There has been a lot of discussion lately on HackerNews around email newsletters by Jason Baptiste here and here as well as our own case study about StartupDigest as a newsletter company here. Email newsletters are a huge business and I believe that we are going through an email renaissance right now (Thrillist founder Ben Lerer thinks so too).

Right now is the best time (especially for a non-technical founder) to start or work for an email newsletter company.

Let’s assume you already have an email newsletter that’s still small but has traction, who do you start reaching out to for advice? Just like in the Web 2.0 world has the PayPal Mafia, the email world has the Email Mafia.

The Email Mafia is made up of 8 individuals who are pros at building newsletters from small media channels to huge enterprises. At risk of getting whacked, here are its members:

The Email God, Bob Pittman, Founder of Pilot Group
Referred to as the Man with the Midas touch, he has invested in almost every single successful email newsletter company. Bob is the creator of the MTV - the Music Television cable network – which revitalized the music business and spawned the music video industry. Now he leads Pilot Group, a NYC based PE Firm that has invested in Thrillist, DailyCandy, SailThru, Zynga, Rapleaf, GeekChicDaily, Ideal Bite, and more.

The Great Success, Pete Sheinbaum, former CEO of DailyCandy
When email newsletters are referred to as “a serious business”, the acquisition of Daily Candy is what everyone references. Jason Batispste (also part of the Email Mafia) put it best:

In 2008, [Daily Candy was] sold to Comcast for $125,000,000. That’s right- 9 f**king digits.  I remember hearing about these rumors when they first started to surface in 2006, and I took a look at DailyCandy.  I thought I was missing something since the site was just for an email newsletter.  I thought there had to be some social network or great hot new product I was missing.  Nope, it was just that an email newsletter.

Pete was the CEO of DailyCandy during the acquisition and lead the company through the transition before leaving to start his next company, The Mandelbrot Project, funded by the Foundry. He has also sat on the advisory board of IdealBite, TravelPost, TotalBeauty, and more.

The Golden Boy, Ben Lerer, CEO of Thrillist
Ben, co-founder of Thrillist, has arguably the fastest growing and most profitable private email company today, reportedly doing $10,000,000+ in revenue this year. They’ve already completed their first acquisition of JackThreads and have been on a hiring tear since. In addition Ben has started his own venture capital fund with his father Ken Lerer named Lerer Media Ventures, which has been in on some of the most prolific deals this year: Betaworks, Gdgt, ZeFrank Games, Sailthru, Hot Potato, Canvas Networks, and more.

The Pilot, Andy Russell, Founder of Pilot Group
Not much is said publically about Andy but he is a partner at the Pilot Group which he founded with Bob Pittman. He sits on the board of VitalJuice, IdealBite, Thrillist, and DailyCandy. If you can’t find a lot of public information on a guy like this, you know he is truly a badass mafia man.

The Skydiver, Peter Shankman, Founder of HARO
Peter is best known for starting Help a Reporter Out or HARO for short. In less than a year the HARO newsletter went from nothing to the standard for how journalists and reporters source news stories. HARO reportedly was doing ~$1m in sales per year and recently sold to Vocus for around $20,000,000. Not bad for a bootstrapped email list.

The Green Queen, Jen Boulden, Co-Founder of IdealBite
Jen Boulden is the founder of IdealBite an email newsletter of one green living tip you can act upon, once a day. Started in 2005, Ideal Bite grew to 100,000+ subscribers and sold to Disney for $20,000,000 all in less than 4 years. You can check out Andrew Warner’s interview with Jen about how she built her email newsletter business here.

The Reporter, Jason Baptiste
Jason Baptiste is the reason I found out about the business of email newsletters and he has been the person covering the email renaissance since the beginning. It was his two posts here and here that sparked the email business discussions and rumor has it he is working on an email based company of his own :)

The Up and Comer, Neil Capel, CEO of SailThru
SailThru is a relatively new company which just received funding from Bob Pittman, Ben Lerer, AOL Ventures, etc. It has received the email Midas touch and has a very intriguing product which is still in alpha. Although their product is new, you will definitely be hearing much more about Neil and his company in the near future. He’s the up and comer, so keep him on your radar.

The Health Nuts, Amanda Freeman and Lisa Blau, Co-Founders of Vital Juice
On both Hacker News and the comments below our readers said, what about Vital Juice? I’m not exactly their demographic (which is why I hadn’t heard of them before) but they deserve to be in the Email Mafia. They were funded by Pilot Group, have been killing in on Compete, last reported to have 100k subscribers growing at 10% a month.

