Managing Director of Supernode Ventures Laurel Touby on Building a Venture Capital Firm
Laurel Touby founded mediabistro.com, 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 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. 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: http://bit.ly/CBSLTouby.
An inveterate connector, Laurel touches the entrepreneurial community in various ways, including via her monthly co-hosted Cereal Entrepreneurs breakfast, Supernode Ventures meetings and Startup Digital Dinners. She lives in a loft in Silicon Alley and is married to Jon Fine, Author of “Your Band Sucks” and Executive Editor of Inc. Magazine.
