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Eric Hippeau

American businessman

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ5386733
Source-derived summary

Eric Hippeau is a partner at Lerer Hippeau Ventures in New York City.

Early life and education

Hippeau graduated from the Lycee Francais de Londres and attended the Sorbonne University in Paris.

Career

Hippeau joined Ziff-Davis in 1989 as publisher of PC Magazine. He became president in 1991 and chairman and CEO in 1993. In 1995, SoftBank acquired Ziff-Davis, and Hippeau continued in the role of CEO until 2000, when the company was sold.

Hippeau joined SoftBank Capital in 2000 after leaving Ziff-Davis, Inc., where he was chairman and CEO. He was also a managing partner at SoftBank Capital.

Hippeau was President of SoftBank International Ventures, where he established SoftBank's international private equity funds and expanded them into Europe, Latin America and Asia. He was also SB Capital's board representative for its direct investments in companies, such as Yahoo!, GeoCities and CNET.

Hippeau was also responsible for founding ZDTV, a cable channel dedicated to technology and the Internet.

Hippeau was the CEO of HuffPost, which he joined in June 2009, after investing through SoftBank Capital and taking a board seat in 2006. Hippeau is a co-founder of NowThis News.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Eric Hippeau” is american businessman. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Eric, Hippeau and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1989, 1991, 1993, 1995—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Eric, Hippeau and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american businessman” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5386733. The first chronological checks are 1989, 1991, 1993 and 1995.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Eric Hippeau”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Eric Hippeau primary sources, Eric Hippeau archive and Eric research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Eric Hippeau” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.