Laurel Touby
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Entrepreneur
Innovator and business revolutionary Laurel Touby knows what it takes for a start-up to thrive.
Laurel Touby
Laurel Touby founded MediaBistro, a website that revolutionized the way people in the media industry do business, connect, and communicate. During her time as CEO, she pulled the company through two recessions, pivoted, managed growth with minimal resources, and developed an audience via guerrilla and social marketing (before that term existed). Users subscribe to MediaBistro’s many services, which include online education, employment classifieds, conferences (offline), events (offline), forums, and industry-specific blogs, such as the popular TVNewser. Following the sale of the company for $23M to Jupitermedia, Laurel remained with the company through June 2011.
Laurel began investing in seed-stage startups, including AdYapper, Appboy, Apploi, Buddie, Clef, CreativeWorx, Fashion GPS, Learn Immersive, and Pivit. She is an LP in Lowercase Ventures (with holdings in Twitter, Uber, etc.) and in Pershing Square, among others. Laurel is active as a public speaker and hosted “Secrets of Successful Startups“ on CBS Interactive. Past episodes of the show can be found here: bit.ly/CBSTouby.
An inveterate connector, Laurel touches the entrepreneurial community in various ways, including via her monthly co-hosted Cereal Entrepreneurs breakfast, Flatiron Angel meetings and Startup Digital Dinners. She lives in a loft in Silicon Alley and is married to Inc. Magazine executive editor Jon Fine.
Links:
@laureltouby