Distribution as Destiny Control

““I love distribution businesses. I love to control our own destiny. If you develop a product and you have distribution, that’s the name of the game.”

“Before Warner, virtually everything Ross had done had been a preface; transient; utilitarian. Alliances he had formed had been little but handholds to enable him to climb higher. Now, for the first time, he had appropriated a business that he would not just as happily discard. He would continue to climb—he could not not—but he would never leave its province. He did not need to. It offered him everything he might want: seemingly infinite vistas of business possibility; astronomical compensation; entree to a glamorous, star-studded world. And it was, moreover, a business where his instincts with people—cultivating them, catering to them, winning their favor—would be extraordinarily, even uniquely, useful.”