Frank Biondi – Former CEO, HBO, Viacom, and Universal Studios (2005.03.09)

I recently read Sumner Redstone's autobiography for the second time. He has a short passage about how Frank Biondi took over Viacom as CEO, but was later fired. I was very interested to hear Frank's perspective.

History:

Went to Princeton to play baseball during undergrad

Went to HBS during Vietnam (chose HBS over Harvard Law because MBA took 2 years and Law took 3)

Started in Investment Banking

Ran HBO, Viacom, and Universal Studios for a time

Held several other significant executive jobs in the media industry

Notes:

Internet will become big avenue of personal entertainment

Globalization has changed the media biz (95% of the world population is outside North American)

Consumers have been gradually willing to pay for more options (HBO->Showtime->VHS->Blockbuster->Digital->PVR)

In Media, you don't want to be the first mover (and you don't have to be to succeed)

The Music industry is in desperate straights fighting online access

TV may be in trouble due to PVR (if you can fast forward past commercials, there goes TV big revenue stream)

He talked about why many studios don't adopt tech faster – mostly because existing management doesn't understand technology and people don't want to make the wrong decision because they'll lose their job

He thinks Sony is going to have a tough time

He has been fired 4 times

The first time was because fraud was found at his company (he says he had nothing to do with it)

Fired at HBO because he got a new boss and his boss wanted his own people in high positions

Third firing was at Viacom because of Sumner Redstone wanting to run the company

He said Redstone sucks the life out of people because he is so involved and passionate

He said all Redstone was interested in was making deals.

Redstone stayed hands off for 6 years, but learned more about the biz and decided he wanted to try running the show

Owners are tough to deal with

In his fourth firing, the owner of the company started selling parts of the company (the wrong parts)

If you aren't fired at some point, you probably aren't pushing hard enough

Getting fired isn't the end of the world

Much better to be lucky than smart (said it twice during his talk)

You have to take chances on people; they won't bat 1000 though

Hire people smarter than you. That doesn't mean they won't go after your job so you can't be dumb about it.

Told a story about how Barry Diller would throw away memos he received from people. He wanted to see who would followup on the memos to find who was really passionate about their ideas.

He thinks Viacom is too big. It really needs to be pared down to pre-Paramount acquisition size and centered around MTV ($50 billion today) which still has a lot of room to grow internationally

AOL is an ISP in search of a biz

He thinks Yahoo will be selling more advertising than Disney in a few years

He thinks MSN will own 50% of search by the time everything is said and done

Cable could be sewing the seeds of their own free competition since a lot of broadband is being run over cable

If he was graduating today, he would go to a small entrepreneurial company

If he started at HBO at a different time (like two or three years earlier or later), he would not be as successful as he is today