Fred Seibert

Background

Fred Seibert is an American media executive, animation producer, and angel investor whose career spans music, cable television, animation, and early-stage technology investing. He attended Columbia University starting in 1969, where he spent most of his time at college radio station WKCR-FM and never graduated ¹.

Seibert began as a jazz and blues record producer in the early 1970s, co-founding the independent label Oblivion Records around 1972 with Tom Pomposello and Dick Pennington, producing albums by Mississippi Fred McDowell and Joe Lee Wilson ¹. He received a Grammy Award nomination at the 20th Annual Grammy Awards ¹.

In 1981, Seibert served as MTV’s first creative director during the channel’s August 1, 1981 launch, working with the Manhattan Design collective to create the iconic MTV logo and contributing to the “I Want My MTV!” advertising campaign ^{1 2}. In 1983, he co-founded the media branding agency Fred/Alan Inc. with Alan Goodman; together they revitalized Nickelodeon between June 1984 and January 1985 — Fred/Alan’s own description is that they took the network “from worst to first in the ratings in six months” — and created the Nick-at-Nite concept in 1985, the launch positioning for Comedy Central, and the launch of VH-1 ^{1 2}.

From 1992 to 1996, Seibert served as the final president of Hanna-Barbera, where in 1994 he established the animation incubator anthology What a Cartoon!, a 48-short program that launched Dexter’s Laboratory (Genndy Tartakovsky), Cow and Chicken (David Feiss), Johnny Bravo (Van Partible), Courage the Cowardly Dog (John R. Dilworth), and The Powerpuff Girls (Craig McCracken) — properties that became Cartoon Network’s early original-programming franchise ¹.

In 1998 Seibert founded Frederator Studios, an independent animation company that produced My Life as a Teenage Robot for Nickelodeon, Adventure Time for Cartoon Network, and Castlevania for Netflix ¹. In March 1999, MTV Networks CEO Tom Freston appointed Seibert as the first president of MTV Networks Online ¹. In 2007, Seibert co-founded the early internet-video company Next New Networks, which was acquired by YouTube in March 2011 ^{1 2}. He also co-founded the New York-based studio Thirty Labs in 2014 with John Borthwick (Betaworks), Jonathan Miller, and Shari Redstone ¹.

Seibert stepped down as Frederator’s CEO in August 2020 but remained executive producer on ongoing projects ¹. On February 23, 2021, he announced the formation of FredFilms with a first-look deal at VIS Kids ^{1 2}.

In 2004, then-unknown teenage developer David Karp began interning at Frederator Studios’ New York office, where Karp built Frederator’s first multi-user blogging platform ^{1 3}. In late 2006, Seibert introduced Karp to Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet — Sabet had previously invested in one of Seibert’s projects — which led to Spark co-leading Tumblr’s $750,000 Series A in October 2007 alongside Union Square Ventures ^{4 3}. Tumblr itself launched in February 2007 from a rented desk at Frederator’s Park Avenue South offices ^{1 3}. Seibert was one of Tumblr’s first bloggers, an angel investor in the company, and served on Tumblr’s board of directors before the platform’s $1.1 billion acquisition by Yahoo in May 2013 ^{1 3}.