Burda invests through BurdaPrincipal Investments in the American innovation and media startup WaitWhat. Behind the two-year-old company are the former managers of the digital conference series TED, June Cohen and Deron Triff. The first round of financing totaled about four million dollars.
Burda investing in WaitWhat
BurdaPrincipal Investments leads the current Series A investment round. WaitWhat has set itself the goal of “rethinking” the evolution and growth of media offerings. The company website states, “WaitWhat is a unique content incubator that invests, develops and maintains original media ideas until they reach a broad reach.
In doing so, they can build on their experience as the person in charge of the TED Talks, which has built them into a globally successful media brand with more than a billion viewers and listeners. Cohen previously served as Vice President of Content at Wired Digital. Triff, in turn, was vice president of digital ventures at PBS, a non-commercial TV broadcaster in the US.
WaitWhat podcast “Masters of Scale” with over 15 million downloads
A similar goal Cohen and Triff have set for their new startup. WaitWhat launched the podcast “Masters of Scale” in May 2017. With guests such as Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Daniel Ek (Spotify), Howard Schultz (Starbucks) and Phil Knight (Nike), and with over 15 million downloads in more than 200 countries, “Masters of Scale” has been in the shortest Time has developed into one of the most reputed business media formats worldwide. The show will be moderated by US billionaire Reid Hoffman, co-founder of the LinkedIn business network.
Hoffmann is also among the other investors in the first round of financing, which amounts to a total of four million dollars. According to their own statements, the founders want to invest the capital collected here in the development of further innovative media offers that exceed the format limits.
On Thursday, the WaitWhat makers launched the podcast “Should This Exist?”, Which explores the effects of technology on humans.