Jon Steinberg Biography
Jon Steinberg is an American former COO and President of Buzzfeed, Former CEO of Daily Mail North America and currently the CEO of Cheddar Inc., a new media company covering tech news and culture. In September 2016, Cheddar received $10 million in funding from Comcast and other investors. He is a member of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and the Paley Center Media Council.
Jon Steinberg Age
As of 2019, Steinberg is about 42 years old of age. He is an American by nationality and he belongs to white ethnicity.
Jon Steinberg Family
Steinberg’s mother, Renee, is a teacher at a New York private School and his father, Richard Steinberg, is a doctor turned real estate broker.
Raising Jon Steinberg, now the president and chief operating officer at BuzzFeed was easy, his parents say. He was a good kid who didn’t put up much of a fight when it came to most things. But when it came to sports, the Steinbergs had a fight on their hands. Sports, they recall, was not Jon’s cup of tea.
Renee Steinberg remembers that her son was interested in every new technology that came out — from computers and video games to cordless phones.
Jon Steinberg Wife
Steinberg is a married man. He is married to Jill. They are blessed with two children Cooper and Edie.
Jon Steinberg Education
Steinberg attended Grammar-High School from 1988 to 1995; he is a graduate of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs 1995-1999 and holds an MBA from Columbia University from 2001-2003.
Jon Steinberg Career
Steinberg joined BuzzFeed in June 2010 growing the company from 15 employees to over 300. Under his leadership, BuzzFeed has grown into a global and profitable social advertising business that works with over half of the top 100 brands. Steinberg was named one of AdAge’s Media Mavens in 2012.
Steinberg was previously Strategic Partner Development Manager on Google’s SMB (Small Medium Business) Partnerships team. Prior to Google, Jon was the Director of Business Development at Majestic Research and the founder of iBuilding, a commercial real estate software company backed by Tishman Speyer Properties, Benchmark Capital, and 12 Entrepreneuring.
In 2013, he joined the board of Legal Mobile App startup, Shake.
Prior to founding Cheddar, Jon was Chief Executive Officer of DailyMail.com North America and played a leading role in building the company’s digital media assets in the US.
Jon Steinberg Net Worth
As of 2019, Steinberg has an estimated net worth of $850,000.
Jon Steinberg Twitter
Jon Steinberg Interview
Interview with Jon Steinberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Cheddar
Elyse Southwell: Welcome Facebook live Elyse Southwell here at Nasdaq Marketsite, for our first series called Nasdaq disruptors. We have an awesome first guest the one, the only Jon Steinberg is our guest so welcome.
Jon Steinberg: Yeah I was the president of Buzzfeed.
Elyse Southwell: Okay!
Jon Steinberg: And the CEO Daily Mail North America and now Cheddar.
Elyse Southwell: Okay. So let’s talk about this, being that you were at Buzzfeed you were at Daily Mail now you are at Cheddar what intrigued you about the news?
Jon Steinberg: I guess you know I think of it as art, I really do. I think that I like creating something I like lots of people seeing it and I guess there’s a fair amount of ego that goes into that you know, but I find it enormously satisfying to create something a lot of people see, and I like the feedback so there’s a vanity in that, but there’s also a desire to create something that’s of value. I think that there’s easier ways to make money than media. I think if I was just interested with purely making money it would probably be a hedge fund, but I get genuine satisfaction from creating stuff. With Cheddar, when people tell me that they learn something every time they watch or they are exposed to new companies for new ideas, that’s the most satisfying part of my professional life.
Elyse Southwell: Cool! So, can you tell us a little about Cheddar, what it is you know?
Jon Steinberg: You Know at Buzzfeed when we started leaning into what people called it and we stopped trying to tell people what it was, everything sort of went our way so I live by that, and people have called Cheddar, first the Wall Street Journal called this app, and everybody started calling us the CNBC for millennials and that’s a hell of a thing to be called. So I’ll go with that for now. We have broader aspirations; we just announced yesterday that we’re opening up a studio in the corner of the flat iron building, where the Sprint store is. We are going to call that Cheddar Life, it’s going for more lifestyle programming, but ultimately, we are a business technology and media news company.
Elyse Southwell: So would you say that you yourself are a disruptor given your background?
