Chris Lavergne is an American media strategist and

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...

who founded the

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

Thought Catalog ''Thought Catalog'' is a website founded in 2010 by American entrepreneur and media strategist Chris Lavergne.Newton, MattheThought Catalog And The New Age Of Confessional Media''Forbes.'' June 7, 2015 Owned by The Thought & Expression Compan ...

'' in 2010.

Background

Born in suburban Virginia, Lavergne would later attend Hampshire College in Amherst,

Massachusetts Massachusetts ( ; ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine to its east, Connecticut and Rhode ...

. For his senior thesis, Lavergne wanted to study the interaction between

publishing Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...

literature Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, Play (theatre), plays, and poetry, poems. It includes both print and Electroni ...

, audience and the business of writing, which eventually led to the idea of ''Thought Catalog.''

''Thought Catalog''

Lavergne registered the domain name for ''Thought Catalog'' in 2008, and began working on the site while consulting for record labels and publishing companies.Weissman, Say
Thought Catalog Wants to Capture the Millennial Moment
''

Digiday ''Digiday'' is an online trade magazine for online media founded in 2008 by Nick Friese. It is headquartered in New York City, with offices in London and Tokyo. Description ''Digiday'' provides daily online news about advertising, publishing, a ...

''. June 8, 2015 ''Thought Catalog'' started publishing on February 1, 2010. By 2012, ''Thought Catalog'' was attracting 2.5 million unique visitors per month, and began to attract a large number of

millennial Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ...

readers, with nearly three-quarters of the site’s audience falling into the 21- to 34-year-old demographic. In July 2014 ''Thought Catalog'' was drawing more than 34 million unique visitors per month, with much of the traffic due to social sharing.Marikar, Sheil
On the Nice Internet, Caring Is Sharing
''New York Times''. June 6, 2015 Characterizing the site, Lavergne has said, "On the most basic level, we are an experimental media website dedicated to providing great content. What defines 'great content' is and probably always will be an open question and work-in-progress, but right now one of the things we are consistently striving for is to find a balance between commercial success and quality work." Lavergne was named to Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2014.2014 30 Under 30: Media
''Forbes''. June 8, 2015

References

External links

Chris Lavergne on TwitterThought Catalog
Living people Hampshire College alumni Businesspeople from Virginia American technology company founders American mass media company founders Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-business-bio-stub