How Jessica Chan, Perplexity’s one-person team tasked with building relationships with publishers, gets it done

Perplexity launched its publisher program in July, and was “overwhelmed” after receiving over 100 messages from publishers interested in joining, Chan told Digiday in December.

“It became very clear that there was someone that was needed full-time to manage this program,” Chan said. Since she joined Perplexity in September, 14 publishers have formally signed onto the revenue share program.

Her role involves managing publishers that are part of the program, getting new publishers to join and charting the evolution of the program, Chan said.

Chan’s background sets her up well to do that kind of work at Perplexity. For instance, she already knows a lot of folks in the media industry, having helped build LinkedIn’s publisher programs for almost nine years, before heading to work at Meta in brand and developer partnerships for its messaging products at the end of 2021.

Perplexity reached out to Chan for the role, according to Dmitry Shevelenko, the company’s chief business officer. He worked with Chan at Pulse News, a news aggregator iPad app, and both ended up working at LinkedIn when it acquired Pulse News in 2013.

“We are working at such a fast clip [at Perplexity that] I can’t take gambles with hires,” Shevelenko said. “She was first on [my] list.”

There are three skills Chan has that Perplexity needed in the publisher partnership lead role, Shevelenko said. Her experience “moving fast” at an early-stage startup at Pulse News, the fact that she worked at a much larger company like LinkedIn making “really big deals with really big publishers,” and “knowing the end-to-end process” of doing deals with publishers that require conversations with legal, editorial and tech stakeholders, Shevelenko said.

Chan earns publishers’ praise — so far

Chan has been at Perplexity for less than five months, and the publisher revenue share program itself is only six months old. But publishing execs she’s worked with so far seem impressed by her personality and intelligence. That’s a good place to start, in an ecosystem where relationships between tech companies and publishers can often turn sour.

“[Chan] obviously has a background in this. She knows the market. I think she’s been fantastic so far,” said Mark Howard, chief operating officer at Time.

A publishing exec — who works for a media company that is part of Perplexity’s revenue share program, but asked to speak anonymously — called Chan “smart and personable.”

A second publishing exec — also at a media company that’s part of Perplexity’s program who requested anonymity — called Chan “sharp and empathetic,” and said that she “knows her stuff.”

And a third anonymous publishing exec, who helped oversee a deal with Perplexity, said Chan’s been “super attentive.”

While it’s been a “complicated and unique time” to be a publisher as AI’s role grows both within and outside the industry, Chan has come to the table with “positive vibes and eagerness to find a way to work together,” the third exec said.

This is especially important given the fact that this particular exec’s media company is focused on finding new ways to share data with Perplexity. Chan was “very eager to learn” about contractual obligations around the publisher’s content (the exec declined to give specifics on the record), and she’s often been quick to hop on the phone to figure out what the company can and can’t do with that content, they said.

The third exec also praised Chan’s ability to “articulate exactly” how Perplexity works, how it would use and display the shared data, and how the publisher would make money from Perpelxity’s revenue share model.

Because of her transparency in these conversations, Perplexity and this publisher were able to get a deal done within three months of their introduction to Chan, the third exec said — making for a “seamless process” that was on “a relatively truncated timeline for something so new.”

Meeting the challenge of relationship-building …

One of Chan’s skills that kept coming up in the conversations Digiday had for this story was her ability to build and maintain relationships — both in her professional and personal life. Chan herself said this is something that differentiates Perplexity from other AI tech companies.

“I think that is core to who I am and core to what I care about. And I think it shows in a lot of the conversations that we have with publishers. We’re not about just writing a one time check, getting content and then — one and done. It’s about the long term sustainability, which I think is reflective in the structure around the ad revenue, the way that we’re thinking about partners, and managing partners,” Chan said.

Ingrid Flores, CEO of Hosta AI, has known Chan since her Pulse News days too, and worked with Chan for two years on LinkedIn’s partnerships team. They’ve stayed good friends ever since.

“She’s someone you meet and want to be best friends with. [She has] a combination of charisma and people skills,” Flores said. Chan’s biggest assets are her empathy and humility, Flores added.

Zan Variano, senior partner program manager of ecosystem at iCIMS, also worked with Chan on LinkedIn’s publisher partnerships team after she joined from the Pulse News acquisition. He remembered her optimism at work.

“Working with Jessica was always a joy because she brings tons of warmth and humanity to the table. She’s upbeat and unpretentious,” Variano said. He called Chan “one of the best relationship-builders I have ever met in my career.”

What sets her apart in this field is being able to foster those relationships over the years, he noted. “She’s never too busy to make time for a call or a brainstorm or just to chat,” Variano said. “I still hear from connections within the industry that Jess has maintained some regular contact with them for five, seven, even 10-plus years at this point.”

… amid contentious times

While Chan may be well-liked by her peers, she faces a good deal of skepticism from publishing execs who question AI tech companies’ intentions when it comes to fairly compensating them for the content and data being scraped to train their large language models. To really set the scene Chan is working in: News Corp sued Perplexity last October, alleging the company violated copyright and trademark laws by misusing content from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post.

“[Chan is] independently operating in a frankly difficult role. Also in the room are some publishers that have been unhappy with Perplexity,” Shevelenko admitted. He declined to comment on future hiring plans at Perplexity to grow Chan’s team.

But Chan’s kindness and responsiveness makes her well-equipped to deal with this unease, according to Shevelenko. “She’s able to get folks that maybe going into the first meeting were prepared for battle, and diffuse some of the emotional tension and get folks focused on the overlapping areas of mutual interest,” Shevelenko said.

Chan herself acknowledged these challenges in her role, and said her priority is to help publishers understand what Perplexity does.

The third anonymous publishing exec told Digiday they “felt taken care of” in their work with Perplexity, even with Chan being the only person on the company’s publisher partnerships team.

When asked how Chan can do all of this on her own, Shevelenko said that, as a startup company, Perplexity brings on leaders who “can do the work of five people and are given a lot of autonomy.” Additionally, he does join some conversations Chan has with publishers — especially when she flags meetings that might need more pull from Perplexity’s execs to keep the ball rolling — as does CEO Aravind Srinivas and vp of business Ryan Foutty, Shevelenko added.

“She has the confidence to ask for that, rather than try to do it all on her own,” Shevelenko said.

It’s worth noting that Chan is one of the few women in a leadership role at a prominent AI tech company right now. Flores said she admires Chan’s ability to seemingly do it all.

“What impresses me is that she can pull off [the job] with two little children … and every time you see her she looks gorgeous. She’s my fashion guru. And whenever we meet up, she picks the place and it’s always amazing. I don’t know how she does it,” Flores said.