Though BuzzFeed officially launched in November of 2006, the company’s story begins long before. In January of 2001, during his postgraduate study at the MIT Media Lab, Jonah Peretti forwarded an email conversation between himself and Nike to twelve friends. The email detailed a dispute between Peretti and Nike over whether Peretti could have “sweatshop” printed across his personalized Nike iD shoes. Those initial twelve friends forwarded the email to others, who forwarded it to others. It reached millions of people, catching the attention of tech blog Lot 49, the San Jose Mercury News, Village Voice, TIME, the Guardian, the Independent, MetaFilter, Slashdot, Salon, the Wall Street Journal, and eventually The Today Show, where Peretti debated labor policy with Nike’s head of public relations.