Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…He's a good identifier of talent that is for sure. Literally, Bob was about to quit Cap Cities and go have this whole different life until he met Dennis. Here's another good tech theme. Let's pivot away from Iger for a second and back to Oprah. What a contrarian bet to bet on Oprah. It takes probably a lot of guts. He promoted a super under-represented minority person to take a huge bet and put I don't know how much of his career is on the line but some amount of his credibility, maybe all this credibility on the line. What he was doing there, nobody should applaud him for altruism. It was a self-serving investment. It was a sort of non-consensus bet that he was making and saying by doing something other people aren't doing here that I think is awesome, we're all going to go be super successful. He was right. Especially at this moment that we're in now, let that be the message that by doing something, not consensus, and by zigging where others are zagging, you can be enormously profitable. This was such a classic Acquired. Cars driving towards the cliff, pulling the ebrake, and spinning around because the station was in the dumps. One approach to fixing it could have been like okay well we're going to do operational efficiency, which Dennis did, too. We're going to step-by-step, but he was like okay, what's something like a big splash we can make? Here is the king of daytime TV, Phil Donahue, across the street. I'm going to bring in this super knight. We're going to be David against Goliath here.…

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