Ben Huh

Ben Huh is a South Korean and American internet entrepreneur and the former CEO of The Cheezburger Network, which at its peak in 2010 received 375 million views a month across its 50 sites.

Early life Huh was born in Seoul, South Korea and grew up in Rancho Cordova, California, attending Cordova High School there. In 1999, Huh graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism, although English was not his first language. He founded a web analytics company, which folded after 18 months. At the time, the site was getting viewed 500,000 times daily, which Huh notes was "fantastic for a cat picture site that nobody understood." He likes to joke that his investor pitch was "I would like to start a media company by buying a cat picture website. Can you give me $2.25 million?" Huh states that "we felt like that there was a pretty good possibility that we were buying into a cultural phenomenon, a shift in the way people perceived entertainment." At this time in the site's history, the content was user-generated, with users allowed to upload images and add text captions throughout its network of sites, with the best then being culled by Cheezburger employees and users and posted to the front pages daily. They've released five books, two of which are New York Times bestsellers. In April 2012, Circa raised $750K in Series A funding, before being shut down in 2015 and subsequently reopened under different ownership.

In July 2013, Huh told the media that his decision to make 24 job cuts at Cheezburger, amounting to a third of the firm's employees, was one of the most difficult weeks he had ever experienced.

Huh ran Cheezburger until its acquisition by Literally Media in 2016. The sites no longer rely on user-submitted or user-generated content and are instead maintained by a full editorial team that creates fresh content and articles largely centered on the internet and meme culture.

Social Construct Huh founded Social Construct, a technology company that assembled "buildings with software-generated floor plans and rooms that fit together like Lego bricks." The company was founded in 2017 from the New Cities moonshot project at Y Combinator, where Huh worked after leaving The Cheezburger Network. The company raised $17M from Y Combinator and Founders Fund and broke ground on a multi-family building in Oakland, CA before shutting down during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021.

Orange DAO Huh then went on to co-lead Orange DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization with a membership of more than 1,000 Y Combinator alumni. Orange DAO seeks to "help startups apply to, and be accepted into Y Combinator, provide them with pre- and post-YC funding, while helping mentor their leadership and recruit talent, and acquire customers" according to its charter. Huh is one of three general partners of the investment firm Orange Fund which works with Orange DAO to make investments in early-stage startups.

Reception Huh has been a speaker at SXSW, Web 2.0 Summit and TEDx Seattle. In 2010, Huh was named to Fast Company's list of the "Most Creative People in Business." He was also named to GQ's list of the "Worst-Dressed Men in Silicon Valley"; in response to this, he challenged GQ to a fashion duel.

Awards Huh received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in 2011.

Personal life Huh lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Emily and poodle mix, Nemo. He also runs The Moby Dick Project, which aims to change how news is presented. He is allergic to cats.