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Profile
Andrea Breanna is the founder and CEO of RebelMouse, a creative agency with the best CMS platform in the world. The company has built two of the biggest new media companies to date — The Dodo and Axios — both of which were merely ideas when RebelMouse began the strategy, design, and development work. RebelMouse also powers United Airlines' Hub and many of the most popular media sites you know and love. Collectively, RebelMouse-powered properties reach more than 50 million people a month, which makes it one of the top 50 properties in the U.S., and one of the top 500 in the world.Andrea is proudly and openly transgender. Specifically, Andrea is a non-binary, transgender lesbian (transbian) who is happily married to Milena Berry, the founder and CEO of PowerToFly. Together they have four, beautiful kids and live in Tribeca, NYC.
Before RebelMouse, Andrea was CTO of The Huffington Post where she joined in the first year of the company's life and ran the product, design, and engineering teams. After The Huffington Post was sold to AOL, Andrea ran the same groups for all of AOL's media properties.
After AOL acquired The Huffington Post, Andrea saw what a custom CMS looked like for the first time. She inherited 53 properties built on dozens of different content management systems, but soon realized that they were all built by IT people who didn't fully grasp the concepts of traffic and distribution. Starting in 2012, RebelMouse was the first platform to create the "social front page," a hub where users could aggregate social feeds all in one place. It went viral with eight million users worldwide, sparking Andrea to realize that there wasn't a CMS to bring it all together yet.
That epiphany — coupled with the realization that social, mobile, and the acceleration of industry changes would soon make everyone's technology painfully obsolete and expensive — led to the birth of RebelMouse.
Andrea Breanna is not only someone to be admired as an amazing company founder, but she is also a true warrior of women in tech. Andrea was the former CTO of The Huffington Post, where she realized the digital ecosystem was severely lacking a social-forward, modern CMS option. That’s when she founded RebelMouse, and our company has gone through the true ups and downs of startups. But Andrea has handled them with complete grace, perseverance, and compassion. And those are her best strengths. I could type a lot about being business savvy, but that’s a given. I am sure every nominee shines in that department. Andrea came out as transgender a few years ago, and together as a RebelMouse family, we all stood by her and watched with admiration as she became her true self. Everything has been beautiful since then. Andrea has a RebelMouse mantra: Prioritize happiness. Happiness always comes first because work IS personal. She always encourages us to take breaks, travel, spend time with our families, exercise and not be consumed by work, which can easily happen in the startup culture. I will forever be grateful to Andrea for this. Because when employees are happy productivity actually increases. It seems obvious but Andrea is a trailblazer in practicing it. Andrea also makes sure we are reaching out to MORE women in tech and members of the LGTBQ+ community to join our team so that we can continue to break down industry standards of what is commonly a male-dominated space. Compassion, courage, and kindness. THAT’S how you lead a company.
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