By CHRISTINE LAGORIO-CHAFKIN, INC
Dao Nguyen, the head of data and growth at BuzzFeed, eyes half a pie and narrates a brief history of the first part of her career. “I wanted to be part of the Internet revolution,” she says, explaining her stint in the late-’90s New York startup scene. She fled after the dot-com boom’s implosion–a particularly messy moment for her, since she had to lay off many friends as her company, Concrete Media, went down in flames in 2001.
Dao Nguyen (INC)
She’s no longer bothered by this fact, she says, as she unwraps her pie, forks a bite and explains that, with the dreams of the first Internet revolution in tatters, she declared to her then-boyfriend, now-husband: “This is terrible. I want to quit and move to France and eat cheese and drink wine. I want to learn French and sit out this Internet recession.”
So she did, moving to Paris, consuming her fill of fromage and vin, and also working her way up the French paper of record, Le Monde. From 2006 through 2008 she ran its digital arm–and did so quite profitably, a rare feat for a media site in the aughts. For this she gained wide esteem in the French media circuit, and within Le Monde she launched a new digital publication–sort of a proto-BuzzFeed or -Huffington Post, replete with celebrity coverage some critics there deemed gauche–called Le Post.
And with that, she got herself fired.
“That was fine with me. I never set out to run a big media organization. I never meant to live in France for the rest of my life,” Nguyen says. “I’m not even a Francophile.” (A request for comment from Le Monde went unanswered.)
This c’est la vie, let’s move on attitude works well at Nguyen’s current employer, BuzzFeed, where she first arrived in the summer of 2012. So does her zest for experimentation. In fact, it works really, really well. BuzzFeed is famous not just for its quizzes and listicles, but also for pioneering a data-driven approach to Web content, and the more well-known BuzzFeeders are quick to point out exactly how crucial a role Nguyen plays there as its vice-president of growth and data. “She brings this incredibly high-powered, abstract way of thinking to editorial. We have a lot of data; she is really good at seeing what it means,” says BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith. “She just has a lot of intellectual wattage,”
Although Nguyen, 40, technically manages a team of just 10 people, she’s become an in-office celebrity and is hailed as one of the key people–if not the key person–responsible for the company’s outstandingly rapid growth in traffic over the past year.
“Since she’s joined, we’ve had this tremendous and unprecedented run of growth,” boasts BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti, noting that the site has nearly tripled its traffic in the past year since Nguyen began managing the data-science team last summer. Unique monthly visitors more than quintupled, from 28 million to 150 million, in the two years she’s been with the company. “It’s just like incredible to hire someone and say ‘your job is growth,’ and then you look, and she just like knocked it out of the park.”
Nguyen’s data group has affected within BuzzFeed a lot more than just, say, inspiring the creation of a few more Guardians of the Galaxy-themed listicles. Her work has helped BuzzFeed’s editorial team carve out new coverage areas, and nurture them to significant traction through social-media and in-site technology. In the wake of the announcement that BuzzFeed is taking $50 million in new venture capital investment, her work is also influencing the vast restructuring of the company’s 200-person editorial team.
You’d think she’d have made big waves by driving so much change in her short tenure. In a newsroom, bringing in someone whose job isn’t strictly editorial–but whose success depends on instituting changes through editorial–can be a risky proposition. Journalists (trust me on this) can be very possessive of their craft, especially when business-side executives start moseying around their part of the office.
But editors at BuzzFeed say they liked working with Nguyen from day one, thanks to her editorial experience and her clear desire to help them do their jobs more efficiently. She also possesses a unique set of personality traits that seem to have helped her along the way, not least of which is her appealing sense of curiosity.
“I love talking to people, like, ‘what’s going on in this part of the business, and why are you seeing that? What information do you think would be interesting to have to think about your problem?’ And I’ll find that for them,” Nguyen says.
For instance, Nguyen says she decided to try to boost BuzzFeed’s lackluster weekend traffic by first approaching an editorial director and asking about her current strategy for socially promoting existing content, because she recognized the site being shorter-staffed on the weekends necessitated such an approach.
“We said. ‘OK. We can write a piece of code that sends you, on Fridays, according to our analysis, the top 20 posts we should be promoting,'” Nguyen recalls telling the editor. And here she is quick to add she firmly believes that data should not determine one’s editorial strategy, but rather inform one’s decision. “You can promote them or not,” she continues. “But this is what the data suggests.”
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