Facebook Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief of The New Republic. When Chris Hughes helped hatch Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard, practically the only people sharing personal information on the Web were on dating sites. Morphing into a powerhouse networking site, Facebook now has over 600 million users. Eager to connect like-minded communities to a greater good, Hughes became the force behind My.BarackObama.com, the campaign apparatus that helped elect Obama and revolutionize the Web as a political tool.
At 25 years old, Hughes has become a technology superstar whose business is people, helping create two of the most successful start ups in modern history. With an instinct for building technology that networks the commonality of real people and real communities, he helps organizations understand the limitless power of social networking.
It wasn't that long ago that people were still reading paper newspapers and getting their news from Tom Brokaw in the evenings. Today the media environment is undergoing radical transformation, and Chris Hughes has had more than a little to do with it. In 2004, along with college roommates Mark Zuckerburg and Dustin Moskovitz, Hughes co-founded Facebook, the dominant social networking site that now counts nearly a billion active users worldwide.
A few years later, Hughes used his Facebook experience to design the social media and online organizing strategies of Presidential candidate Barack Obama to stunning success.
Now the publisher and editor-in-chief of The New Republic, a 98-year-old journal of politics and arts, Hughes is shaping the future of one of the most storied and influential intellectual news magazines in the country. Investing in narrative-driven, long-form journalism, he is setting the standard for high-quality analysis adapted to the new media environment.