Jonah Peretti

Peretti was born in California and raised in Oakland, California.[7] His father, a criminal defense lawyer and painter, is of Italian and English descent and his mother (née Cherkin), a schoolteacher, is Jewish. His stepmother was African-American.[8][9] He attended The College Preparatory School in Oakland, followed by the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he graduated with a degree in environmental studies in 1996.[10][5] He taught computer science classes at Isidore Newman School in New Orleans, in the mid-1990s.[11] He completed a postgrad at the MIT Media Lab.[12]

While at MIT, his email exchange[2] with Nike over a request to print "sweatshop" on custom order shoes went viral.[13]

Peretti cofounded The Huffington Post, along with Kenneth Lerer, Andrew Breitbart, and Arianna Huffington in 2005.[5] He left The Huffington Post in 2011 after it was bought by AOL for $315 million.[5][12][14]

In 2005, Peretti hosted the Contagious Media Showdown at Eyebeam in New York City, where he worked as director of the R&D Lab from 2001 to 2006. During the process Peretti developed the concept of the "Bored-at-Work Network", which he supposes to be larger than some major television network audiences.[15]

Peretti founded the "Internet popularity contest" site BuzzFeed in November 2006.[16] After leaving The Huffington Post, Peretti began working at BuzzFeed full-time.[12] While originally known for its mix of internet memes and lists, the site was the first to break the news that John McCain would endorse Mitt Romney in the 2012 Republican Primary.[12] The site continued to grow afterward, raising over $35 million in funding from investors the next year.[17] In August 2014, the site raised another $50 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, more than doubling its previous rounds of funding.[18] The site was valued at nearly $1 billion by Andreessen Horowitz.[18]

In 2019, Peretti announced that BuzzFeed would be cutting its overall workforce by 15 percent. Peretti said he wanted to reduce costs without resorting to additional fundraising.[19][20] Its remaining workforce then officially unionized, their first successful fight being over laid-off staffers getting their earned paid time off.[21]

Peretti has been caught multiple times stealing another person's identity, and he settled a lawsuit out of court where he apologized to both Jeff Goldblatt and John Lott for stealing their identities.[22] In Goldblatt's case, he was in competition with Peretti’s newly created dating service called rejectionline.com. Peretti set up the website JeffGoldblatt.com, under the pretense that it was Goldblatt’s personal website. Peretti sent out emails from me@JeffGoldblatt.com that, according to Goldblatt, “contained multiple lies about me and portrayed me as an arrogant jerk who was bragging about how I stole the idea of the New York City Rejection Line.”[23] In Lott's case, Peretti set up AskJohnLott.org and used the email address john@AskJohnLott.org to support gun control. Peretti sent out hundreds of thousands of emails using Lott's name to lobby against the proposed “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.” James K. Glassman, a former Washington Post columnist, who later served as U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, was among the hundreds of thousands of people who received these emails, and who engaged in lengthy back and forth emails with Peretti over the claims that Peretti was using Lott's identity.

He is the elder brother of comedian, actress and writer Chelsea Peretti.[24] Their brother is a figurative artist residing in Pennsylvania, and another sister is attending Drexel University. He is married to blogger Andrea Harner, with whom he has twin sons.[24][25][26]