Lisa Stone

Cofounder of BlogHer

• Born: 1967?
• Place of Birth: Atlanta, Georgia?

Primary Company/Organization: BlogHer

Introduction

Lisa Stone, along with Internet entrepreneurs Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins, cofounded BlogHer in 2005 to create opportunities for women bloggers around the world to access and engage in a community dedicated specifically to the interests and information relevant to today's women. Stone served as the company's chief executive officer (CEO) and was the chief architect behind BlogHer's distributed, diversified media business. She helped grow the company from a grassroots conference into a top-ranked women's community through the development of innovative models to deliver profitable, high-quality online media and to attract and compensate a massive base of new content contributors. The BlogHer Conference emerged as the world's largest in-person event for the blogging community, and BlogHer.com has secured its place as an award-winning, high-traffic social hub. Prior to BlogHer, social media-saavy women barely had a grip in the male-dominated blogosphere.

Early Life

Stone spent most of her childhood in Montana. Her parents, John and Janet Stone, moved Lisa and her siblings—sisters Nancy and Anna and brother John—to Missoula, Montana, in 1976. Her parents had become enamored of the small college town in the state's far west after visiting friends from their medical school days who resided in the area. Stone was instantly attracted to the mountain landscape and snow. The family settled in an part of town close to the University of Montana, Missoula.

Stone attended the city's historic Hellgate High School. At the time, she was more interested in cheerleading and dating than academics. College was not on her personal agenda until after she received some prodding and encouragement from several of the school's teachers, who saw potential in her intellect and ideas. She then became more focused on the future: Once high school graduation was behind her, she left Montana and moved across the country to attend Wellesley College, a prestigious women's institution in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

During her college years, Stone took a trip to California to visit her sister who was studying at Stanford University. She decided the West Coast fit her style and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area after graduating from Wellesley, taking a job working in fuel futures with a local management consulting company. While learning about the industry and the markets and cultures of Europe, Stone decided on a different career path: She wanted to become a journalist. The realization prompted her to leave her consulting position and take a job as a writer with the local newspaper, The Oakland Tribune.

Life's Work

The Oakland Tribune was a daily newspaper in Oakland, California. During her tenure there, Stone gained valuable experience as a writer and investigative journalist. After originating a series of hard-hitting articles revealing the Federal Aviation Administration's lack of emergency preparedness, she was offered and accepted a job as a journalist with the powerhouse Cable News Network, or CNN.

Stone was a successful print journalist for CNN, but life changes instigated another career transition in 1997. Her job with CNN required extensive travel, and following a divorce, she decided to begin a career in the then-new field of online journalism, which would give her scheduling flexibility or the option to work from home.

Stone's first online journalism job was with WebTV, where she learned and honed her skills with hypertext markup language (HTML). Then she moved on to a position with Women.com as the company's executive producer, editor in chief, and vice president of programming. In that capacity, she was responsible for launching and developing online content communities for Bloomberg, E! Television/Online, the Gallup and Knight Ridder news organizations, HBO's Sex and the City, and Hearst and Rodale magazines. Under Stone's leadership, Women.com became a top-tier site.

When Women.com was acquired by iVillage in 2001, Stone took the opportunity to try something new. She left the company and applied for a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University. The fellowship recognizes the evolving face of journalism by awarding a small and select group of journalists from around the globe with an opportunity to engage in a year of study at the esteemed Harvard University with their peers and time to pursue their own individual areas of interest and expertise. Stone was the first Internet journalist to be accepted as a Nieman Fellow. She moved to Massachusetts, where she spent the first six months of the program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) observing gaming technology. The next six months she spent at Harvard assessing business models that could be leveraged to fit the technology she had just discovered.

As soon as the Nieman fellowship ended, Stone moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area. She took a job with Law.com, where she built the first sponsored social media blogging network. During that time, Stone was also writing blogs covering the 2004 presidential election for the Los Angeles Times. She knew by then that there was a lack of resources for, and representation of, women in the blogosphere. However, it was not until connecting with two like-minded Internet entrepreneurs, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins, at a blog conference that the BlogHer took root. The three women discussed a project that would enable women bloggers to connect and share with one another. They decided on hosting their own blog conference specifically targeted at women bloggers. They agreed on the name BlogHer and held their first conference in 2005. Some three hundred women attended.

