Cash the Lucky Check Immediately

“As I was racing around in those early days trying to build up our assets I was also planning to turn the television stations we’d bought with Silver King into a national network. It was unbridled, brainless ambition. Hauling endless bricks of programming up such a steep hill just wasn’t worth the toil. Thankfully, a better brick, a gold one, got thrown over our transom. Jerry Perenchio, a truly great entrepreneur and generous gentleman, had just bought Univision, the Spanish-language network, and he thought our stations would further his distribution. He offered us a whopping $950 million. I cashed the check as soon as it arrived. This ended our very short-lived experiment in programming local television stations, and I was relieved to be out of it. I was just learning the difference between extremely difficult business models and internet-enabled virtual ones that flowed fast from idea to adoption. I was also learning to take advantage of luck and circumstance, which made a lot more entrepreneurial sense than trying to pull off an old media idea born only out of my native optimism.”

“I didn’t know any of this when I cold-called Paul, thinking he might find the idea of a combination of Ticketmaster and HSN compelling. He told me of his frustrations with Rosen, and how he believed the company should jump-start online ticketing. Eureka—that was the seed and… suddenly I did see the future and got so excited about the online possibilities that I couldn’t race fast enough to get a deal done. I told Paul that if he traded his stock in Ticketmaster for stock in HSN, I’d deal with Rosen and he could get out of that tortured relationship. I’d dealt all my life with far more obstreperous characters. Paul Allen quickly agreed and ended up with 11 percent of my company and joined our board. A year or so later he sold his shares, doubling his money (not that he needed it, but if he’d kept his shares, he’d have become far richer than the Midas he already was).”