Jacob Cohen Donnelly: In 2015, you wrote a blog post called A Founder Story, 7 Lessons on Building a Modern Media Business. In it, you said the Digiday story goes back to April 1st, 2008 when only a fool would start a media company. It was the second worst economy since the Great Depression, and it was a very bad time to start a media business. How did you get into media and why did you decide to launch Digiday at the worst possible time?
Nick Friese: Great question, and guilty as charged. Only a fool would start a business at that time. What happened was I had a big change in my life. Before I get to that, I can talk to you a little bit about my background. I was in publishing for years. I was at Hurst, I was at Meredith. I left those big corporate structures and got into startups as soon as the internet really started to bubble up. Once I got into those startups, I realized that that was the place for me. I loved building businesses from scratch.
