Laura Graham O'Shaughnessy, Co-Founder and CEO of SocialCode, at the company's office
Businesses can be born in unlikely places.
In the spring of 2010, when money-losing Newsweek was on the block and The Washington Post newspaper was wheezing, Washington Post Co. chairman and chief executive Donald E. Graham sat down for a steak dinner with his daughter, Laura, and her husband, Tim O’Shaughnessy, then a rising star as a co-founder of District-based LivingSocial.
They had come to BLT Steak, and Laura immediately had second thoughts about getting together at the hip, power restaurant on I Street Northwest. BLT’s glittery, look-at-me vibe seemed all out of character with Graham’s cardigan persona.
“I was mortified that we had taken Don to this place,” Laura would say later.
Nevertheless, they settled in an out-of-the-way corner and began catching up. Laura and Tim are very much part of the region’s digital scene, having met at Revolution Health, former AOL chairman Steve Case’s attempt to shake up the health-care market. Laura had run Revolution’s online marketing team. Tim, 28, an idea guy, ultimately left to build LivingSocial out of a Facebook app.
“If I weren’t running LivingSocial,” Tim said at one point, “I would be starting a company that helps brands use social platforms.”
Graham’s face lit up.
“That’s a really good idea,” said the businessman who sat on Facebook’s board. He knew how fast audiences and advertisers were flocking to the site.
Before the evening ended, Graham was probing his internal Rolodex, trying to think of someone who could turn O’Shaughnessy’s musing into a business.
The answer, it turned out, was sitting across the table from him.
Laura Graham O’Shaughnessy was a smart, hungry, University of Chicago graduate eager to step out from her family’s shadow.
A child of privilege, she was born with a gene to please. Growing up on one of the grandest streets in Washington, her parents encouraged her to live as normal a life as she could. She volunteered on the Bethesda Chevy Chase Rescue Squad as a teenager. She worked in hospices on Chicago’s south side while attending college.
“I have a customer satisfaction drive, even when I was a waitress at a Greek deli on the side in college,” she said.
Her summers were an eclectic mix. As an emergency medical technician in the mountains of Colorado, she learned how to stick a pen in a throat to help a choking patient breathe. During college, she was a live-in nanny and athletic trainer. She thought about becoming a physician, scoring well enough on the admission test that Kaplan, owned by The Post, invited her to teach test preparation.
After college, she ended up in Nepal, doing an analysis of hydroelectric power. She gave up the physician idea and headed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management to work on an MBA. During the summer of 2005, she interned for mass media and information company Thomson. She earned her MBA in 2006.
“I couldn’t work in a 60,000-person company,” she said.
So she pitched herself to Revolution Health through a friend because it was small, and “I knew I wanted a really dynamic work environment.” She learned marketing. She learned Google search. She learned to spend company money smartly. She eventually left in 2008 to work at Slate, then the Washington Post Co.’s online media site.
She was at Slate when her father, several weeks following the BLT Steak dinner, asked Laura to meet him for breakfast. It was the Tabard Inn, a clubby, laid back neighborhood spot that is a short walk from The Post’s longtime headquarters on 15th Street NW.
As they sat in the outdoor courtyard, eating their omelettes, Graham had a request.
“I need you to get this started and push this forward,” he told his daughter.
He was talking about “the project.” Tim’s idea. The Facebook thing. They would name it SocialCode.
Laura agreed to take it on.
“I didn’t want somebody else to have it,” she said.
Laura O’Shaughnessy, 37, has rarely talked publicly about her role building SocialCode. She’s been too busy getting an unproven enterprise off the ground. Soon after accepting her father’s challenge, she set out to build a team. She looked inside the Washington Post Co. She traveled to conferences. She even offered someone $500,000 to laun
