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Who

Steele is the president and publisher of the blog network Curbed, which includes Curbed.com, Eater.com, Racked.com, and Gridskipper.com.

Backstory

Massachusetts native Steele got his start in publishing as a student at Brown when he and his pal Andy Bernstein turned their obsession with the band Phish into a book, The Pharmer's Almanac. Steele settled in the city after graduation, landing a job working for Richard Ekstract's Wideband, a now-defunct consumer electronics publication. In 2000, with Ekstract's support—and $700,000 in capital from Ekstract and others—Steele and a friend, Josh Albertson, went to work on a website called Mouseion, which was intended to be a directory of popular websites. When the bottom fell out of the tech market, the duo shelved their plans, and in 2001 Steele rejoined the Ekstract fold, helping to launch a new title, Hamptons Cottages & Gardens. He left the company in 2005 to join Nick Denton's blog venture Gawker Media as managing editor. After overseeing the launch of a half a dozen blogs for the company, he departed Gawker in 2007 to focus his attention on his self-started blog network, Curbed.

Of note

Steele started a real estate blog called Curbed.com in 2004; he later teamed up with partner Ben Leventhal to launch the restaurant-obsessed Eater.com. Since then Steele and his cohorts have launched a handful of other blogs, including LA and San Francisco iterations of Curbed and Eater, the Hamptons-themed The Beach, and retail blog Racked.com. For two years, Steele did double duty, juggling his day job at Gawker with a burgeoning blog empire of his own on the side. In July 2007, he went to work on Curbed full-time, raising $1.5 million in financing from Nick Denton and Gawker Media, NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson, real estate publisher Brad Inman, and Joanne Wilson, the wife of venture capitalist Fred Wilson. The company expanded a bit in early 2008 with the acquisition of the lightly-viewed travel blog Gridskipper.com from Gawker.

For the record

Yes, that's his real name. He's named after his grandfather.

In print

With Josh Albertson and Jonathan Van Gieson, Steele is the author of 2003's Book of Ages: 30 and The Big 40!

Personal

Steele is single. His ex-girlfriends include Dannielle Romano, editor-at-large at the Dany Levy-founded Daily Candy, and Jessica Coen, who once worked under him at Gawker and now works at New York magazine. Steele lives in a one-bedroom walkup on Rivington Street.