Daniel Reiss

"Sure, this sounds like fun." — Margaret Atwood

We pitched an idea to Margaret Atwood because my colleague Emily and I wanted it as fans. The Handmaid's Tale ends with a fictional future academic conference — and "Are there any questions?" may be the most wonderfully frustrating last line ever conceived. What if we asked Atwood to actually answer some? She ran with it. I wrote the questions I'd always wanted answered; they were passed along through her people. I never met her. But my questions became part of the canonical text — and I ended up credited as a voice actor alongside Claire Danes and Atwood herself. Wasn't my job, just a spare-time project that came to mega-fruition. The Washington Post called the result "highly pertinent, ingeniously conceived."

Six years figuring out how everyone was going to say everything to each other.

Head editor of American Greetings' digital R&D team during the exact years the world was figuring out how to communicate online. Not just birthdays and holidays — all of it. How do you celebrate on Facebook? What does a greeting card become on a phone? We had a big greenscreen digital content studio and a budget to build sets and puppets and hire adorable animal actors like Suzy the chimpanzee and Uggie the dog from the Academy Award-winning film The Artist. We acquired libraries of animated GIFs before they were cool again (again), built tagged databases to make them searchable, and shipped justWink — the brand, the app (on millions of phones), the whole ecosystem. We were working through social media, mobile, instant messaging, emojis, and whatever came next, as society adopted them in real time. The work earned a U.S. patent, on which I'm listed as inventor. Taylor Swift used the tech. The job that took me from creative to technologist and taught me the medium really is the message.

Half a million readers a month and the engine of a global marketing strategy that's still running.

I founded Shutterstock's content marketing program from nothing and built it into an operation that reached half a million readers a month: 8 blogs, 7 languages, 57 social channels, a 15-person team, and an experimentation mindset that defined the golden age of branded content. We made mega-viral content and won a bunch of awards along the way. The program I built became the engine of their global marketing strategy — and still is, today.

Built an award-winning magazine — and accidentally, a CMS that passed Amazon's security review.

As Director of Branded Content at Audible, I founded and ran Audible Range, their online magazine, sourcing and editing journalistic talent like Roxane Gay, Leonard Maltin, Nick Offerman, and Jane C. Hu. It won a Digiday Award for Best Brand Publication. Along the way, I built MTVessel, the content management system that powered it all — which turned out to meet Amazon's rigorous internal security standards and got adopted across the company. The medium is the message, indeed.

Build something. Get acquired. The investors hire you. Yale asks you to teach it.

A former MasterClass colleague brought me to Outlier.org during the pandemic as Creative Director. On the side, I built their content marketing and SEO program — 50K monthly organics in year one. Outlier won TIME's Best Inventions 2020. Then it was acquired; GSV Ventures liked the work enough to bring me in directly as a fractional creative director, leading their existing team and producing the ASU+GSV AIR Show — 15,000 people at the San Diego Convention Center, 125+ companies, one of the largest AI-in-education events in the world. That work led Yale University's Center for Emotional Intelligence to invite me to run a workshop on AI in creative production.

"Sure, this sounds like fun." — Margaret Atwood

Six years figuring out how everyone was going to say everything to each other.

Half a million readers a month and the engine of a global marketing strategy that's still running.

Built an award-winning magazine — and accidentally, a CMS that passed Amazon's security review.

Build something. Get acquired. The investors hire you. Yale asks you to teach it.

I'd love to hear what you're working on.