Lee Semel
Cofounder, CTO Emeritus at Muck Rack
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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SeniorLee Semel is a seasoned technology founder and former CTO with 15+ years building profitable, bootstrapped SaaS and digital media platforms from New York. As cofounder and long-time CTO of Muck Rack, he helped create the industry-standard PR platform and a leading journalist network, and he co-created the Shorty Awards, an early and enduring institution in social media recognition. His background includes founding a web consultancy that delivered high-profile sites and custom CMS work for institutions like Harvard, the Smithsonian, and Goldman Sachs, showing both enterprise-grade execution and product intuition. Lee blends hands-on engineering and product leadership with event production and media-savvy entrepreneurship, a combination that helped Muck Rack grow while maintaining profitability. An unglamorous but telling detail: he has repeatedly chosen sustainable, bootstrapped growth over venture scale-up, signaling disciplined operational and technical priorities.
15 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
883reputation
78kreached
4answers
11questions
Github Skills (85)
parsing10
validation9
json-schema9
python9
redis9
caching9
database8
http8
task-manager8
amqp8
python-requests8
json8
realtime7
task-scheduler7
django7
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
quickbrownfox/twitter-convowall
Mar 2011 - Mar 2011
Contributions:56 commits in 7 days
muckrack/python-goose
May 2015 - Mar 2019
Html Content / Article Extractor, web scrapping lib in Python
Contributions:2 PRs, 2 pushes in 3 years 11 months
python
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