When he left Viacom, Hecht established a company, Worldwide Biggies, in a brownstone office not far from Times Square. With venture capital funding of nine million dollars, and a staff of twenty-two, they create interactive Web shows and video games and other multiplatform activities. “I use the word engagement as the new metric, as opposed to viewing,” he said. “Some people call it leaning forward as opposed to leaning back.” In the products they produce, they look for “six levels of engagement.” The audience must be able to (1) watch (on any device); (2) learn (by searching for information about it on the Web); (3) play (games); (4) connect (social networks, IM); (5) collect (microtransactions involving money on the Web); and (6) create (user-generated content). “If we have four of the six, we put it into development. If we get six out of six, we think we have a hit.” He has since created successful Internet games and a popular mockumentary series on Nickelodeon called The Naked Brothers Band.
The new hits will differ from the old ones, he said. Storytelling will have to change. “We’re learning that now. Some of it is that a story isn’t necessarily a story. Facebook is a story. What’s the story? ‘I’m going to look at what Albie is doing now. I’m going to go on my Facebook page and it said that Albie is now doing an interview. And just yesterday Albie posted seven pictures.’ That’s a story.” Hecht, like many a high-concept Hollywood executive, thinks in formulas, but his are broader (in a business sense). He said games are about “experience,” TV about “character,” and movies about “stories.” In the stories Worldwide Biggies is working on, he said, “If we can move someone so they love this character, and they’re moved through a story, and they’re playing a game, and they’re connecting with their friends about that game, and they’re collecting objects in that, and at the end of this experience they have created their own video of this experience, we’ll have moved them into a different type of storytelling.”
He believes the Web is not just a distribution platform. Rather, because of its interactive nature, he believes, “The platform itself is content.” Hecht feels like an entrepreneur again. “It’s all about the new Wild West for me,” he said.
JASON HIRSCHHORN WAS ANOTHER Viacom refugee. He grew up in Manhattan wanting to be a music entrepreneur. When he was fifteen, in 1986, New York City bars were lax about checking the IDs of teenagers, until the “preppy” murder case. A teenager, Jennifer Levin, left an East Side bar with Robert Chambers late one night in 1986. Her body was found that morning in Central Park. Bars cracked down on minors, and kids could not easily congregate.
Borrowing his father’s empty briefcase, Jason approached the owner of the old Fillmore East, where he had been bar mitzvahed, and made this offer: on nights the place was closed he would fill the hall with teenagers, in return for half the gross. No alcohol would be served. The owner agreed to the experiment. Jason called all his private school friends and asked them to call their friends; this extemporaneous network became viral. Seven thousand teenagers showed up. “We grossed seventy thousand dollars the first night,” he said.
When Jason was a senior at New York University, he discovered the wonders of the Internet. “You could ask questions and find things,” he marveled. He started building a music-trading site. From his East Ninety-sixth Street apartment, and with an assist from his sister, he built a site, the CD Club Web Server, that offered users advice on how to work the CD clubs and catalogues to get the most for their money. Consumer Reports described it as a great resource, prompting Columbia House, a music catalogue, to phone to tell him to take down their trademarks.
“Why don’t you just advertise?” he asked, half joking.
Instead, they proposed to pay ten dollars for everyone he signed up. “All of a sudden,” Hirschhorn said, “I’m making thirty thousand dollars a month!” With this money he built Musicstation.com, which linked to other music sites. He created a music search engine that scanned the Web and television to find music, place it in categories, and fashion a music index. Not long after, five media companies got into a bidding war to buy his company. A lifelong MTV fan, he chose Viacom in early 2000. He was twenty-eight and “I was the lone digital guy.” Over the next six years, he was promoted six times, becoming the youngest senior executive at Viacom, the chief digital officer of the MTV Networks. Soon after Viacom pulled back from its bid to buy MySpace, a bid he had instigated, he resigned. While he won’t criticize the failure to acquire MySpace, he was frustrated. “I was an entrepreneur who came into a big company and tried to treat it as a start-up,” he said. “Big companies don’t innovate. They operate. Frankly, I think MTV should have owned the Internet.”
He was thirty-five and opted to take what he said was a 90 percent pay cut and accept equity to become president of the Sling Media Entertainment Group. Sling Media sells a product, the Slingbox, which allows users to watch their home television and DVR on their PC, MAC, or mobile devices. His editors selected what they think of as “the best stuff, putting it on the front page” of a Sling media guide. They plan to make money by selling ads and sharing revenues with their content providers. One day, he hopes, Sling Media will also create its own content. Sling Media aims to become another distribution platform, letting users watch what they want when they want it on various devices, and letting Sling gather data on user preferences which they would share with content partners. Once again, Hirshhorn struck gold. Soon after he joined, Sling Media was sold for $380 million to EchoStar Technologies, the satellite television company. “We’ve built a virtual cable distributor online,” he said. He knew that the Slingbox, like Apple TV, could prove to be a dud, or that he could feel restrained operating under a new corporate owner. But Jason Hirschhorn was very rich and had a sandbox to play in.
For a while at least. Chafing under the constraints he felt working within a traditional media company that he said “did not move fast enough into the digital age,” in late 2008 Hirshhorn did what he had done at Viacom and left in search of another sandbox. He found it in the spring of 2009, when the company he wanted Viacom to buy-MySpace-had slumped and Murdoch brought in new management, including Jason Hirshhorn as chief digital officer.
MARC ANDREESSEN HAS SPENT much of his life working in the digital sandbox, achieving the fame and financial success others seek. A large man with an immense, shaved, egg-shaped head, his restless leg hammers the floor, and he speaks rapidly in a booming voice. His professed motto is, “Often wrong, never in doubt.” A self-made multimillionaire at age thirty-eight, Andreessen has often been right. As a computer science major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he worked at the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Inspired by Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of open standards for the Internet, in 1992 he and a coworker, Eric Bina, created an easy to use browser called Mosaic. The browser worked on a variety of computers, facilitating the hypertext links that allow Web surfing and Google search, helping users to effortlessly hop from site to site. After graduating in 1993, he moved to California, where he met Jim Clark.
The former founder of Silicon Graphics, Clark shared Andreessen’s conviction that the browser could be a transformative technology, and he had the money to advance that dream. Not long after, Andreessen became cofounder and vice president of technology for the company that would become Netscape Communications.
With Netscape’s IPO in 1995, Andreessen became very prominent in new media circles. He also became very rich, and even richer when Netscape was sold to AOL for $4.2 billion in 1999. After a brief stay as chief technology officer for AOL, Andreessen started Loudcloud, a Web-hosting company that sold software and consulting services. After its own IPO in 2001, Loudcloud was sold to EDS and changed its name to Opsware, with Andreessen remaining for a time as chairman.