And on a personal note I am extremely proud of all that our email newsletter company StartupDigest has accomplished so far. Our email newsletter StartupDigest has grown from a 22-subscriber side project to a 60,000+ subscriber international media company in less than 7 months. StartupDigest is still very young but we are already seeing the massive potential of what we have created.

Sign up for StartupDigest here.

“Once you enter into the Startup Weekend event, there is no Israeli, Palestinian, or American – there are entrepreneurs, developers, investors, designers working together to build technology and have fun.”

Wednesday, July 14 through Friday, July 16 is Tel Aviv Startup Weekend organized by Tel-Aviv StartupDigest Curator Amir Harel and Eddy Resnick in conjunction with the Peres Center for Peace. The following is Chris McCann‘s interview with Amir about the event and how it’s bringing together people who have historically been farthest apart for the first time.

What is Startup Weekend in your own words?

The event is an open platform of ideas and projects that provides networking, resources and incentives for participants to learn how to turn an idea into a product. It is a place to meet and work with programmers, marketers, entrepreneurs and investors to build companies and more importantly build a community. Our motto – Less talk. More action.

What happened at the last Tel Aviv Startup Weekend?

We had an amazing event last December at IBM HQ. We had 130 participants, 50 of whom pitched ideas that turned into 13 projects, and one company that now raising money.  We had some creative and interesting ideas developed over the event. For example, one team turned the PC keyboard into a guitar – they designed a keyboard hanger with straps like a real guitar and placed a mouse pad on the numbers keys on the right, and the F1-12 where cords. You could stroke the strings with the mouse and chose the chords with the F keys.

What is the Peres Center for Peace and why are you working with them for this year’s event?

The Peres Center for Peace is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, non-governmental organization founded in 1996 by President of Israel and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mr. Shimon Peres. It aims to further the vision of Mr. Peres for people of the Middle East to work together to build peace through socio-economic cooperation, development, and people-to-people interaction. Simply put – like us they also believe – Less talk. More action :-)

How exactly are Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs working together at the event?

Once you enter into the Startup Weekend event, there is no Israeli, Palestinian, or American – there are entrepreneurs, developers, investors, designers working together to build technology and have fun. We are not taking any political stand, and we are not associated with any political group – we just want to send a message – we can do things different, we can do things better, and it needs to come from the ground up. We just want people to connect in their field of interest and get to know new people regardless of their religion, nationality, gender, or anything else.

There have been some Israeli-Palestinian startups, like Ghost, but never has there been such an event where you just come to meet, work and talk about the things that we know best with people from the other side. I think we need more companies like that, more events like that. We are pioneers, but we are just a drop in the sea, we need more action from the people, from both sides, to do things in order to achieve real progress.

Where did your inspiration come from to organize Tel Aviv Startup Weekend?

First of all, I just wanted to participate in Startup Weekend, so I tweeted, “How come there is no Startup Weekend in Israel?” I got a reply from the US team: “so do it” – and here I am organizing rather than participating, but it’s a lot of fun working with Eddy Resnick, my co-organizer of the events here in Tel Aviv.

After a successful first event, Eddy and I thought about how we could bring Startup Weekend to the next level, and we wanted to use this platform to advance social change. We thought about organizing a women’s Startup Weekend and a few other ideas, but since Startup Weekend is such an amazing platform to bridge gaps, we decided to focus on the greatest one — the one between Palestinians and Israelis. We got in touch with the PC4P and we started to work on it.

On a personal level, I’m not politically involved, and for some time I got a little desperate about the situation, but I decided that like with Startup Weekend, I should do something to make a change. I see it as my own, yet small, contribution to increase the chance for a peace.

How many of each group are signed up and expected to attend?

We expect about 130 attendees, 20-30 of whom are Palestinians. We need to get authorizations from the government/army for each Palestinian participant. This is not an easy task, and this is where we use the help of PC4P. Additionally, Startup Weekend pays for a hotel and transportation for each Palestinian participant. This is why this event is very complicated and expensive, but we have the help from our sponsors like PayPal, Google, and IBM to make it happen. This is why we had to set a limit from the Palestinian side. We are now fully booked with a waiting list – which I think its amazing, taking into consideration that we had only 3 months of work on this. That is a very short time for this kind of event.

How can others get involved with if they’re not in Israel?

We’re working on a livestream (it’s not that easy in term of authorizations), our Twitter is @SWIsrael and we will have our event hashtag: #swtlv