Jonah Peretti

After the MIT, John Peretti worked at Eyebeam, where Josh Schachter was when developing Delicious. A worked on the RSS reader project ReBlog that enabled users to repost any article in their feed, a concept that inspired Tumblr and other similar services. He eventually met Ken Lerer who motivated him to launch something together. Lerer had Arianna Huffington join the project and together with other stakeholders they launched the Huffington Post. In 2011, when AOL bought the HuffingtonPost, Peretti left the Huffington Post to dedicate himself full-time to the development of BuzzFeed.

While working at the HuffingtonPost, Peretti launched BuzzFeed Laboratories as a side project in 2006 with John Johnson, spending a day a week on developing it. BuzzFeed was a no-writer, algorithm-driven only (based on rapidity of links dissemination) website that curated buzzworthy stories on the web. A BuzzBot would send the stories through instant messaging to the service’s users. In 2008, BuzzFeed raised $3.5 million. In 2011, Peretti hired Ben Smith from Politico to launch a newsroom within BuzzFeed. In 2012, BuzzFeed raised $15.5 million. In 2014, BuzzFeed raised $50 million. By 2016, BuzzFeed had became a fully-fledged news outlet. At that point, the finances of the company started to be in the red and layoffs started. Revenues were not increasing as they did the previous years. In 2020, BuzzFeed acquired the HuffPost in a deal that made Verizon Media a minority shareholder of BuzzFeed. In 2021, Jonah Peretti took BuzzFeed public.