Jonah Peretti
Founder & CEO, BuzzFeed · 2 appearances on the record.
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founderexecutive@peretti ↗buzzfeed.com/jonah ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
Jonah Peretti co-founded The Huffington Post in 2005 alongside Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer. He subsequently founded BuzzFeed in 2006 to pioneer viral digital media and algorithmic social sharing.
25statements → 5claims → 4claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.96/5average certainty → 1.92/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 4said about them ↓
4 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
5 assertions · 2 opinions · 13 insights · 3 disclosures · 2 what ifs · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Jonah argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Jonah Peretti on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Jonah Peretti said on How I Built This that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Peretti: BuzzFeed made the right call publishing the Trump-Russia dossier
“I definitely think it was the right decision, and the reason we published it was because you had everyone in the senior levels of government and media talking about this document and referring to the document even in public communications.”
Peretti plans to resolve BuzzFeed's going-concern accounting notice
“So our plan and management's plan is to resolve that going concern. And really going, going back to founder mode of saying, hey we got to reinvent the company for this near future, and wanting investors to know there's risk to that, but also now we're getting …”
Peretti: Publisher content no longer goes viral across a fragmented social web
“The biggest difference is that content from publishers used to go viral on Facebook all the time, and everyone used to be on Facebook. Now, now the social web is really fragmented. Some people are on Facebook, some on Instagram, some on TikTok, so, you know, s…”
Peretti: Physical events will grow as AI makes software infinite
“I think that you can embrace AI and use it in products, but you also can counter program AI, which is people are sick of just digital experiences and want to connect with other people in the real world. And it's also scarce. You know, if all of a sudden softwa…”
Peretti: BuzzFeed should not have done debt-laden SPAC deal to go public
“There's a million tactical things that if I had a time machine, I could, you know, like not, not do a SPAC acquisition where we take on a bunch of debt you know, before and go public without raising capital. That was, that I would tell my younger self not to d…”
Peretti: Silicon Valley Tech Companies Are Monocultures Shunning Content Creators
“If you look at all the big tech companies in Silicon Valley, they're monocultures of engineers and business people. They don't really hire people who make and create content.”
Peretti: Why he rejected Disney's 2013 buyout offer for BuzzFeed
“I think that part of it is a gut thing or an emotional thing where you just didn't feel ready. I felt like there was a lot more we had to build. At the time we were really a website and our video business had just started. It was growing so much. And I knew th…”
Peretti: Long-term building requires a high valuation and large investment capital
“The valuation is set through investment, and the fact that people have invested in us has given us resources To build big things in the future, and to not think day to day, like, how are we doing this quarter, or how are we doing, you know, this week, and thin…”
Peretti: Viral consumer businesses often peak in their first year
“There's a weird dynamic of this kind of super connected viral internet, which is that oftentimes people have their best year of sales the first year because it's, there's novelty, and it goes viral, and then it's like, you know, how, what do you do the second …”
Peretti: Great content and teaching adapt in real time to audience feedback
“I think if you think about content from a, from at the time, print and broadcast, you think about making something that you push out to this giant audience, but if you're in a classroom teaching, you know, 25 kids that are in front of you real, you start, you …”
Peretti: A strong right-wing media outlet always leaves room for a left-wing equivalent
“In every industry, if there's a Coke, there's going to be a big spot for a Pepsi, and the Drudge Report's out there by themselves, and in every, in political media, if there's a strong right-wing thing, there's always room for a left-wing, and the internet was…”
Peretti: BuzzFeed Could Not Have Raised VC by Pitching Journalism Hires
“Cause we probably wouldn't have been able to even raise money if we had said, oh, our plan is to hire lots and lots of journalists and reporters.”
Peretti: Election Run-Ups Are the Best Time to Launch News Organizations
“We learned from Huffington Post that building a news business in the run-up to election is a good time to do it”
Peretti: The best internet businesses align core products with native advertising
“I looked at the best businesses on the internet, and they tended to use some form of native advertising. So Google had a search engine, and you enter a keyword in, and it would give you a bunch of related links, but it would also give you a bunch of related pa…”
Peretti: Social content succeeds as relational connective tissue, not raw information
“When we started BuzzFeed, everyone thought of content as information to get in people's head. This is the article. Are people going to read it and get the information in their head? We had this insight that content was on social was a way of connecting with so…”
Peretti: People Share Harvard Business Review to Signal Intelligence
“So people like to say that they read Harvard Business Review or share articles from Harvard Business Review because it seems like they're smart and like, and it has the word Harvard in it.”
Peretti: Founding startups is not a good way to make money
“First of all, in terms of the money question you're asking, it's not a good way to make a lot of money. Sometimes people are fortunate and make a lot of money in startups, but most of them fail, and when I think about the New York tech scene and the people tha…”
Peretti: In viral media, the audience becomes the distribution network
“It's supposed to be there's an executive or an editor or someone who determines what lots of people see, and this was just an emergent thing where sending it to people resulted in more people seeing it, and people became the distribution. The way that it sprea…”
Peretti: Viral diffusion timelines dropped from months to weeks between 2001 and 2003
“And with each project, the timeline for it to spread got shorter. So, so, so the Nike email diffused over something like three and a half months, and then rejection line was like two months for, you know, and then like it was like two, three weeks you know, so…”
Peretti: John Johnson personally funded BuzzFeed's expenses at launch
“When we started, John just paid every month the expenses of BuzzFeed.”
Peretti: BuzzFeed Doubled Audience Annually From Launch
“We basically doubled our audience every year from when we launched the site, and it started with something like 200,000 or 300,000 people a month.”
Peretti: SoftBank funded BuzzFeed so he could stay at HuffPost
“Really the first time we were able to raise money, you know, was from SoftBank, which also was invested in HuffPost, and they, there was another firm that wanted to invest, but they told me I had to leave HuffPost.”
Peretti: BuzzFeed's branded HBO 'Game of Thrones' quiz hit 1M views
“When quizzes got really big, a month after that, we could have a branded quiz for HBO, which is, how will you die in Game of Thrones? And you answer questions, and it'll be like, you'll be trampled, or you'll be beheaded. And, like, it was, it got a million vi…”
Peretti: Traditional business people expect startup founders to wear hoodies
“People get mad if you don't wear them, you know. Particularly, like business people, you know. If I, like, wear a nice button down and go to a meeting, they're like, oh, it's kind of disappointed. I kind of wanted, like, a startup person.”
The other half of the tape: Jonah Peretti's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 3 episodes on How I Built This. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Guy Raz 4
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Advice Line with Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed | May 7, 2026 | 13m |
| Live Episode! BuzzFeed: Jonah Peretti | Jul 27, 2017 | 31m |