YouSaid · the spoken record
Bob Iger
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- 128
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- 2023-01-06
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- 2023-01-06
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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections
“Well, I think sometimes decentralization is misinterpreted to mean anarchy. And it can't be that. Pushing down decision-making and empowerment and a sense of ownership into organizations is important, but as long as it generally conforms to what leadership expects or other constituents expect and want and is a very careful balance. I felt, for instance, at Disney that too many decisions were being made centrally and there wasn't a sense of empowerment or ownership. And some people who knew more about their businesses than any central organization were being deprived of the ability to supply their knowledge. So it had to change. That said, I felt managing the brand and its qualities, its attributes had to be done centrally and consistently.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was one thought that we should build. And I was told half a billion dollars five years. And I said five years is an eternity because I thought this change was going to happen fast. So we don't have five years. We have to do it faster. And then Kevin Mayer, who was running strategic planning for me at the time, started looking for opportunities. And we invested in a platform that Major League Baseball had created called BAMTech. And by investing, we had a path to ultimately buying control. And that became the solution.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Revenue in order to go in this direction, which means telling Wall Street, okay, you've enjoyed all this great profit growth for Disney over would have been a decade, that's now going to go in the opposite direction. That was hard. But on the technology side, we immediately started hunting for a solution. Yeah.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pull off streaming, yeah. To tell us more about that read Hastings from Netflix try to convince me that there's no way we could do it. You won't have the platform. You don't know how to manage things like busted credit cars, all the issues with geo-targeting and there's so many different factors that we had no ability to do any of that. So after I articulated the desire to go into the business, we then had to figure out how we're going to execute that. And there were a few impediments. The biggest impediment was we needed a technology solution to do so. But the other impediment was that we were making all this money from other forms of distribution, including licensing movies to Netflix and cable and satellite subscription fees and advertising that in making this pivot, we were going to have to convince Wall Street that it was essential for us to disrupt ourselves, the innovator's dilemma was essential for us to reduce”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are streamers that are not going to survive. There will be blood, to quote the name of a movie. They're not going to all make it. And the reason is that there are some platforms that don't have the high quality branded content. They don't have enough of it and they're not differentiated. So not all streamers are created equal.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I never doubted that ultimately creativity and quality and brands would matter more. And it's interesting if you look at today's world and you look at all the streamers that are out there. By the way, there are haves and have-nots and the have-nots are going to fall by the wayside. What do you mean by that?”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I knew what our movies were doing on that platform. They gave us some indication how popular they were. They didn't give us too many details, which, by the way, spoke volumes too.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything, distribution tech, everything. Did you ever doubt that for a moment when you saw that Netflix was doing? Because there was a point where I doubted it as a consumer because I would lazily comfortably watch Netflix over anything just because even if it was bad content just because it was so convenient.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On a new technology platform, I know that if we control it, then the customer will be ours and we can create a deeper, more intimate relationship with them. And it would also give us the ability to wean ourselves of basically our reliance on cable and satellite”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disney fans, Pixar fans, but the tickets were being sold by Fandango in movie theaters. We had no idea who was watching our movies. Then we put the movies on cable and satellite and Netflix. We didn't know who was watching there. We'd sell consumer products, we'd sell thousands of Spider-Man costumes for Halloween, Walmart and Amazon would know who the customers were. Other than our theme parks, we had no customer relationship. We had all this passion, the greatest fans in the world, Star Wars fans, my goodness. How passionate are they? We had no idea who they were. I thought, okay, we're losing is a value proposition there that we're not participating either. So it was, I know our content is going to work.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then anybody was willing to pay at the time. So we used to license the HBO and Stars and Showtime. Nefix blew them all away. So I'm thinking, well, that says a lot, really. And then I thought, we'll be fine continuing to license to Netflix. That goes back to the argument high quality branded content. They demanded it. They were lusting for it. Yeah. But I thought now we were entering a new technological era where the customer and customer's relationship with the company is potentially value creating, meaning if you can strengthen that relationship, you can improve the value of your relationship with a customer. If you look at Disney in 2016, 17, we started really talking about this. The movie theaters own the customer for all.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The future was that, did that go back to your original? Because your original vision when you became CEO was content is king, distribution will just be everywhere. And so when you saw streaming, you're like, this is the distribution vehicle of the future and paired with our great content.