Our US Adventures

Felix Dennis and colleagues have now completed their move into 55 West 39th Street - the same street and block where Dennis Publishing has been ensconced for nearly a quarter of a century - ready to embark on their fifth start-up operation in the US. The Week will take up half the space. Under the stewardship of Steven Kotok and Bill Faulks, this has been the most successful launch ever in the news and opinion sector in the US, and currently sells over 500,000 copies per week www.theweekdaily.com. Felix and a group of Dennis colleagues have some big ideas about what is to happen with the remaining space.

Our first start-up was in 1973. We produced Kung-Fu, Jaws, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, ET and Walt Disney Corporation publications. We later moved to New York City, where we launched an edition of Smash Hits called Star Hits, which was a huge success. From these same offices we launched an edition of our UK magazine MacUser. Twenty months later we sold it for the then enormous sum of $23 million to Ziff Davies.

Our third launch was Mac Warehouse, a mail-order software and hardware supplier based in Connecticut, which became a $2.5bn company listed on Nasdaq.

Dennis Publishing's fourth start-up came under the stewardship of home-grown UK staffer and Belfast boy Steve Colvin, who helped Dennis launch Maxim US, followed by Stuff, Blender and The Week. Maxim was the most successful US magazine launch for decades, selling 2.5m copies a month. This operation was sold to Quadrangle in the autumn of 2007 for hundreds of millions of dollars. However, Dennis retained the ownership of The Week US.

Plans for Dennis's fifth start-up operation are already under way. Ten desks, ten chairs and ten computers are ready to be filled by the most talented people in the industry, working on exciting new projects.