Molly Stern

Molly Stern is the founder and leader of Zando. Before launching the company in 2020, she served as SVP & Publisher of Penguin Random House’s Crown Publishing Group, where she built and led high-impact editorial programs across literary fiction and commercial publishing. At Crown, she launched Hogarth, a literary imprint developed in collaboration with Chatto in the UK, bringing the bestselling, prize-winning work of Sally Rooney, Anthony Marra, Han Kang, and Herman Koch to the U.S. She also partnered with Sarah Jessica Parker to create the SJP for Hogarth imprint.

Molly has published Pulitzer Prize winners in fiction and nonfiction as well as generation-defining bestsellers including Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, Andy Weir’s The Martian, and Michelle Obama’s Becoming. With Zando, she created a modern publishing house built on a simple belief: discoverability changes everything.