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One as I was a consumer who worked for me that product worked for me. Second, I was tired of on every single earnings call answering the question about what the future of cable and satellite television was. And I didn't really want to deal with it anymore. I thought, well, the only way not to deal with it is to say, well, that's not really where our future is either. Our future is somewhere else. We're going to redirect, we're going to change the future”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They didn't think they had the money. They just didn't think they'd have it. And I think they proved to me anyway that they did. So I thought, okay, we got to go into that business. If we're just going to license to them, they're ultimately going to disrupt us fully.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, of course. What hit me was I joke about it often is we were selling nuclear weapons technology to a country. Build nuclear weapons to use against us.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For Netflix And then you guys pulled it. And I have to say, I was pretty pissed when that happened because I was really mad. I was like, I want to watch my shows on Netflix. And you guys took them away, of course.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Channels, ESPN, ABC, Disney Channel go on and on. I worried that that business was going to be replaced by app-based entertainment and we had to be there.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Switching costs between channels, between devices, but impacting time. When do I watch something? Where? Where do I watch something? How on a fixed device on the wall or on your mobile phone, all of those things, and starting to impact pricing as well, but also starting to have a huge impact on linear television watching. I want to watch linear channels. And I don't really like the user interface the cable and satellite is giving me. I love being able to watch programs, and I love being able to watch app-based programs going back to the development of Web 2.0, which I think apps have proven already that for a consumer, they're just fantastic. It was a fantastic development. And that's authority. I don't want a channel. I want a program. Give me a program. Boom. Move a cursor over an icon or wherever you got it. So I felt because Disney was so heavily invested in linear.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were showing the way, particularly for the big tech companies. And what was also happening is the consumer was starting to exert more and more authority. You know, one thing we've also seen over this period of time, actually you go all the way back to the event, to the remote control and television, is that technology is giving consumers much more authority and power than ever before.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was mostly Netflix, but it was very, very clear that what Netflix was doing would be done by others, by well-financed.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're starting to impact the entire business. And what we were seeing was not just the disruption of distribution, but disruptive distribution, disrupting essentially almost every area of the business, monetization, advertising. Is that mostly?”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was interesting was I felt at that point, maybe I don't have to do anything. We have such a great hand. And I actually spent 2012 to 2016, I spent an inordinate amount of my time developing Shanghai Disneyland. Yeah. Which was not only a pet project of mine, but I thought an incredibly important project for Disney and its future in terms of planning a flag on mainland Chinese soil. So we did all that. And then, of course, the winds of change got even more fierce as internet 1.0 gave birth to Nera 2.0 and app-based entertainment, new forms of distribution. And that ultimately started my thinking about streaming. During that period of time, it was very, very clear that the disruptive forces that I talked about seeing in 2005 had gotten much more profound.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, where you know, I always tried to envision our theme parks, and could I see a Marvel world or a Star Wars world or a Toy Story world and all exist today?”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I had a list one James Bond, but I never even had a meeting on it. Would have loved James Bond. Harry Potter was already gone to Warner Brothers. They ended up Getting the rights, something obviously Disney should have done, but didn't.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the next thing that happened is I went back to that acquisition filter and there was Lucasfilm still sitting there with Star Wars. And Steve at that point was really ill. He died in October of 2011. Let that go. I dropped it. I wasn't going to put a hard sell on them because I knew that wouldn't work. And I waited, and then he ended up calling me some months later and said, I want to talk to you about that idea. Clearly, I had struck a nerve of some sort, a positive one. And that resulted in a deal that we announced in 2012. So we ended up not just with Disney and ESPN and ABC, but we ended up with Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, just like that. We had more known brands known for their quality of storytelling than any other media and entertainment company in the world.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let Wall Street think of it that way, yeah, but not the consumer. I felt that Marvel was another Disney and that we shouldn't worry. Again, I wanted the value generated to be considered by Wall Street. It didn't matter whether the consumers knew whether it was owned by Disney or not. The same thing is true, by the way, with ESPN, and you could argue ABC News and other brands too. It just didn't matter. Strengthen that brand and then end up with a collection of them and let each basically consumer of those brands know exactly what they are, find them, don't make it all convoluted.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's even Disney. Interesting because Marvel had been considered as an acquisition by Disney in earlier years when he was considered too edgy. And I thought, well, that's because people are thinking that has to be Disney's Marvel.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These weren't just superhero movies. These were Marvel movies. And it was putting a spotlight on the Marvel brand changing even the look and feel of the logo and reminding everybody Captain America's marvel, so that you build the brand with the characters and the stories underneath it which gives you the license to try new characters and stories that you say. That's how you get to New Guardians.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the whole movies each of those, and then we'll put them all together in one called The Avengers, which had been a comic book and the rest is history.