A self-admittedly failed investment banker who auspiciously co-founded The Bleacher Report, Bryan Goldberg writes with fluid style, real knowledge and a good dose of compassionate humanity over at PandoDaily. Bleacher Report essentially gives everyone in the world his own sports talk show and owns exclusive rights to a webcam in Kobe Bryant’s sock drawer. It sold itself and its overwhelmingly male audience (can you say Axe Spray, media buyer?) to Turner Broadcasting in 2012 for triple-figure millions. So Goldberg knows of what he speaks. He writes easily about San Francisco real estate, making his employees rich, management compensation packages, and building an audience on the web. It’s all mercifully sensible without a smidgen of jargon. Here’s Goldberg on one of the web’s great alleged mysteries, Search Engine Optimization: “The secret of SEO is to… create content that people want to read. That’s it. That is the deep, dark secret.”
Perhaps most refreshing, especially in a Silicon Valley success story, is Goldberg’s patience. It seems to go wholly against the grain of Instagram culture. Start-ups are built overnight, right? But Mr. Goldberg has the audacity to title one of his articles: “Traffic Growth Should Be a Marathon, Not a Sprint.” Huh? We were reminded of that line the prolific (but oft-blocked) writer John McPhee attributed to the great New Yorker editor William Shawn: “It takes as long as it takes.” (Uttered while debating a comma.) McPhee was flabbergasted, but delighted too, in the same way we are reading the judicious, far-sighted, quality-conscious Bryan Goldberg. And the best thing? He’s really very good with charts. This skill must help with his presentations: he raised $6.5 million to launch Bustle.com.
