inMEDIAte: Shane Smith: The Man Behind Everything

Who is Shane Smith?

He is the journalist and web entrepreneur responsible for the co-creation of the media company VICE Media, Inc.

VICE currently has 36 offices all over the world.
It has a multimedia network that counts with an exclusive source of original online video and an international network of digital and non-digital branches: ● VICE News ●VICE Sports ●Munchies ●Noisey ●The Creators Project ●Thump ●Fightland ●i-D.co ●Television and feature film production studio ●A magazine ●Vice Records (record label)

How he did it?

All started in Canada, in 1994. Smith, along with Gavin McInnes and Suroosh Alvi, founded what was called at the time Voice of Montreal; with the help of government funding destined to provide work and community services. It published articles about subjects not covered in print. In the present day, twenty one years since it creation, VICE Media has a net worth over $400 million US dollars.

The New York Times described him in the article, A Wild Man Grows Up (Just Enough), as “a cross between punk rocker and Fortune 500 Executive”, as he fulfils two opposite roles: he is the voice of the new generation of careless and spontaneous youngsters, but also the link between that audience (which is rather difficult to reach) and corporate America. So more than a dual role, we can say he fulfils a bounding role.

You can see how his regular day looks like in this article by The Wall Street Journal.
How different is it from your regular day?

Another fact that might interest you (but do not interest me at all), is that Smith is in the list Ones to watch, by Forbes Magazine, which lists future FORBES400 members (the wealthiest 400 Americans of the year). This demonstrates how successful a man who does something driven by passion can become; as he told Jeff Bercovici (journalist for Fobes Magazine):

“The best piece of advice I ever got from anyone was when Spike Jonze said take money out of the equation. And that’s actually when Vice started making lots of money. That’s when I stopped worrying about money and started worrying about what I wanted to do.”