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's people and creating a culture that enables them to thrive and giving them the resources, which includes not just money, but marketing support and distribution help and bringing things to market in a much more impactful way. So trust the creative team at Marvel, give them basically as much fuel as they need to make great things. And the next thing, you know, they come in and they pitch this wild five-year plan where we're going to introduce Thor, Captain America.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what was licensed was Spider Man was licensed to Sony, and Iron Man had been made by Paramount, and Universal had Hulk. That was it. But then when we did the due diligence, first the team said there were 5,000 characters. He said, wow. Then they came back and said, no, sorry, there are 7,200 of them. I thought, well, there has to be characters that are as good as some of these others or in the right creative hands. We can make them good. I just thought, okay, if you can make a good Iron Man and a good Spider-Man, you can make a good Captain America. We weren't thinking Captain America. We weren't thinking Thor. We weren't thinking Captain Marvel. We weren't thinking Black Panther. We weren't thinking about any of these characters. Guardians of the galaxy, which existed came from a whole other group of characters. Let's tell great stories. And like Pixar, they had a core creative team that was really impressive, led by Kevin Foggy, who's still with Disney. I always thought it can't just be about an acquisition. It has to be about your ability to execute.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They had only put one movie out, Iron Man. And that gave birth to got a slew of things. Interestingly enough, I was never a comic book fan. My dad wouldn't let me read comics because they were frivolous, but I was aware of the passion that people had for comic books. And in the process of considering Marvel, I studied the business pretty closely. And the one thing that I realized is that the stories that had been told already were so voluminous. And over years, well, this is interesting. There's a treasure trove here because some of the albums.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in June of 2009, I walked into Marvel's office in New York alone, pitched the idea about buying Marvel, told a Pixar story, ultimately got Steve Jobs on the phone to tell how great the relationship had been, offered Disney stock, which was, I had proven already to Steve how valuable that could be. Steve got Disney stock at $28 a share. $135 million of it. And we ended up closing the deal for Marvel and announcing at the end of August in 09. And then we were off to the races there.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we had had a process at Disney where we looked at potential acquisitions. We basically called an acquisition filter or sieve with definitions of what we might want and what we wouldn't want and what would be left, what would make it through the filter. And there was a list of things that made it through. And one was Star Wars or Lucasfilm. One was Marvel. There were a few others at the time. So I looked at the team and we thought, okay, what's next? And interestingly enough, my first thought was Star Wars. And I knew George Lucas Wells, Steve knew George very well because he bought Pixar from George. People forget. And we didn't get a chance to schedule a meeting with George because Steve was sick. And this is 2009 when he has liver transplant. So we put that on the back burner to wait because Steve wanted to meet with George and I to talk about it. While we're waiting for that to happen, I spent months trying to get the head of Mars.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was cutting edge. It became the next generation of Pixar technology. So you can imagine just how blown away I was by all of this. And then when it worked, we closed a deal for them in 2006. Success through 2009, if I remember correctly, cars in Ratatouille, Ratatouille and Cars in Wally and UP. Just amazing stuff. Original ideas.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Ed Camille's computer scientist, and they showed me a technology that enabled a director and a team to edit through space and through time in ways that were vastly different than what I had seen before. Essentially, it was an ability to change an image of very, very specific image within an overall image. And the change that was made would basically apply to the whole movie was plucking something out a moment and that hadn't existed before.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, anyway. Then I looked at their technology platform and they take me through not what they were using to make CGI films then, but what would be the next generation of them. And it was shocking to me what they showed.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Film that feels like it has a home, and the people that, first of all, they become part of the film. Yeah. A sense of place, it starts actually to become. I use the word tangible, it comes to life. I don't think I've ever really told that. I love it.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up all around the walls, had music that was referenced to the movie. They did all of their meetings about the film in this room. The movie started taking on kind of a tangible quality of actually existing in a space. Where at Disney we had one room that all the movies shared. One movie comes in for a few hours, has a meeting, does something, they move out, another one comes in. That's subtle, really subtle, but a sense of place and home and collegiate feeling. I mean, I had gone up to Pixar. I could not believe what I saw. I go into the Wally room and the up room. One day I see Ratatouille Wally Up Brave was another movie they made. Two others that I went into rooms, the movies never got made. One was about a blue-footed newt that was getting your extinction. And the other one was about pets that lived in a building on the upper west side of Mountain.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct, although we ended up adopting a lot of Pixar's creative processes. I'll just give you one example. At Pixar, every movie that they made was basically driven from the idea of a director. Director pitches the idea, Pixar says, we like your idea, go make your movie, they go and make the movie. There's a passion that exists deep with inside that director that is evident in every single step of production and creativity of that film from when it just starts to basically be born to when it starts to grow and be shared with the world. At Disney's case, we assigned ideas to directors. So a director would be brought in to direct a movie with someone else's idea. And the connection didn't exist. The passion didn't exist. That's one. There were other little things, even logistically. It Pixar, every movie got assigned a room, basically a nice conference room. The movie lived in that room full-time. The director and the team put pictures.