becoming president. The succession therefore put an executive already familiar with the company into the chief executive’s job. Kerner’s move left him involved in its direction after three decades associated with its operations. The distinction matters when reading his career today: founder and board chair is the relevant description.
A founder’s career does not have to end at the handover, and an organization should eventually be describable through people besides its founders. Silverchair’s succession gives this story both developments at once. The company continued under Schweitzer; Kerner continued in a role concerned with where it might go.
Co-founds Silverchair with Elizabeth Willingham.
Thompson Street makes a majority investment.
Kerner becomes board chair; Will Schweitzer becomes CEO.
Still following the audience
In September 2025, Kerner appeared on Midnight at the Casablanca, the publishing and technology podcast hosted by Paul Peters and Lauren Kane. The episode considered early experiments in digital distribution and the industry’s current encounter with artificial intelligence. His experience stretched across several generations of publishing technology.
His work stretches from page production and album design to publishing software, audience intelligence, and board leadership. They also contain smaller images that resist the corporate biography treatment: a band manager calling the office, a company borrowing its name from Narnia, two founders considering whether an old building could be made light enough to work in.
Those details keep Kerner’s story attached to the people around the products. Willingham helped build the company. Cunningham made pages and later helped deliver publishing sites. Designers shared credits. Publishers brought collections, requirements, and readers. The work accumulated through those relationships, with new technologies repeatedly changing what was possible between them.
A record sleeve and a research platform offer very different invitations. Both depend on someone accepting. Kerner has spent much of his working life around that moment of contact: giving a work a form, helping it travel, and considering the person who might open it. The phone in the early office makes a fitting first image. There was already more than one audience trying to get through.