To understand what makes BuzzFeed tick, you need to know how Dao Nguyen thinks about data.
As the publisher in charge of BuzzFeed, which has annual revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars, you might expect Dao Nguyen to be getting the best tables at fancy restaurants in order to land advertising deals with chief marketing officers. Instead, Nguyen meets me at a Le Pain Quotidien cafe wearing a grey fleece with the Dow Jones logo on it. She’s every bit the down-to-earth geek who you’d expect to be building BuzzFeed’s technology and data infrastructure.
It turns out that BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti bestowed the title on her based on a much older definition of a publisher’s role. “Traditionally that meant owning a printing press and dealing with delivery trucks and newsstands,” Nguyen told me. “Whereas with digital media, getting your content to the public is all about your technical platform, your distribution plans, on social networks or other technical platforms.”
read full article here: Fast Company
