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Danny Cohen

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2023-11-08
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2023-11-08
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  1. “It just depends on your strategy. I'm not someone who really believes you can imagine what's going to happen in five years at this time because things are changing so fast. Look at what AI has done in just the last few months once people begin to understand the power of generative AI. People tell you with confidence they know what's going to happen in five years. To be they're overconfident.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Some, yeah, I think some, but not all. And actually, you know, I think this comes in phases. There was a moment, I remember when I was there where everyone seemed to want to work for Google or Facebook. Not sure everyone feels like that now. There is, I'm sure, 10x, 20x, the amount of young people who want to work at the BBC than they have roles for.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I hope that's true. I think trusted brands are really important, but AI isn't the thing that suddenly going to challenge trusted brands. Social media's already done that for, what, 10, 15 years now. You know, the breakdown in shared truths, the breakdown or understanding of a shared reality and what's really happened, that's already happened. So AI might make that worse, I hope as a kind of concerned citizen that those brands hold on to truth, hold on to that trusted status. But I don't know if that many young people are getting the news from TikTok, why would they when they're 10 years older decide they want it on the BBC? They may do, but I'm just not sure. And I do find that concerning. And it's not that the story for these services over, it's just they've got massive, massive challenges and they're going to require great leadership, great talents, new distribution models to be able to survive.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, this is the problem, though. That's a catch 22, isn't it? Because if they're not on that website, you can't get young audiences to the BBC. So you've got to keep trying and you've got to see whether you can attract them. I think in that story, there was probably something to click on, which was probably the Instagram clip of her, Taylor Swift, laughing at the game or whatever, surrounded by some other celebrities and that sort of. But as I say, that's not the only thing young people are interested in, but you can see these efforts to attract younger people to legacy platforms because they know that those audience are seeping away from them. And that's a big, big, big challenge for them, for their futures. It's existential actually for those companies.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think they're massively challenged by it. You see their attempts to respond to it in, I don't know, this morning, Taylor Swift being an FL match last night with her new boyfriend was one of the main stories on the Beepsey News website. That's not really news in the way you would expect the BBC to present news and there's a story of significance. But what they're trying to do by doing that and which other legacy media also have to try and do is track young audience, make those young audiences feel that there are some topics which are particularly focused on them.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, I think you have to again give credit to YouTube on that shit because that's where you look at the biggest crater on YouTube. They're making tens of millions. There's a set behind them who are making thousands a month or hundreds a month. And that is a platform where you can take your talent and make money from it. Whereas I agree with you, some of these other platforms, there's no pathway at the moment. Now you could argue that these companies will work out what that pathway is. They'll work out a way of rewarding their top creators and creators generally to do it. But we're not seeing that pathway yet. And so I would advise people if you want to be a creator, focus on the areas where you could actually make money. And if that means doing short form, make focus on that short form, throwing your audience to the long form.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “You're right. I don't know whether one has to work out okay, how do you manage that? There was a very interesting recent large scale survey in the UK. Young people in the UK are watching over an hour's TikTok a day now on average, which seems astonishing for one platform. You're not going to be able to fight those trends, but you can ask yourself, what can I do to make sure that the short form content I'm creating has the best chance of taking people to the long-form episode? And you could argue that's a kind of responsibility if you care about long-form content. I really care about long-form content. It's the long-form content where the money is, says an investor. You know, you're not going to make much unless you're a very highly influential influencer on TikTok. You're not making much at the moment. The big YouTube creators, they make money on the long-form videos that you can put adverts in. That's where the money is. And that's true of a lot of these, you know, that if you have a great 105 minute or 120 minute movie, you've got a good chance of success. Not really got anything like that chance success with a minute clip.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “It's going to worsen it. I think you're right. You know, there's a big who knows about everything in AI now, but hits and stars. I mean, hits and stars. And that's something Len actually says quite a lot, you know, as someone who bought one of the three majors in music and there's plenty of experience in it across entertainment like me now. You have to focus on talents to give yourself the best chance. You also have to take risks. You know, that's something I learned throughout my career. If you try and do exactly what people have done before, you often get a slightly shallower facsimile of it, a fader facsimile. And you have to take risk, which means some of them don't work, but some of them do. And actually that really fits with Lenz perspective of investment too. You know, he's something of a contrarian investor who'll look for opportunities in the opposite direction from where other people are looking. And I think that's actually been wonderful marks of his success.