Jonah Peretti

BuzzFeed made the world a meme.

- Max Read

“I heard WeGrow, the preschool, is being shut down,” Jonah Peretti says, sitting in a conference room in BuzzFeed’s New York offices. “How do you explain that to your 4-year-old?” He affects a gently parental tone: “‘There’s this guy Adam Neumann, and he’s very charismatic …’”

Like Neumann, Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, took money from the Japanese investment giant Soft- Bank—not the company’s Saudi-backed Vision Fund, he’s careful to clarify—early in his start-up’s life. Unlike WeWork, though, BuzzFeed has managed to keep its head above water for 13 years in an industry with much worse prospects than those of real estate. Since its founding in 2006 and especially since the creation of its news division in 2012, BuzzFeed has led the transformation of a media industry threatened by tech mega-platforms, private-equity vultures, fickle readers, and declining ad sales. It has pioneered new formats and business models, all while breaking major national stories like the infamous Steele dossier. (Even the New York Times has taken notice: Its 2014 “Innovation Report” looked to BuzzFeed as a model of web-publishing excellence. Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor, has remarked on its substantial journalistic impact.) But it’ll probably always be known for the memes. “The audience still isn’t bored of quizzes,” Peretti says.

When did you first see “the dress”? 1

I was out in a restaurant, and I was trying to be polite and not look at my phone and hanging out with my friends. And my phone was vibrating, and people were like, “Oh my God.” The restaurant I was in, literally all the waiters were looking at it. People were passing it around.

How long did that last?