The Former White House Aide Who Founded Fab.com

Many former White House aides have gone on to work in the private sector, but few have distanced themselves as far from wonky world politics as Jason Goldberg, a onetime Clinton staffer who founded Fab.com, the design sale site that started out as Fabulis, a gay social networking platform.

After Goldberg, now 40, graduated from Emory University in 1993, he went to work for the White House, first in the Cabinet Affairs office, then for Erskine Bowles, who was chief of staff at the time. By 1998, though, Goldberg had left politics and enrolled in Stanford Business School. After graduating in 2001, Goldberg bounced around a string of high-profile digital gigs—first in AOL Time Warner’s strategy group and then at T-Mobile, where he founded their hotspot service. In 2003, he founded Jobster, a social networking company. After selling it, he launched another, Social Median, which he sold 11 months later to Xing, a business network site located in Hamburg.