Jonah Peretti is an American entrepreneur known as the co-founder and CEO of Buzzfeed, an American Internet media, news and entertainment company.
Early life and education
Jonah Peretti was born on January 1, 1974, in Contra Costa County and raised in Oakland, California. His father, an Italian and English, is a criminal defense lawyer and also a painter. His mother, a Jewish, is a school teacher. His stepmother was an African-American.
Peretti is an Internet Entrepreneur and a co-founder and the CEO of BuzzFeed. He is also one of the co-founders of The Huffington Post and a developer of reblogging under the project “Reblog”.
Jonah Peretti attended The College Preparatory School in Oakland, California, and then graduated with a degree in Environmental Studies in The University of California, Santa Cruz in 1996. In the mid-1990s, he taught computer science classes at Isidore Newman School in New Orleans, Louisiana. He also completed a postgrad at the MIT Media Lab.
While he was there, his email exchange with Nike over a request to print “sweatshop” on a customer order shoes that went viral. He is the elder brother of comedian-writer, Chelsea Peretti. Their brother is a figurative artist who is residing in Pennsylvania, while his other sister is attending at Drexel University. Peretti is married to a blogger, Andrea Harner, with whom he has twin sons.
Career
Peretti set up two websites between 2001 and 2003, impersonating people with the intention of slandering them. One site impersonated John Lott, an American gun rights advocate with whom Peretti disagreed. Another site impersonated a business rival, who set up a dating site that rivaled Peretti’s service. Peretti apologized to both men in his 2005 legal statement.
Peretti co-founded The Huffington Post along with Andrew Breitbart, Kenneth Lerer and Arianna Huffington in 2005. In 2011, he left The Huffington Post after it was brought by AOL for $315 million. He hosted the Contagious Media Showdown at Eyebeam in 2005, where he worked from 2001-2006 as a Director of the R&D Lab. During the process, he developed the concept of the “Bored at Work Network”.
In November 2006, he founded the “Internet popularity contest” site BuzzFeed and began working full-time after he left The Huffington Post. The site continued to grow for over $35 million in funding from investors the next year. The site made another $50 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. This time they made more than double than its previous rounds of funding. The site was valued at nearly $1 billion. Peretti announced in 2019 that the BuzzFeed would be cutting its overall workforce by 15%. He also said that he wanted to reduce costs without resorting to additional fundraising.
Peretti and BuzzFeed
Peretti has a net worth of $200 million. He is considered to be the veritable king of viral media and marketing. He is the creator of such viral projects like “BlackPeopleLoveUs.com” and the “Nike Sweatshop Emails”. Peretti and his sister, Chelsea, also launched the popular “New York Rejection Line”, which received a great deal of attention in the media.
Johan Peretti launched BuzzFeed in 2006 as an experimental lab that focused on making things people wanted to share and tracking viral contents. Under his leadership, the BuzzFeed has grown to over 1000 employees worldwide. There are more than 200 million monthly visitors and 1.5 billion monthly video views, with producers and writers creating entertaining and shareable contents, and editors and reporters covering everything politics to technology and investigations. BuzzFeed has also pioneered social advertising, which allows the world’s leading brands to build shareable campaigns.