all Fever Lion Ruling Hollywood on the 20thTh In the Century Gatekeeper era, few people had an outstanding hub for the Internet. Barry Diller is exceptional. Launching its broadcast network in the late 1980s, leading ABC programming, running Paramount and Fox, Diller no longer wanted to work for anyone else. Or you arehe talks about independence. As a free agent, he quickly mastered the power of interaction and built an empire that included Expedia Group, almost the entire online dating industry (Tinder, Match, Okcupid) and an online media lineup that included people, which wrote a hit song for him early in his career, titled “Failure.”
In his memoirs, Who knows, The third act of Diller’s career became short, as the path to becoming an internet billionaire was sent in dozens of pages. Much of the book weaved his life into a less fantastic gay man (although, he loved his iconic wife, Diane von Furstenberg), with delicious statements about his Hollywood era. So as a wired reader, I started interviewing with his tech life as a shortage in tea.
“What do you mean?” Growls Diller is a notoriously painful man. When I told him I just wanted to hear the wonderful details of his tech age, like the ones he shared about his early behavior, his behavior change, and he was happy to agree with me. “I’m angry about it,” he said. (Note: The book is in production for 15 years.) “This is what I should have done, but I didn’t.”
I tried to make up for the omissions in our conversation. To get things started, I reminded him of a 1993 profile of Ken Auletta New Yorker titled “Barry Diller’s search for the future.” It describes Diller’s third act to seek out the Hollywood scene using his newly discovered metaphor for obsessed with Apple Powerbooks. During the decade of the PC revolution, the idea that media tycoons actually used computers was a novelty, and Auletta acted like Diller invented public key cryptography.
But Powerbook Once was Diller said, criticized. During his first job, while working in William Morris’s mail room, he buried himself in archives and tried to read each file and contract to understand the nuances of the business. In each subsequent work, he set out to absorb a lot of information before making a critical decision. That was his superpower. Now, with an Apple laptop, he is within reach. “I can do everything myself,” he said. “Technology basically lifted me out of my own obsolete.” In the early 1990s, he was the best time to learn about the digital world, and just before the boom, he took a high-tech listening journey that included visits to Microsoft and MIT Media Lab. “My eyes are plates,” he said. “I’m eating every inch.”
He also met Steve Jobs on a tour Toy Story. “I never had the ability to animation – I didn’t like it,” Diller said. “Of course, he was right, I was wrong. He slammed me into the Pixar board, and I just didn’t want to do that. Steve didn’t like being rejected.” Diller described his relationship with work as a tension. He marveled at Jobs’s business, but despised his scorched earth strategy. He added: “The idea of 30% taxes passed by the Apple Store is that it’s an absolute rage. It’s pure Steve. But it’s breaking down now.”
When the internet took off, Diller had a carnival. Some prizes are mostly forgotten – City Search? – But other awards were inspired. He convinced Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer to sell him Expedia, which became the core of the travel group, now including Hotels.com, Orbitz and VRBO. His company’s total valuation is over $100 billion. He calls most of it “luck, situation and timing.”
