HuffPo Co-Founder on Where He Thinks Tina Brown’s Daily Beast Went Wrong
Just in case you missed it, BuzzFeed Chairman Ken Lerer was the star of the full-page front-of-book Q&A in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine. (Though the magazine doesn’t ID him as such, he’s also managing director of Lerer Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital fund, and chairman of Betaworks.) The interview, by Amy Chozick, is a brisk, entertaining read that covers everything from the NRA to nepotism to animal slide shows, so please read it. But for now, I’d like to dwell on this single exchange:
Q: People thought Tina Brown’s Daily Beast would go head to head with Arianna [Huffington] and The Huffington Post, which you founded together. But that hasn’t really happened. Is it a disadvantage to have an editor from the old media days of town cars and huge salaries?
A: I know Tina well, and she can be hungry when she wants to be. We spent a million dollars the first year of The Huffington Post. My guess is that they spent at least 10 times that the first year. So it doesn’t mean that Tina spent so much, it just means that maybe she raised too much money. Sometimes it isn’t good to have all that money, especially with a start-up. They don’t have particularly great technology, and they haven’t built a community.