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “You're 100% right. It's a big, big problem. I mean, I've been involved with one or two projects that went to streaming platforms. Very, very high quality projects that just disappeared. That's because there's so much on there. They don't market very much. They trust only on the algorithm to throw things at you. The quality of those algorithms is, I think, slightly overrated. Take some of those streaming platforms. The stuff they offer me as the things they like to watch, they don't often offer me something I really want to watch. The quality of the recommendation engines is not as good as I think people hope they would be. And so that problem discovery is a very, very profound one now.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “First of all, you shouldn't accept that linear television is over, broadcast television's over, particularly for older audiences. They are watching quite a lot of amounts. So channels have value, but I believe particularly with digital audiences, it's the young audiences that have obviously moved over first. And you really need to pay a lot of attention to what young audiences are doing because they're the pathfinder for the older audiences. I try to think most about youth audiences as the kind of pathfinder to what the future will be like. One of our very interesting stats I've noticed”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think the biggest challenge is the one that I think about every day now, which is the fragmentation of audiences, fragmentation of entertainment audiences, and the rapid shift to digital consumption of entertainment. You know, you have day-to-day crises, whether that's around a certain show or anything else. But the biggest challenge, the macro challenge, the most interesting challenge is about that fragmentation and that digital transition. And that's very challenging for a legacy broadcaster like the BBC or like a network in the US, CBS, ABC, when you can see those audiences fracturing and going towards digital consumption and curated consumption. That's the biggest ongoing challenge both for me then, going back for years, and I think still for the management of broadcasters and TV stations now.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, I understand people understand it's hard. I mean, it is hard managing things. And sometimes when you sit outside as an investor, you can sometimes think, oh, why didn't they do this? Why didn't do that? And often you don't understand the complexity of what the person in the hot seat as the manager was having to do and all the different elements they were having to juggle. So I think those things around emotion intelligence and management experience can give you a deeper understanding of the challenges that business faces.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “All about talent, whether that's about a founder of a company or a presenter on a BPC1 or a mainstream network show, the fundamental thing it's all about talent. It's all about teams. It's all about being honest about what you're not good at and what you need support from other people at. It's all about delegating, doing the things that only you can do. And if you're in a very senior role in a business, and I sometimes say this to the CEOs of the companies we invest in, if the thing you're doing on your list is something someone else in the company should be doing, you probably shouldn't be doing it because your focus as CEO should be only on the things only you can do. So I learned lots about management and I think that's helped me a bit because not all investors have had many decades in management.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So much more interesting, so much more runway to have a long career in this rather than treading around the same turf I had been for the first 25 years of my career. It was just much, much more appealing.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So, my job before working for Access for Lemblavatnik was running the television division of the BBC. So I ran networks, BBC TV networks. I was in charge of production and all the green light hab content. And I'd been there about eight years. And I was ready actually just to do something different. The way I think about it is I want to work until I'm really old. I think that's what keeps you healthy. So I was about 43, 44. And when I reflect on that, I thought, well, I'm not even halfway through my career if I'm going to work till I'm old. Do I want to be doing the same thing with the same people in the same world? However wonderful and exciting it is. Do I want to be doing those for another 25, 30, 35 years? And I couldn't imagine that. So I left the BBC without deciding what I was going to do next. And I went and had some nice meetings on the West Coast and so on with TV businesses and studios and so on. But around that time, Lemblavatnik had approached me. We had known Len actually through my wife for quite a long time. And the proposition he offered was”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Pleasure. It's very nice to be here. You've had a really amazing people actually on your podcast before, so nice to be in their company.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “What is it about founders that gives you the confidence to invest in them? It's metrics, but it's also a question of emotional intelligence and an ability to read people, extreme drive, focus on quality, an ability to separate what really matters from all the other stuff going on, and attention to detail, and flexibility of mind. Because as conditions change, what do you do about that if conditions change? How flexible are you in changing your approach? They're as true of someone acting on the stager to 300 year old theatre as they are of a gaming company.”

    2023-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source