Storify has hired Don Loeb, a former Adobe business development executive, to help the company generate revenue from its story-telling service. The hiring of Loeb marks a major point in the company’s history as he becomes the first sales person within the company.
With the hiring of Loeb, the company has brought on board a seasoned tech veteran with solid credentials. Previously, he was a business development executive for Typekit, which was acquired by Adobe in October 2011. His past experiences include working for Feedburner (acquired by Google in 2007), and also being a Product Manager for iGoogle. He also spent over three years at Yahoo working on business development.
Loeb is also an advisor and mentor to SmartShoot, Upwest Labs, and Mass Relevance, which gives Storify a very interesting asset. Not only does he know sales, but he has worked with startups and tech companies.
Storify co-founder Xavier Damman told us in a statement:
We are super excited to have Don join Storify as our head of business development.
With his experience as Biz Dev at Yahoo, Feedburner (with Dick Costolo), and more recently at Typekit, he is the perfect person to develop the potential of Storify. We have amazing users, from the largest news organizations around the world to the best brands and they want to do more with Storify. We are growing our team so we can address that demand. Exciting times ahead!
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Here’s a team photo that Damman posted during a team luncheon earlier today.
The premise behind Storify is that it helps turn what people are posting on social media into a compelling story. Imagine if you’re trying to find stories about the United States fiscal cliff and wanted to catalog what different people, influencers, thought leaders, and pundits were saying about it on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other channels. How exactly could you curate it into a cohesive and simple way that people can follow along and understand? Storify claims that it can help solve this problem since “streams flow, but stories last.”
In November, the company launched a new version of its site that put more emphasis on fronting user-created media and content, as well as a more prominent search function. The new design seems to be a great step towards having the company spruce up its appearance so that more businesses and publishers could find it more appealing to use.
Storify is growing in popularity and it was only a matter of time before the company needed to bring someone on board to help it monetize its data and product. In 2012, users posted 554,000 stories, all of which racked up a total of 367 million views. The company also announced that there were 46,000 publishers worldwide that have embedded Storifys on their website.
Photo credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images
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