Susan Lyne’s Digital Makeover

Even at the startup Premiere magazine, you were working for an extension of a mammoth organization—Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Give me a sense of what's it like at a bona fide startup?
I'm hiring a team that can really scale up the business. Many took big pay cuts to come here, and they are doing it for many of the same reasons that I am—because there's a bigger opportunity when you're at a startup to have a bigger win at the end. But it's also because a startup is really fun. And a company that's growing this fast is really fun, and so if you've been working in a big corporation where things move at the pace of molasses, and it takes umpteen meetings with the strategic planning team to get something done, this is extremely liberating. So we have been able to attract phenomenal talent. When I started Premiere, we were part of a much larger company. We were a little band off to the side in unfinished office space trying to invent a magazine. And that was the last time—the early years of Premiere. Now, it's really fun working with a lot of 20- and 30-somethings. There's an optimism and a sense of the possible when you are working with people who are still fresh to business. That's infectious, and I love it.

The buzz around Gilt seems ubiquitous. What's Gilt's secret to publicity and marketing?
When you get a certain scale, that creates buzz. When I came to the company in September, we had 300,000-plus members. Now we have well over 1 million. And so as the company grows and as membership grows, the buzz grows. It's really a factor of just the hyper growth that Gilt is experiencing.

What have you had to learn?
I had to learn that everyday creates new opportunities and new challenges. There's not a day that goes by that something has to be fixed, built, or made better. This is a very fast-moving environment. I worked in a media business that felt fast—certainly network television, where everyday you are programming a lot of stuff. But very little of it is live. This is live entertainment everyday. And it is fresh, live entertainment everyday.

I note your frequent analogy to entertainment? Is that your media background sneaking through?
Yeah, absolutely. And it's also because our members expect more from us. They expect this not to be just a good shopping experience but to be fun. And so there is definitely an entertainment quotient in this mix. Everybody is really happy to buy great products at great prices, but there's definitely another level to this experience that on good days does feel like great live entertainment.

How much do you miss the media business?
I feel like I'm still very engaged in it because I have so many friends in the media. I don't feel like I've left it in that sense. And I'm a media junkie. I still watch tons of television, read three newspapers in the morning—real newspapers. I get a dozen magazines. I'm of a different generation, and I do feel like there is a divide. I see it with my kids. They consume an enormous amount of media, but they consume it online.

By the way, what about the answer to the second part of my question about The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post—what doesn't grab you about them?
What they don't do well? I think that what you generally don't get in Internet publications is the juxtaposition of stories. I think that's part of what good editors do is to figure out how they are going to create a front page or a feature well where things play off each other, and where there is a curator's eye that is really either letting you know that these stories are the most important to read. That is why reading The New York Timesonline is a totally different experience. I want to know what the editors think was the most important story of the day—and the six other stories that demand a front-page start. When I read Vanity Fair, I like to see what's the mix that [editor] Graydon Carter has put together. My favorite magazine right now is New Yorkmagazine. I think it has a true voice. You often don't get that in big news aggregation sites. You feel like there's a group of people [at New York magazine] sitting in a room together, and they are coming up with a take on what's happening in the city that is unique and smart and always makes you think. Because so much of the way we read Internet news is through search, you don't get that.