Jon Steinberg: I like being disruptive, I mean that’s for sure, Yeah, I also get genuine satisfaction from stirring stuff up, and what’s nice is that when you don’t have anything, at Buzzfeed we didn’t have anything when we got started. We had 15 people and we had a little bit of traffic and no revenue, you can really mess with the incumbents and I like messing with the incumbents.
Elyse Southwell: So what would you say I guess would be a challenge at Cheddar, and or I guess what’s your day to day like?
Jon Steinberg: Everything is a challenge, and at the end of every day you want to like pull your hair out of your head and you’re really dusted up, and you have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and go at it again the next day. So I think endurance and being a marathon runner is really what’s key to this. Every day is filled with successes, things that are exciting and then any kind of failures and fallbacks and all sorts of things like that. So that’s the hardest part of it all, and what we are doing now is incredible logistically complex. We do a live show at 9:30 from the floor of the New York stock exchange and from Nasdaq Marketsite we are piped between the two places. We do that then we’ve got to go and produce that show again for the next day as well as creating new programming, sell advertising packages and there’s a tremendous amount of logistical complexity in terms of working with all the video production hardware, all the vendor relationships, all the data relationships, all the production graphics, it’s more running a factory than I have really been involved in.
Elyse Southwell: so you mentioned some of the successes, could you tell us about one success that you’ve had so far, obviously you are in the initial stages, but?
Jon Steinberg: I think the fact that the programming is resonating with so many people, and we are routinely getting eighty to a hundred thousand live viewers across the first hour, that’s more success than I could have ever hoped for. From a standpoint, everyday every show should be our best show, and on a day like today where we broke the story we had Dan Roth from LinkedIn talking about their new video product. We had Kathryn Minshew, the founder of the Muse which as raised, I think 20 or $30 million talking about her company, and we had Gweneth Palthrow company Goopon talking about their new makeup line, and we were all trying on the makeup. That level a variety from a large market cap company to a startup to a fun type thing, that’s a show that I want every day and I want right now eighty to a hundred people to see that every day. I judge us by the last show; the last show has to be the best show. I’ve got to be proud of the last show, that in Fidelity Today was our first financial sponsor, we used the Fidelity app in the show to look up analyst ratings and quotes and that was a breakthrough type of endorsement. When we were Buzz Feed and we got GE to advertise for us the first time, that was an endorsement for that company. So I look for these victories every day and I want them.
Elyse Southwell: Yeah, awesome, so what would you say I guess how does it compare to running Buzzfeed and running Cheddar?
Jon Steinberg: You know I don’t ever look backwards, I really don’t you know. I guess I do for like learning, but I get asked that question all the time, and I think it’s all sort of the same and all very different. How does it compare? I think I have learned a lot, I’m always having to up-level myself and kind of reinvent myself so there’s never that much to learn as much as kind of you know, How do I go through that progression again of discovering everything new, I guess.
Elyse Southwell: So, here at Nasdaq we love Cheddar.
Jon Steinberg: Thank you, we love you guys.
Elyse Southwell: Fabulous, so I think that–
Jon Steinberg: Precious is right up there, Precious from for my team who is at TVC her booth, well she’s not there now. She’s typically in that booth.
Elyse Southwell: Well you seeing somebody up there now, right? So, what do you think is going to happen with the future of the TV industry? I mean, I look at Cheddar and we love you guys. Obviously I look at you as a disruptor of the television industry, what do you think?
Jon Steinberg: TV is over, period, end of sentence, over! The viewing audiences especially for cable news are 50 or 60 years old. Media viewer for fox is 65 or 68, media viewers for any of these networks is in their early 60s and live video programming is undergoing a renaissance, whether it’s Facebook or Roku or twitter or sling TV or all these different platforms people want that programming, but nobody wants a crappy cable box. It’s a terrible experience, it’s overpriced, it’s finito. It is what happened to newspapers, it’s happening to television now, and they make too much money and it creates a passivity and contentment that is right for someone like me who’s got nothing to go after just attack.
Elyse Southwell: I don’t know, I’m not a business insider but you said you do not see a 18 year old kid coming out of college or 21 year old coming out of college and saying you know calling up his local cable company and saying, hey! Come install a cable box.
Jon Steinberg: Right.
Elyse Southwell: So you think that’s why?
Jon Steinberg: Do you?
Elyse Southwell: I mean I do, but, I also have Apple TV and I–
Jon Steinberg: Oh you do? But you are not 18 to 20.
Elyse Southwell: Do I think that? I don’t know, I agree with you.
Source: nasdaq.com