ZelnickMedia

A Father and Son Team That Founds Web Start-Ups Wants to Finance Them, Too: Ken and Ben Lerer Get Their Own Fund

Peter Kafka in Media on February 2, 2010 at 3:30 am PT

Meet another set of investors funding New York-based Web start-ups: Lerer Media Ventures, run by Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and his son, Thrillist co-founder Ben Lerer. Their backers include familiar names like Ron Conway and Arianna Huffington.

Hot Potato Is Ready to Eat: Do Twitter, Facebook Users Want Another Real-Time Chatter Service?

Peter Kafka in Media on November 25, 2009 at 7:25 am PT

Last month I told you about Hot Potato, one of the buzziest start-ups in the very buzzy “real time” sector. Now you can check out the service yourself. Or at least you can get a glimpse of it in this video.

BusinessWeek’s Future Is Cloudy, but Better Than It Could Have Been: The Grim Non-Bloomberg Scenario

Peter Kafka in Media on October 30, 2009 at 12:12 pm PT

BusinessWeek employees are waiting to hear if they’ll have jobs once Bloomberg takes over the publication, and I’m told that staffers expect to hear their fate shortly after Thanksgiving. That has to be unnerving, but I can at least offer a little bit of comfort in the worst-case scenario employees would be facing had they been purchased by private equity firm ZelnickMedia. The short version: Almost everybody gets fired.

BusinessWeek’s Pitch to Investors: Buy Us, Then Fire Us

Peter Kafka in Media on September 15, 2009 at 9:10 am PT

How do you sell a business magazine that lost $43 million last year? Convince buyers that they could fire 20 percent of the staff without missing a beat. That’s part of the pitch Evercore Partners has been making to investors on behalf of McGraw-Hill, which wants to dump BusinessWeek. Look out, copy editors!