Brooke Hammerling founded her PR agency Brew Media Relations in 2005. Brew also happens to be Brooke’s long-time nickname. The CEO of Brew is Dena Cook. Brew PR has offices in Santa Monica (where Dena Cook usually works), San Francisco, and New York City.
Who is Brooke Hammerling?
Brooke attended Rollins College in Winter Park Florida – not far from Orlando and according to the Brew website, she did actually learn a lot despite the tropical location. However, we did not find any mention of what her degree or what field of study was her focus.
At some point after her college years, she found herself in the Silicon Valley area where she did a fair share of night life – During this time in her life, she managed to meet and become friendly with some folks who were at the beginning of their careers and then over time became some of the big names in the tech world.
“She became that person who everyone knew randomly. Basically, it would be like if in seven years all the people I’m friends with were suddenly billionaires,” one source told The Observer in a 2011 interview. “She’s good at what she does. But her network was organic, and it’s really, really powerful now.”
Also noted in the interview referring to her knowledge of the press, “She knows who just got dumped, who had a baby, who’s gay, who’s straight, who got moved off this beat, who’s competing with this writer. You might not be Facebook friends with Nick Bilton, but she is,” said Kate Pokorny, one of Ms. Hammerling’s early employees from the days when Brew was still run out of her apartment on West 10th Street.
Brooke has said of those Silicon Valley days, “AT 24, 25, YOU’RE FEARLESS. I certainly was. Being in the Valley at that point was, I’m guessing, what it was like to be in Hollywood back in the beginning of the film business when you had five movie stars. You had access. Everybody knew one another. You’d be at a social conference or what not, and there would be Marc Andreessen or Larry Ellison.”
Mark Pincus co-owner of Zynga
“There were parties every night for the dotcom world, and my ex-boyfriend was best friends with Mark Pincus and Marc Benioff, who was a marketing dude at Oracle at the time,” Ms. Hammerling explained. “They were older. I was the youngster. I was the little girl living on a houseboat in Sausalito, and they all just thought it was the funniest thing,”
Since then, Pincus started the gaming app company giant Zynga. Benioff founded a multi billion-dollar web company Salesforce. Andreessen is the CEO of Oracle, and Ellison became one of her first clients when he founded an early cloud computing company, NetSuite.
Brooke has done very well for herself and Brew PR, but from all reports, it seems her real talent lies more in people, reading them, seeing what is important to them and then using that information to propel herself and clients forward.
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