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they come down every week and turn that place around. And so they started to do that. And we also proved pretty early on that we were good stewards of Pixar 2, that one, we were benign, we wouldn't do any harm, and two, we were incredibly supportive. And most important was we were respectful of their culture. And that's really important when it comes to creativity.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was interested in Apple. He knew I showed him playlists. We started talking about music. We hit it off. And then when I called him about the Pixar acquisition, he at that point was viewing me as a much different executive than he expected. So we bought Pixar. I assigned the people who ran Pixar, John Lassiter and Ed Catmull, to run Disney animation with a goal to turn Disney animation around, which if you look back on what they did, it's just extraordinary because it was Moana and Tangled and Frozen and Zootopia. Because those were at Disney.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the iPod at the time didn't have a screen on it. He then said, I'm going to come down and see you. He comes down and takes a prototype of the iPod with a video screen on it, shows it to me, which in a way was the precursor to the iPhone. There's a posture stamp screen on it. He says, you see this? I said, yes. He said, this is a screen. I could tell. It doesn't just show the name of songs. It'll play video. If we put this out, he was already playing to announce it. Would you put your TV shows on it? I said, yes. In five days, we made a deal. He could not believe that a traditional media company would be willing to disrupt itself so much by taking shows, lost, desperate housewives, and Gray's anatomy and putting them on the video iPod. And I think that changed his perception of me tremendously because one, I cut through all the red tape, got a deal done. Two, I showed a willingness to be future-oriented and willing to disrupt ourselves.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was lucky, really lucky. Before I became CEO, I spent some time with him. Didn't get that far because he just viewed me as one of the Disney bureaucrats. But I at least showed him interest and curiosity in Apple and what he was doing. And before I made the call on Pixar, there was a six-month period where I was named CEO, but I was waiting for my predecessor, Michael Eiser, to leave, which was planned. I called Steve and I said, I have a crazy idea, my first crazy idea. And that was to create a television version of iTunes. He had, you know, created this with almost find every song that you ever wanted to find in one place. I thought, why don't we do that with TV shows? Why don't we go back to, I love Lucy and you name it, put all TV shows in one place. And that point I'm thinking about basically web distribution. I was not thinking about any mobile distribution.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This, of course, in my case, I had a head of steam. I was a brand new CEO. My wife told me I wasn't going to last more than three and a half years if I didn't do something really bold, which is good advice. So I picked the phone and called Steve Jobs with a crazy idea. That was in October of 2005. And we announced a deal, I think, in the first week in February, just a few months later.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They work for BigSarg. So, what happened was I, in my first board meeting as CEO, after they chose me, I showed them 10 years of Disney animation failure and told them this had to be fixed because it conformed to my strategy. But I went through the process that I had gone through in my head, which is who do I identify to do it? And I said, well, roads lead to Pixar. I said, the problem is that we can't pluck those people out of Pixar too hard and they're not for sale. And if they are, it would be terribly expensive. I think the board was so blown away by the craziness of the idea that they didn't say yes and they didn't say no. They just felt this is so crazy. It's never going to happen. And I read that as what I call an amber light, which is they're not putting a red light in front of me. Don't do it. They're certainly not putting a green light in front of it. Do it. But again, I think because they were just so shocked at the thought they weren't really focused on how we're going to contend with.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that was very true at that point. And so I thought, okay, number one priority under the umbrella of the strategic priority that it just articulated is fixed Disney animation. How do I do that? Great people. Where are the great people? So I thought, okay, I got to get the relationship with Pixar back, but I also have to fix Disney animation. The light bulb that went off was what if we buy Pixar, which was a crazy idea because it wasn't for sale. All roads had to go through. They were public.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very cultural. And so here we are in 2005. I make that declaration. I look at Disney and see where are the deficiencies. One of the biggest was Disney automation, which had powered the company starting with Walt in 1923 when he founded it. And if you looked at the years prior when Disney animation was great, the company was great because it had such a massive effect on company perception, brand perception, of course, on commerce. And then the way Walt created the company was if you create great IP, it's leverageable in consumer products and in theme parks and in music and et cetera and so on.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone, I think, to do that, but they don't create processes that result in that. They rush things into the marketplace, meaning they don't take the time, they get impatient, they don't manage the creative community well, they don't take risks on new ideas that sound odd but could be great. They don't know how to process failure in creativity, which is interesting because one of the things I'm seeing today is there's so much anxiety over transformation and creation that companies managing creative processes are transferring that anxiety to the creative community. Oh, gosh. There's already basically an embedded anxiety. Don't make it worse. So I just felt that there were ways that you could exit cultural...”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I made that case loud and clear. I articulated it as the company's number one priority, invest in high-quality branded content, period.”
2023-01-06 · a16z Podcast · Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source