OMR26: Itzehoe, Def Jam and 42 Employees – Three Platform Chiefs Who Couldn’t Be More Different
On May 5 and 6, the OMR Festival will bring the minds behind ChatGPT, YouTube Music and OnlyFans to Hamburg. What connects the three: they run platforms that have turned entire industries upside down. And all three have biographies you couldn’t make up.
Hamburg – The OMR Festival has expanded its speaker lineup with three names you rarely see in the same sentence: Nick Turley (ChatGPT), Lyor Cohen (YouTube) and Keily Blair (OnlyFans). Together, they represent AI, music and the creator economy—pretty much the three forces currently reshaping the digital business landscape.
From Itzehoe to San Francisco – the world formula in ten days
Nick Turley is VP and Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, responsible for a product that now counts more than 800 million users per week. The twist: Turley comes from Itzehoe in Schleswig-Holstein, studied computer science and philosophy at Brown University, and made his way to OpenAI via roles at Dropbox and Instacart.
There, in 2022, he was part of the hackathon team that built ChatGPT in just ten days—originally intended as a one-month experiment. The rest is history.
Turley already appeared on the Conference Stage at OMR25, greeting the audience with a “Moin Moin” before speaking in English about the future of AI. The AI industry is known to evolve on a weekly basis. What has changed since his last appearance—ChatGPT as an operating system, third-party apps, integration into everyday work—is likely to be among the most closely watched topics in Hamburg.
Lyor Cohen: From the Beastie Boys’ tour bus to the YouTube empire
Few careers in the music industry read as cinematically as Lyor Cohen’s. In the early 1980s, he joined Russell Simmons’ Rush Artist Management and, on his very first day, was thrown in as a substitute tour manager for Run-DMC’s first UK tour.
He then toured with the Beastie Boys, became president of Def Jam Recordings, shaped the Island Def Jam Music Group, led the recorded music division of Warner Music Group, and founded his own label, 300 Entertainment—before moving to YouTube as Global Head of Music in late 2016.
Nearly ten years later, Cohen oversees a platform that most recently paid out more than $8 billion to the music industry in a single year. His instinct for pop-cultural trends clearly remains intact: in a recent letter to music partners, he raved about how Baby Keem created a blueprint for fan engagement with an album rollout combining documentary content, exclusive listening events and music videos.
In Hamburg, Cohen will take the Conference Stage to discuss how the music industry has changed—and how he identifies whether newcomers have the potential to become superstars.
Keily Blair: From a London law firm to the top of OnlyFans
Perhaps the most surprising biography of the three belongs to Keily Blair. The Dublin-born executive is a lawyer by training, educated at London’s “Magic Circle” firm Allen & Overy, with further roles at Morrison & Foerster, PwC and the US law firm Orrick.
At the latter, OnlyFans was already her client—until she switched sides in 2022 and joined the platform as Chief Strategy & Operations Officer. Since July 2023, she has been its CEO.
Since then, Blair has been running a company that generates around $7 billion in annual revenue with roughly 42 full-time employees—something she dryly translated into $37 million per employee at the Web Summit in Lisbon. Middle management? Doesn’t exist at OnlyFans, as Blair has emphasized in interviews.
The platform, founded in 2016 and long primarily associated with adult content, has broadened under Blair’s leadership: athletes, musicians and filmmakers now also use the subscription model, and OnlyFans has even licensed a series to Netflix. At the same time, Blair knows the darker sides of the business firsthand—a bank refused her as a customer after she took on the CEO role.
On the Conference Stage, Blair plans to explain what it takes to build successful creator communities.
Three completely different career paths, one common denominator: they are redefining entire industries in real time. On May 5 and 6, the OMR Festival in Hamburg will bring to the stage those who don’t just comment on change—but build it. Festival passes are still available at the early-bird price of €559 (net) at omr.com.