We resume at BuzzFeed, where Dan built a team that grew online newsletters into one of the biggest traffic referrers, writing over 200 posts that drove over 250M clicks to its site. He knows how to exploit opportunities, bending them towards a positive and focused purpose. You can feel this energy as he applies innovation and creativity to managing people and projects. The definition of an innovative leader.

BuzzFeed is an online publication founded by Jonah Perretti in 2006. Dan’s first year, he studied their email design and started cultivating a newsletter team of three, then five. By Dan’s fifth year of employment, the company spiked in growth from 175 employees to 1500 employees and opened 20 offices worldwide. Last I checked, 24 blogs were trending.

Dan gives a unique perspective about his teambuilding exercises that are not really teambuilding exercises. He built the team and passed it on to capable hands as he did after creating Not a Newsletter, a monthly briefing with news, tips, and ideas about how to send better email worth signing up for if you have a blog. To foster trust, he turned ‘his meetings’ into ‘their meetings.’

You might have noticed BuzzFeed in the news lately. Entrepreneurs under financial pressure can have difficulties fulfilling promises when they take their companies public, which was the case at BuzzFeed. Seventy disgruntled employees could not sell their shares because stock prices dropped after their Initial Public Offering (IPO) in December 2021. This collective group has sued the media outlet for $8.7M. 

The New Yorker, on the other hand, was a whole new scary and exciting challenge for Dan. An established, well-respected magazine. Its first publication hit the marketplace on February 17, 1925. It was founded by Harold W. Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, a New York Times reporter. “Ross wanted to create a sophisticated humor magazine—in contrast to the corniness of other humor publications such as Judge, where he had worked.” According to the New World Encyclopedia, the New Yorker publishes reportage, criticism, essays, cartoons, poetry, and fiction.

Dan helped The New Yorker magazine with a digital transformation, increasing online subscriptions. The magazine publishes 47 times plus five extra in-depth issues each year. To digitally transform the magazine, Dan directed a team of five journalists and brought Adhoc teams from established work silos within the organization together. The New Yorker Subscription Teams of creative, intelligent, reasonable, hardworking people who happen to be unusually friendly helped make Dan’s job as Director of Newsletters easier. A bonus was being around people with an extensive vocabulary. His relational literacy helped them invest in the makeover to increase online subscriptions.

“Three years this summer,” Dan says, “Inbox Collective exceeds all expectations.” You will learn of his aspirations and ways of sending better emails. Imagine inviting email subscribers into your living room; that is how personal email is to us. Our conversation is also filled with pearls of insight into fostering resilient teams: trust, respect, security, and connection. The four underpinnings of healthy relating that requires constant attention. DOWNLOAD

Dan was so inspired by our conversation that he wrote this blog post!

NEXT STEP after listening: Challenge yourself and do the Conscious Attentive Leadership Mentoring (C.A.L.M.) Activities below.