Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
That’s quite a feat for one person. But after talking to her boss, former colleagues and publishing executives, Chan seems poised to woo publishers, given her experience and the hard and soft skills she’s acquired throughout her career.
Perplexity has launched its publisher program in Julyand was “overwhelmed” after receiving more than 100 messages from publishers interested in joining, Chan told Digiday in December.
“It was very clear that there was someone who needed full-time management of this program,” Chan said. 14 publishers since she joined Perplexity in September formally signed the revenue sharing program.
Her role includes managing the publishers who are part of the program, recruiting new publishers to join and charting the program’s development, Chan said.
Chan’s background predisposes her to do this kind of work at Perplexity. For example, she already knows a lot of people in the media industry, having helped build LinkedIn’s publisher programs for nearly nine years before heading to Meta in late 2021 to partner with brands and developers for its messaging products.
According to Dmitry Shevelenko, the company’s commercial director, the confusion reached out to Khan for the role. He worked with Chan at Pulse News, a news aggregator app for the iPad, and the two ended up working at LinkedIn when acquired Pulse News in 2013.
“We’re working at such a fast clip [at Perplexity that] I can’t gamble with hired workers,” said Shevelenko. “She was the first [my] list.”
Chan has three skills that Perplexity needs in a key role of partnering with publishers, Shevelenko said. Her experience of “moving fast” in an early-stage startup at Pulse News, the fact that she worked at a much larger company like LinkedIn, closing “really big deals with really big publishers” and “knowing the whole process.” about closing deals with publishers that require conversations with legal, editorial and technical stakeholders, Shevelenko said.
So far, Chan has earned praise from publishers
Chan has been with Perplexity for less than five months, and the publisher revenue sharing program itself is only six months old. However, the publishing bosses she has worked with so far seem to have been impressed by her personality and intelligence. That’s a good place to start, in the ecosystem where there are relationships between tech companies and publishers can often turn sour.
“[Chan] he obviously has a background in it. He knows the market. I think she’s been fantastic so far,” said Mark Howard, Time’s chief operating officer.
A publishing executive who works for a media company that is part of Perplexity’s revenue-sharing program but asked to speak anonymously called Chan “smart and likable.”
A second publishing executive — also at a media company that is part of the Perplexity program and who requested anonymity — called Chan “bright and empathetic” and said she “knows her stuff.”
And a third anonymous publisher who helped oversee the deal with Perplexity said Chan is “super observant.”
While it’s been a “complicated and unique time” to be a publisher as the role of artificial intelligence grows both inside and outside the industry, Chan came to the table with “positive vibes and an eagerness to find a way to work together,” said a third executive. .
This is especially important given the fact that this particular manager’s media company is focused on finding new ways to share data with Perplexity. Chan was “very eager to learn” about the publisher’s content contractual obligations (the exec declined to go into detail on the record), and was often quick to jump on the phone to find out what the company could and couldn’t do. the content, they said.
A third director also praised Chan’s ability to “articulate precisely” how Perplexity works, how it will use and display shared data, and how the publisher would make money from Perpelxity’s revenue-sharing model.
Because of her transparency in those conversations, Perplexity and the publisher were able to close the deal within three months of their introduction to Chan, the third director said — allowing for a “seamless process” that was on “a fairly short timeline for something so new.”
Dealing with the challenge of relationship building …
One of Chan’s skills that kept coming up in the interviews Digiday conducted for this story was her ability to build and maintain relationships—both professionally and personally. Chan herself said this is something that sets Perplexity apart from other AI tech companies.
“I think that’s the core of who I am and the core of what I care about. And I think that shows in a lot of the conversations we have with publishers. We’re not about writing a one-off review, getting content, and then – one and done. It’s about long-term sustainability, which I think is reflected in the structure around ad revenue, the way we think about partners and the management partners,” Chan said.
Ingrid Flores, CEO of Hosta AI, has also known Chan since her Pulse News days and worked with Chan on the LinkedIn Partnerships team for two years. They have remained good friends ever since.
“He’s someone you meet and want to be best friends with.” [She has] a combination of charisma and people skills,” Flores said. Chan’s greatest strengths are her empathy and humility, Flores added.
Zan Variano, Senior Partner Ecosystem Program Manager at iCIMS, also worked with Chan on LinkedIn’s Publisher Partnerships team after she joined from the Pulse News acquisition. He remembered her optimism at work.
“Jessica has always been a joy to work with because she brings so much warmth and humanity to the table. She is cheerful and unassuming,” Variano said. He called Chan “one of the best relationship builders I’ve ever met in my career.”
What sets her apart in this field is her ability to foster those relationships over the years, he noted. “She’s never too busy to take time to make a phone call or brainstorm or just chat,” Variano said. “I keep hearing from contacts in the industry that Jess has been in regular contact with them for five, seven, even more than a decade.”
… in the midst of troubled times
While Chan may be well-liked among her peers, she faces significant skepticism from publishers who question the intentions of AI tech companies when it comes to fair compensation for the content and data that is scraped to train their large language models. To really set the stage for what Chan is working on: News Corp sued Perplexity last Octoberclaims the company violated copyright and trademark laws by misusing content from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post.
“[Chan is] acting independently in a frankly difficult role. There are also some publishers in the room who were unhappy with Perplexity,” Shevelenko admitted. He declined to comment on future hiring plans at Perplexity to expand Chan’s team.
But according to Shevelenko, Chan’s kindness and responsiveness are well-equipped to deal with this turmoil. “It can get people who maybe going into a first meeting ready for battle and diffuse some of the emotional tension and get people to focus on overlapping areas of common interest,” Shevelenko said.
Chan herself acknowledged these challenges in her role, saying her priority is to help publishers understand what Perplexity does.
A third anonymous publisher told Digiday that they “felt taken care of” in their work with Perplexity, even though Chan was the only person on the company’s publisher partnerships team.
Asked how Chan can do this alone, Shevelenko said that as a startup, Perplexity brings in leaders who “can do the work of five people and have a lot of autonomy.” In addition, he will join some of the conversations Chan has with publishers — especially when he flags meetings that might require more push from Perplexity execs to keep the ball rolling — as will CEO Aravind Srinivas and VP of business Ryan Foutty, Shevelenko added.
“She has enough confidence to ask for it rather than trying to do it all herself,” Shevelenko said.
It’s worth noting that Chan is currently one of the few women in a leadership role at a prominent AI technology company. Flores said she admires Chan’s ability to seemingly do everything.
“What impressed me is that he can break free. [the job] with two young children… and every time you see her she looks gorgeous. He is my fashion guru. And whenever we meet, he chooses a place and it’s always amazing. I don’t know how he does it,” Flores said.