Penske Media's Billion-Dollar Rise
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A story about how Jay Penske, son of billionaire Roger Penske, built a media empire from scratch.
"He originally started getting into digital business in his twenties when he bought mail.com. He was going to create a new email service. It didn't work out, so he eventually sold the domain mail.com to someone else and made a little money doing that.
He still wanted to get into digital and media, so he started an ad network in the 2000s. It was going okay, and then they eventually started buying publications to put ads on. Slowly over the last 20 years, they started gaining momentum.
They buy more and more publications. He's got a chip on his shoulder because he's the son of a billionaire. He says he's taken no money from his parents and started this with a very small sum of his own money. He's just slowly rolled this into another thing and another thing.
Now it's this massive business. Two or three years ago they raised $200 million to further fund acquisitions. They own South by Southwest, the Golden Globes, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, a large chunk of Vox, Variety, Billboard, Women's Wear Daily, New York Magazine, and more. They get hundreds of millions of monthly uniques and they're one of the few media companies that's consistently profitable.
When he hires people - they have something like 1000+ people - he interviews every single person they hire. When he buys a company, he wants to interview every single person who works there. They say he's a steward of the brand and truly cares."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.