Biography
June Cohen is the Cofounder of WaitWhat, the venture-backed media company behind properties like Masters of Scale and Meditative Story - both Top 1% podcasts drawing a combined 150 million downloads and 70+ podcast industry Awards, more than any other media company of any size.
Cohen is the founding Co-Executive Producer of numerous WaitWhat podcasts, Masters of Scale (Business), Meditative Story (Wellness), Should This Exist? (Technology) and Spark & Fire (Creativity), for which she also serves as host.
She was also Executive Producer, in 2016, of the first documentary series in VR, The Possible, for With.in, and host of the Sincerely, X podcast, a co-production of TED and Audible.
Prior to WaitWhat, June was for 11 years the Executive Producer of TED, and co-host of the annual TED Conference. She joined TED as employee #5 in 2005 and pitched the idea of bringing the conference talks online. In 2006, she launched TED Talks, under a then-new Creative Commons license. In 2009, June introduced the ground-breaking TED Open Translation Project, which grew into the world's largest volunteer subtitling effort, with 120 languages, 20K translators and 100K translations.
June and her future co-founder Deron Triff ultimately grew TED Talks to 1 billion views/year. Under their leadership, TED's media efforts earned 17 Webbies, 8 iTunes Best Podcast of the Year awards, a National Design Award and a Peabody.
From 1994-2000, June was VP of Content at HotWired, the pioneering website from Wired magazine, which introduced many of the conventions now commonplace on the web, including the ad banner. In 1991, as an undergraduate, she led the Stanford team that developed the world's first networked multimedia magazine, Proteus. Built in HyperCard, using alpha builds of QuickTime and Adobe Premiere, Proteus was distributed over the campus network as a supplement to the student newspaper.
June holds a BA from Stanford, where she was Editor in Chief of The Stanford Daily.