As a way to help conference attendees and other interested women stay connected outside the conference, Stone and her partners launched a blog hosted by Typepad. Within just one year, the blog became so popular that the three founders committed themselves full time to their new venture. Camahort Page, Des Jardins, and Stone quit their regular jobs and launched BlogHer as a limited liability company in 2006. With expectations high, the team realized that they needed to upgrade their platform from Typepad and moved the blog onto Drupal, which offered improved functionality and design options. Also in 2006, the three partners created an advertising and publishing network under the BlogHer umbrella to promote blogging among women and to make it easier for any woman to participate. With BlogHer's rapid success and expansion, Stone rallied to secure venture capital and big-name conference sponsorships to support the continued growth of the company.

By 2011, BlogHer had emerged as the fifth-largest online women's network. In addition, the company experienced huge revenue growth, saw its conference participation soar into the thousands, achieved top-tier distribution status for its advertising enterprise, and recorded utilization rates of nearly half a billion hits per month for the BlogHer.com community. BlogHer was honored as one of AlwaysOn's OnMedia Top 100 for 2011 and among the Global 250 for 2010 and 2011. Separately, BlogHer.com was ranked among the Top 100 Websites for Women by Forbes in 2010, 2011, and 2012.

For her contributions, Stone has been recognized in the Ernst and Young Winning Women Class of 2011, as a recipient of the 2011 PepsiCo Women's Inspiration Award, and as one of the Most Powerful Moms in Media by Working Mother magazine in 2011. She was listed as one of the most influential women in Web 2.0 and technology by Fast Company in 2008, 2009, and 2010 and as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company in 2010. In 2009, Stone was identified as one of the seven most powerful people in new media as ranked by Forbes magazine, as one of AlwaysOn's Top 25 Women in Tech, and among the Influencers of Silicon Valley by the San Jose Mercury News. She frequently spoke at industry events and was an active member of the board of directors for the International Women's Media Foundation.

After BlogHer was acquired by SheKnows Media in November 2014, Stone remained for another year as chief community officer. She went on to become an entrepreneur in residence at Trinity Ventures in 2016. The following year Stone took the position of chief marketing officer at the New York–based company Ellevest and within a year was promoted to chief strategy officer. She left the position in 2019 and, in 2022, co-founded BrainTrust Founders Studio, a venture capital company that assists Black-owned beauty and wellness brands.

Personal Life

Stone was married in the late 1980s, but the marriage ended by 1997, shortly after the birth of the couple's son, Jake. In 2003, she met Christopher Carfi, a senior strategist with Ant's Eye View, who helps clients such as Google and Visa develop their own social business strategies. Stone met Carfi, a blogger and single parent, via Twitter. The two decided to live together in the San Francisco Bay Area of California with Jake, Carfi's son Gordon, and two Australian cattle dogs named Ike and Max. Gordon has a daughter, Meghan. She returns to Missoula annually to visit family.

Bibliography

“Experiences with Internet Journalism.” Nieman Reports 56.2 (2002): 35. Print.

"Lisa Stone." LinkedIn, 2024, www.linkedin.com/in/lisastonew00t/. Accessed 8 Mar. 2024.

Stone, Lisa. “Lisa Stone Interview, Founder of BlogHer, Talks to Us About Her Success.”

“Study: 3 in 4 Online Women Are Active Social Media Users.” Public Relations Tactics 17.5 (2010): 10. Print.

Swartz, Jon. “The New Faces of Tech.” USA Today 5 June 2012: n. pag. Print.

Tobias, Vicki. “Blog This! An Introduction to Blogs, Blogging, and the Feminist Blogosphere.” Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women's Studies Resources 26.2–3 (2005): n. pag. Print.

Viveiros, Beth Negus. “Picking Up Chicks.” Chief Marketer 2.5 (2010): 41–42. Print.