Ralph

"The match had been struck! Serendipity über alles! I instantly perked up and stopped him short. “QVC, really?” I said, leaning forward, suddenly completely engaged. “I was just there last month and was amazed and excited by the interactivity of selling on television.” Ralph looked astonished. While he was proud of it, it was a small-time operation and way outside mainstream media. They both were looking at me weirdly, and then at each other. *Why would Barry Diller be interested in a home-shopping company?* Until then I had been utterly passive and now, suddenly, my eyes were lit. “Tell me more about QVC. I want to know everything.” All I’ve ever needed was pure curiosity, and here it was, raging. I was rapt—my divining fork was twitching furiously. QVC was a successful concern, making around $60 million a year. But it was not something the Robertses thought would be their ticket into big-time media. Ralph then mentioned, mostly as an aside, that Joe Segel was soon going to retire, and he planned to sell the 15 percent of the company he owned."

"I’d told Ralph and Brian that I’d promised myself to never again sign an employment agreement and that I’d report to a board, but not to an individual. QVC was a public company, and the other major owner was John Malone’s Liberty Media. Malone had become the overlord of cable media. He controlled the largest cable network, and with Liberty, he owned most of the programming. He was known both as the Cable Cowboy and, in a swipe from then–vice president Al Gore, as the Darth Vader of media. He was and always has been the smartest person in media, with an extraordinarily subtle and ingenious mind in the body of an outdoorsman conservationist libertarian who’s never met a tax he wanted to pay. I didn’t want to ever be stuck between them and would only agree to a three-way partnership where any two members could decide an issue, as long as I was one of the two. This made them more than uncomfortable, but I was adamant—I’d never do anything again where I wasn’t in some position of control."

"I spluttered, “I don’t know, but QVC is this primitive clay I want to get hold of and use it to pursue *interactivity.*” That was mostly babble, because all I really knew was that this was the first time in months I’d been intrigued by anything. Ralph and Brian knew they’d just hooked the big fish, but were bewildered by the small stream it wanted to inhabit."