The Magnify.net Team

Steve Rosenbaum, Founder and CEO

I was a magician in high school, and I always loved the back and forth with the audience. The feedback. When I started working in the media, I found the whole 'one way' thing kind of hollow. I wanted applause if we did well and I wanted rotten fruit if the audience didn't like a documentary or program we produced.

At the first chance I got, I invented a TV series that gave the audience a chance to do more than watch -- but actually participate. It was called MTV UNfiltered, and if you haven't checked it out, you can find it here.

Along the way, I've made a ton of films, documentaries, and web projects for partners including HBO, Discovery, A&E, MSNBC, and CNN. I've also directed a number of feature documentaries, including a film I'm very proud of "7 Days in September" about how New York was affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Magnify.net is the incarnation of the way I see the media world evolving. Increasingly, the power is in the hands of the audience. The audience engages, shares, ranks, and validates. I always imagined Magnify.net as a platform that would engage, embrace, and facilitate media creating, sharing, and collective knowledge. I'm passionate about the sounds and pictures that real people create, and excited to help create order from chaos.

Alan Medvin, Chief Operating Officer

For as long as I can remember my favorite board game has been Monopoly. As a child, the development of a strategy to control as many properties as possible was both fascinating and a great challenge. Somewhere along the line I realized that the nearest thing I could get to Monopoly in the real world was business in general, and startups in particular.

On account of my childhood revelation that I wanted to work in business, I attended Babson College to study finance and entrepreneurship. In was in college that I realized the beauty of business was that good companies give people the things that they want, at a price they find reasonable enough to pay. This revelation lead me to my first entrepreneurial venture; which was fittingly a store selling something everyone wants; Ice Cream. After finishing school and selling my ice cream business, I've worked for a telecommunications company called IPC where I helped start a business division from scratch and later for a startup online advertising firm called [x+1], developing applications that helped advertisers get more value from their online advertising.

I have come to Magnify to help grow the business, and to continue to look for new and better ways that magnify can deliver value to its customers. Magnify represents what I believe is the next way of thinking about online video. I hope to be able to help you express yourself to friends and strangers with shared interests in ways you would not have previously thought possible.

Kimberly Peterson, Chief Technology Officer

When I was in high school, I was bad at math and good at language. In college I majored in English and French and never took a computer course. I think everyone was surprised when I suddenly decided to become a programmer after a brief and uninspiring career in the fashion industry. Its not as weird as you'd think.

Programming is fundamentally about language. Its the only job I can think of where what you write, the stories you conceive, structure, and edit, literally come alive as you type. Code has a tone, a grammar -- an elegant turn of phrase can collapse 30 lines of spaghetti into an efficient 4-line loop. The words I write can link total strangers from opposite corners of the globe together, not just in a database row, but, potentially, in a friendship. That's the power of words.

After years of working as consultant, mostly for companies that maintain internal applications that only they will ever see, Magnify.net gives me the opportunity to write stories that thousands of people see and interact with every day.

John Brown, Chief Business Development Officer

As corny as it sounds, I believe in the fundamental power of storytelling to inform and transform our lives. Armed with a degree in English Literature I landed my first job in the media business at a fashion magazine back in 1988 in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. My career since then has given me a chance to work on some amazing brands -New York Magazine, The Atlantic, People, Real Simple, InStyle, Health, Essence and many others. Five years ago in the midst of my career at Time Inc. I made the move into digital media to launch a site called Health.com, and that led to a role leading the resurgent This Old House franchise across all platforms - digital, print and TV.

My job at Magnify gives me a chance to serve the needs of media, commerce and other related businesses that recognize the importance of storytelling and the centrality of a curated content experience. With the right tools and talent, any business can have a direct, meaningful and ongoing dialogue with its audience or customers. And that is a powerful relationship to have.

Parm Kang, Chief Financial Officer

I'm inspired by just how quickly the world of web, video and media are evolving. Every day, my curiosity leads me to new discoveries!

And once you understand my background, you'll understand why I'm so insatiably curious. I was born and raised in London, then Winnipeg Manitoba and Los Angeles. This combined with the fact that my parents hail from India, gives me a truly multi-cultural upbringing. My professional experience online includes being the CFO of Fab.com, and before that co-founding a start-up in the financial trading space based in Manhattan. Previously, I worked for over 9 years in financial institutions, including BNY Mellon and JPMorgan Chase. I earned an MBA from the Yale School of Management, an MSc from the London School of Economics and a BS in Mathematics from UCLA. And now I’m part of an amazing group of people at Magnify.net.

Ian Spitalnick, Account Executive

The first biography I remember reading growing up was about Ben Franklin. Even at a young age I realized the magnitude of his accomplishments and I strived to be like him. Now that I have a few more years on me, I can only say that my admiration for the original American Renaissance Man has only grown stronger. Joining Magnify has put me in to position to work towards that dream of being as accomplished as my childhood hero.

My journey to this point has taken me through Nashville studying at Vanderbilt University and working for Dell; moving home to New York to help run a family business in the garment district and receive my MBA from Baruch College. Once I met everyone at Magnify it was obvious to me that this is where I belong. Ben Franklin once wrote "Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor." I am proud to say that at Magnify my business is [video] content and I've never been more content with my position in life -- I am truly a rich man.

Pamela Yoder, Manager, Business Affairs

I've always believed that along with food and shelter, storytelling is a basic human need. Video sharing started on cave walls, we chipped stories into granite, we now capture stories -- literally by lining up little electric blips out of thin air. I believe in the essence of storytelling so much I am a card-carrying journalist. I've shot, produced & edited hundreds of long-form documentaries over the last 20 years. You've seen my work on A&E, MSNBC, National Geographic, CNN, CBS, Court TV and more. I even have awards to prove it!

So what gives with my title today? I also learned that to be a successful creative, you have to be able to run a business. Contracts shape the resources and money you will have to work on a project, the lawyers can actually sometimes pave the way to make things happen. Effective budgets and money management make the difference between profit or deficit. Plus, I like working with numbers, they tell stories in their own way.

Everything I've done leads up to this moment. Magnify.net is here to give a voice to you -- to empower you to tell your story. I couldn't be more proud. Have you shared a video today?

Brittany Gevanter, Senior Web Project Manager

Among groups of Friends, everyone has a role. I have always been the planner. It is not always the easiest task to bring everyone together, but when people are able to come to one place to share their stories, it can be truly magical. Today, there are countless ways to connect with one another, and no one even has to be in the same room. Right now, online video is booming more than ever. People are uploading video to the Internet in order to share their lives with each other.

While attending Quinnipiac University, my eyes were opened to the digital world. I received my undergraduate degree in English and my graduate degree in Journalism. While studying Journalism, I learned a valuable lesson -- the world was headed online and video was going to be central to that experience.

The first time I looked at the Magnify.net site, I knew they were on to something special and I wanted to be a part of this global transition that curation is creating. Now, I am proud to say that I am a part of the Magnify team, where I help manage the online platform that enables so many people share their content, stories, and lives with one another.

Simon Marriott, Software Engineer

I believe that there is something incredibly special about the way in which the web allows us to share and interrelate our ways of seeing the world no matter where we are.

I cut my teeth building software to enable journalists and producers to publish to the websites of CNN and the BBC. Technologically, our work was very much based on the foundations laid by the open source movement. I looked forward to the time when those principles of openness that have so revolutionized software would extend to the media itself -- to the production and management of content. That time is now and this is why I am here at Magnify.net. Here I can help to build tools that empower us all to project, reflect and refract our views of the world around us.