We Built This Because We Had To

Graf wasn’t born from a business plan or a pivot deck. It exists because a few of us got tired of watching good writers get eaten alive by platforms that treat words like widgets and audiences like acquisition targets.

We’ve been on both sides of the publishing equation—creating content that people actually want to read, and building the technical infrastructure that makes it possible to reach them without selling your creative soul to algorithmic overlords. This combination of editorial instinct and technical competence is rarer than you’d think, which is probably why most publishing platforms feel like they were designed by people who’ve never actually tried to make a living from writing.

Cooper Fleishman

Partner

cooperfleishman.com

Cooper Fleishman is a digital media veteran with 15 years of service building beloved editorial brands—from Fortune 500 publishing to scrappy independent newsletters. A longtime journalist and editor, Cooper most recently led growth, digital strategy, and e-commerce for American Express’ Departures magazine, North & Warren’s suite of publications, and Dollar Shave Club’s award-winning men’s magazine Mel. His consultancy, Small Caps, provides revenue solutions for creators. In a previous life, he sold dog food on the sidewalk in NYC and toured southern Ohio as a punk and hardcore drummer. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, dog, and baby boy.

Tom Adams

Partner

Tom Adams is an accomplished IT Portfolio Manager. His career spanning, 15+ years of leading large scale software development teams, has given him insights into Digital Services and Transformations and how to bring simple yet elegant solutions to life. His expertise in Project and Program Management serves as the backbone of operations here at Graf, where he oversees operations and coordinates between departments to ensure a smooth customer experience of implementation of our bespoke solutions. In his spare time, Tom enjoys spending time with his wife and daughters, golfing, and playing Dungeons & Dragons. 

Ramón Ramirez

Partner

Ramón Ramirez is a Graf co-founder. He’s a journalist from Austin, Texas and RTNN’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. 

For 10 years, he served as an editor at the Daily Dot, most recently as its managing editor.

His work has appeared in the Austin American-Statesman, Washington Post, Washington City Paper, Grantland, and more. At the peak of his Dot tenure, his newsroom enjoyed a high of 166 million monthly pageviews across platforms such as Google Discover and Apple News.

Ramón is a bilingual UT Austin grad. Six nights a week, he coaches youth soccer at FC Westlake.

 

Shane Morris

Partner

Shane is what happens when a software engineer decides to care about words and content as much as code. Over the past 17 years, he’s built everything from AI-powered battlefield simulations for the Army to click-through prediction systems for Victoria’s Secret, but his real expertise lies in understanding how technical systems can serve creative work instead of destroying it.

His resume reads like a greatest hits of modern data architecture: Federal AWS, Azure, machine learning implementations, full-stack development across more frameworks than should probably exist. He’s led engineering teams for the US Army, the US Navy, Sony Music Entertainment, and dozens of other organizations that needed someone who could build things that actually work.

He is the co-founder and publisher of EARMILK, and has been featured in ESPN (Grantland), VICE, Jalopnik, WIRED, and many others.

Shane Morris lives in Northern Virginia with his wife, their three children, and an old hound dog.

Matt Marciszewski

Partner

As a self-described “jack-of-all trades” engineer, Matt Marciszewski transforms complex data challenges into actionable insights. Most recently, he has built data-driven solutions for Special Operations Command. With an impressive blend of technical expertise in AWS, Azure, and on-site supercomputing clusters, Matt finds patterns in data that others miss.

His career journey has taken him from Collins Aerospace to Genentech, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Lockheed Martin, and Iron EagleX, where he developed high-performance applications and measured database performance across complex systems.

Currently pursuing a Master’s in Computer Science with an emphasis in Machine Learning at Georgia Tech, Matt combines his academic foundation with real-world problem-solving skills.

Bilingual in English and Polish, Matt brings a global perspective to his work. When not wrangling data pipelines or building machine learning models, you might find him volunteering as a Scoutmaster with The Polish Scouting and Guiding Association or proofreading for Project Gutenberg’s digital archives.