In the first session of the Atlantic's Small Business Forum, Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup, gives some opening remarks and is followed by Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit, who talks about building one of the web's most successful sites.
Bio
Elizabeth Baker Keffer
Elizabeth Keffer is Vice President of The Atlantic and President of Atlantic LIVE. As President of Atlantic Live, the events arm of The Atlantic, she oversees events ranging from small, private "Salon Dinners," to larger panel discussions and Town Hall gatherings, to The Atlantic's Aspen Ideas Festival. She was the company's lead executive in creating the Atlantic/Aspen Institute partnership, producing the Aspen Ideas Festival and the Aspen Health Forum.
Previously, Elizabeth served as the publisher of The Atlantic and Executive Vice President, Atlantic Media Group, where she oversaw advertising, marketing and corporate partnerships at The Atlantic, National Journal, Congress Daily and Government Executive. During this period, she led the formation of two key partnerships: Washington Week with Gwen Ifill and National Journal, and the National Journal-MSNBC politics partnership.
Elizabeth graduated from Brown University and has completed executive programs in sales force management at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and in finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Brandon Busteed
Brandon Busteed leads Gallup’s education work cross K12 and higher education. His career spans a wide range of important work in education, including as an educational entrepreneur, speaker, writer, and university trustee. He was the founder and former CEO of Outside The Classroom (acquired by EverFi), a company that pioneered adaptive online education with the unique distinction of creating the only course proven to change behaviors.
A three-year, 30-school, national study funded by the federal government showed that AlcoholEdu – the organization’s flagship alcohol-abuse prevention program – was effective in reducing binge drinking, drunk driving and sexual assaults. The program has now been taken by more than 4 million students. Busteed is a graduate of Duke University where he studied public policy; he is a trustee-emeritus of Duke and also served on the Board of Visitors for the Sanford School of Public Policy. He is a nationally-known speaker and author on education policy and public health.
Clive Crook
Clive Crook is a senior editor of The Atlantic and a columnist and editorial-board member at Bloomberg View. From 2007 to 2011, he was a Washington columnist and associate editor of the Financial Times. Before moving to live and work in the US, he worked for more than 20 years at The Economist, as economics correspondent, Washington correspondent, economics editor, and deputy editor. In that last role he guided the magazine’s editorial line across its interests in business, politics and international relations.
Matt Danzico
Matt Danzico is a staff reporter and video journalist at the BBC News, who primarily focuses on science and web technology in the US. He has previously worked as a video producer at Discovery Channel and reporter at the Tokyo Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper. Matt is also the founder of several web-based social experiments. Most recently, he created a social media-based time perception project called The Time Hack, which forced him to participate in a new and unusual activity each day throughout 2011 in order to explore whether our perception of time is influenced by our actions.
Alexis Ohanian
Alexis Ohanian is a startup founder and investor in Brooklyn, NY.
After graduating from UVA in 2005, Alexis and his co-founder Steve Huffman started reddit, now a top 100 website.
Now a reddit board member, Alexis focuses on social enterprise Breadpig, publishing authors like xkcd and SMBC -- profits donated to worthy causes.
Alexis helped launch hipmunk and ran marketing/pr/community before becoming an advisor and joining the fight against SOPA & PIPA.
Alexis invests and advises over fifty tech startups. He's Y Combinator's Ambassador to the East, co-founder of the non-profit IHAS, and is writing a book, Without Your Permission.
Along the way, Alexis spoke at TED, volunteered in Armenia as a Kiva Fellow, and was named on Forbes and Inc Magazine 30 Under 30 lists.
He proudly doodled the logos for all three of his startups and loves his cat, Karma.
