The Venture Edge

I first met Richard Rosenblatt, the co-founder and CEO of a now very public new media company, back in 2006, after he had successfully sold MySpace to News Corp’s Rupert Murdochand had just started a long-tail phenomenon called Demand Media.  I had asked him to participate in an Internet forum I was hosting at USC.  People at that event were clearly watching and listening carefully to this serial entrepreneur because he is that rare person who not only envisions a business, but an entire industry, and then makes it happen. If you're familiar with his history, he has done it multiple times, but that’s another story. He became a friend (and, of course, he's a fellow Trojan), and last week I had the good fortune and excitement of being an investor in the company’s highly successful IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.  In the short space of about 4.5 years, Demand Media (DMD) has grown to more than 600 employees with locations in North America and Europe and is now worth as much or more than the New York Times on the public market.

If you're one of the thousands of potential entrepreneurs who want to make their mark on the Internet, you need to understand where things are going and there's no place better to do that than at the annual Web 2.0 Summit, which took place last week in San Francisco.  Unless, like my grad students last night, you get the chance to have a conversation with CEO/founder Richard Rosenblatt of Demand Media, arguably the person who knows more about how to deliver unique content to users in a way that is meaningful to them than almost anyone today.  That's because his company in just 3 short years has not only become the leading producer of unique content on the Web through its network of freelance creators, it is also the undisputed leader in distributed social media, powering the conversations of 3 billion users on sites such as USA Today, Fox News, and CNN.