The women behind the Lede Company took an entrepreneurial leap and now run one of the most powerful PR firms in entertainment.On a Friday morning in June of last year, Meredith O’Sullivan, Sarah Rothman, and Amanda Silverman gathered in O’Sullivan’s Santa Monica living room. The hard-charging public-relations executives headed up divisions at 42West, a giant bicoastal entertainment PR firm representing A-list celebrities and companies.
The three coworkers had started out in various entry-level gigs in the industry and worked their way up. Silverman had been a receptionist at an entertainment PR firm, where she learned on the job. Rothman had started in public relations in college, doing outreach for the governor of North Carolina, her home state. She’d been planning to go into politics when she heard about a communications job at Miramax in New York.
Now they were all executives with impressive client lists. They’d put in their time, “working our asses off,” as Silverman puts it. They knew what it was like to be roused at 3 a.m. by a client unhappy with a Page Six item, demanding it be corrected. Or to stand in a hallway spraying Febreze after a client was caught smoking pot in the greenroom of a late-night talk show. It was time, they thought, to create their own firm.But nothing had prepared them for how scary the leap would actually be.
A few hours after their non-breakfast, they’d tell their bosses they were striking out on their own. “We were, like, puking. We were freaking out,” recalls Silverman. Those conversations were “very emotional,” according to her, and, to their collective relief, “very lovely.” They regrouped at a hotel and began working to launch the business, including hiring a tech firm. Really, though, they were waiting.