Silver King

"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."

"It was kind of pathetic that this little toad of a company was all that seemed to fit my minimum conditions. Hoping he wouldn’t laugh at the idea, I told John Malone I’d take Silver King, but only if I could also get control of HSN itself (Malone’s Liberty Media owned a controlling stake in it, too). I still believed home shopping was the entrance to e-commerce. QVC had steadily taken market share from HSN, which had been mismanaged for many years and was losing money, but I knew enough about the category to be sure I could turn it around. The problem was that HSN had been accused of various fraudulent practices and was in a legal mess with the Justice Department. That asset was frozen for now, so my only option, pitiful as it was, was to take Silver King and await HSN’s unfreezing."

"If I had succeeded in buying Paramount or CBS, I know two things for certain. One is that I would never have been able to control either—I’d have still been an employee and most likely been thrown out at some point. And I’d never have become an internet entrepreneur. Big word, “entrepreneur.” I wasn’t a natural one. I was a tried-and-true corporatist with more than a master’s degree in managing large enterprises. It had been decades since I’d started anything from scratch and my first moves were pretty mundane. We had these two dreary assets, HSN and Silver King, and while turning around HSN wasn’t going to excite anyone, it did give us cash and some credibility to think about expansion. I wish I could say I saw the possibilities of the internet in some full-blown prophetic way. I didn’t. But inside the humdrum reason I wanted to buy Ticketmaster was the seed of what would consume me for the next twenty years."

"The prerequisite for my agreeing was that John Malone would give me a bulletproof lifetime proxy on Liberty’s controlling interest in Silver King as well as a large ownership stake in it and eventually HSN. Control, my hard-ass mantra, would be hardwired, but it sure was small beer."

"I was close to hopeless as I neared the end of my meandering up the Intracoastal. Could I end my career with such a whimper? Where could I find the match that would light my next move? I was down to less than a matchstick when I spoke with John Malone early in 1995. I told him the trouble I was having finding something to get me off zero. Joking and dismissive, he said, “Well, I control Silver King. You can have that if you want.” Silver King? What the hell is that? It turned out to be a string of UHF television stations that didn’t actually broadcast anything; they were repeater stations for the programming of the Home Shopping Network. HSN was the forerunner to QVC. It actually invented the interactive-shopping category. Silver King had revenues of only $40 million a year with no prospects other than its income from the Home Shopping Network."