Lou Dobbs’ switch from TV honcho to Internet mogul is not the first moonshot in new-medialand.
But it is one of the more risky.
Leaving a top TV job to join a web startup seems a bit crazy in the current climate, where pure content plays are old hat and e-commerce is a bare necessity.
Dobbs, however, can at least look at those who were written off before making a success of themselves in cyberspace.
This year’s boom in Internet stocks is changing the idea that the ‘Net is a basement where management failures are sent so they can’t do any more damage.
Just yesterday, Michael Jordan, who was ousted in a coup at CBS, filed to take a new company, Clarant Worldwide, public. Clarant, an Internet consultancy, is designed to compete with roll-up titans Razorfish and Agency.com. The company had losses of $83 million last year on revenues of $50 million.
The former head of NBC television Neil Braun, 47, left the network “to do what I always wanted – to be an entrepreneur,” he said. He went to David Wetherell’s CMGI network, where they add video to the websites of radio stations.
Philip Kives, 69, made a short-lived fortune on the web when he announced the ailing K-Tel was going to sell products online.
Al Teller, a three-decade music industry vet until he hit hard times at MCA, and then Alliance Entertainment, now heads up a little label called Atomic Pop.
Disney’s Jake Winebaum once turned down the chance to head up GeoCities, and he missed out on $200 million in equity. This week Winebaum quit Disney to join Earthlink’s whiz-kid Sky Dayton. The result, eCompanies, is a startup that will help fund and manage startups.
Scott Kurnit, the ex-cable TV executive who now runs about.com (formerly the mining company) says things have changed.
“When I started, you were considered a bit crazy to take a pay cut and pitch in with things like payroll. But you do spend less time and energy on intra-company squabbles.”
It was riskier then too. “There was no rule book for the financiers. The market’s getting crowded, now that the financial rewards are more obvious.”
Scott Kurnit’s stake in about.com is worth around $50 million. As for Lou Dobb’s space.com site, he says with webhead optimism, “Hey, space is a big place.”
Yet another cable veteran, Candice Carpenter, successfully reinvented herself as an Internet boss by heading up the popular women’s network iVillage.
Gordon Gould of New York Internet think-tank Rising Tide Studios, is similarly optimistic for Dobbs.
“The real issue is transferable skills – being good with people, negotiating, it’s not that different in new media. There’s the speed factor though – in television the deal cycle can be a season long, 13 weeks. You’d get nowhere in new media if you took that long.”
Jupiter analyst Adam Shoenfeld has mixed feelings about the future of Dobbs’ space.com.
“On the one hand, he’s always been ahead of the Internet curve compared to other people in television. He started CNNfn.com at the same time as CNNfn the TV channel. But space suggests to me the need for video, and I don’t foresee a rosy broadband future in the next three to five years. A content play without consumer transactions could struggle. He’s definitely entering a high-risk category.”
In other words, without moving pictures or shopping, space.com will fail.
It’s not all doom and gloom for Dobbs though, as he prepares to “follow his dream.” After taking a glance at the space.com site for the first time, Rising Tide’s Gordon Gould spotted an opportunity. “Alien science is one of the great unaggregated areas on the net.”