Who

Bob Pittman's former right hand at AOL, Lerer now invests in the Internet. He's a co-founder of the Huffington Post with Arianna Huffington and an investor in half a dozen other web startups.

Backstory

A one-time political aide to Ronnie Eldridge, Ramsey Clark, and Bess Myerson, Lerer first worked with Bob Pittman at Warner-Amex as the vice president of corporate affairs in the early 1980s. He went on to spend more than a decade working at a PR firm he founded—known in its later years as Robinson, Lerer, and Montgomery—where, along with co-founders Linda Robinson and Walter Montgomery, he handled corporate public relations for companies like Gerry Laybourne's Oxygen Media, Dave Letterman's production company Worldwide Pants, and Ron Perelman's Revlon. (Lerer may be best remembered, though, as the mouthpiece in the 1980s for disgraced junk bond king Michael Milken.) The firm was eventually sold to Young & Rubicam in 2000 and Lerer joined Pittman as the head of AOL's corporate communications and investor relations department. He headed up both departments following the ill-fated merger between AOL and Time Warner; but when Pittman was shoved out of the company a couple of years later, Lerer soon followed him out the door.

Of note

The Huffington Post, which Lerer started up with pundit Arianna Huffington, launched in the spring of 2005. Founded as a liberal alternative to the Drudge Report, the site has always been closely associated with the Greek pundit (it sports her name, of course) as well as the pack of Hollywood liberals who contribute to it like Gwyneth Paltrow, Nora Ephron, and Diane Keaton. It's Lerer, though, who has tended to the business end of the things and arranged $2 million in financing to start the site. (He later cobbled together an additional $5 million from the venture capital firm Softbank in August of 2006.) Although the site has never struggled to generate press or traffic, it hasn't been nearly as successful on the financial front, which is why the site moved beyond the insular world of liberal politics in 2007 as well as released a desperately needed redesign. Lerer turned over the CEO job to Betsy Morgan, the former general manager of CBS.com, in 2007 although he remains the company's chairman.

On the side

Lerer has invested in a handful of other companies, including Blip.tv; a "news platform" called Daylife, which provides technology to the Huffington Post; John Borthwick's e-business incubator Betaworks; and Jonah Peretti's Buzzfeed. Lerer is also the primary backer of Thrillist, a dude-targeted email newsletter that his son, Ben Lerer, set up after graduating from college. Both the Huffington Post and Thrillist operate from the same offices in SoHo.

Board game

Lerer is chairman emeritus of the New York Public Theater. It's an AOL-Time Warner reunion of sorts: Pittman, former AOL International president Michael Lynton, Time Warner EVP Pat Fili-Krushel, and HBO Films president Colin Callender are all trustees as well.

Personal

Lerer is married to Katherine Sailer, with whom he has a daughter named Isabel (in addition to Ben). The couple lives in a co-op in the El Dorado; neighbors include Marty Bregman and Huffington Post contributor Alec Baldwin. The Lerers also have a ski house in Park City and a beach house in Quogue. The family used to have a home in Bedford; they sold the home and an adjacent property in 2002 for more than $5 million.

Campaign trail

Lerer is still active on the political front. In March 2007, Lerer and Sailer hosted a fundraiser for Barack Obama at their apartment, along with Pittman and his wife Veronique. The event attracted the likes of Tina Brown, Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts, and Tom Brokaw.

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