Tom Freston
Tom Freston is a veteran American media executive best known as a co-founder of MTV in 1979 and the longtime President and CEO of MTV Networks, where he oversaw the channel's expansion into a multi-network empire including Nickelodeon, VH1, and Comedy Central. He briefly served as CEO of Viacom in 2006 before being ousted by Sumner Redstone, partly over the failure to acquire MySpace before News Corp did. Today Freston works as a philanthropist and media adviser, with involvement in organizations including ONE.org.
“We got up to like eight or nine billion dollars. That includes consumer products, which became a big thing for us because we would own the IP of all the Nicktoon SpongeBob... Nickelodeon was by far [the biggest business].”
Source→“MTV Networks built from $25M seed funding to $8-9B in revenue”
Source→“I realized at some point I don't have necessarily the instincts to do it myself because I was a little bit older and away from the action... I would find like a woman like Judy McGrath.”
Source→“She would always say, what we have to do is hire aberrant people because it's going to be aberrant people who are a pain in the ass, but they're going to bring us the most success.”
Source→“Our criteria for green lighting a show and going in and producing it had nothing to do with toyability. It was, were we in love with these characters? And did we think it could be a good show and get good numbers and resonate with the audience.”
Source→“They went back and came back to me with, okay, we're eliminating the writers. What we're going to do is find seven or eight people and stick them in a loft down on Broadway and Prince Street... And that became the real world, which really launched the modern version of reality television.”
Source→“We were the first people. We offered like $800 million cash with like a $900 million earn out... Their revenue was like $7 or $8 million a year.”
Source→“It was the same thing with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Paul Allen and Phil Knight. They all started companies because they thought that was interesting fun... But those people always end up richer. They're owners. They didn't check out.”
Source→“These guys are going to be special. By the way, this is the most original thing we have seen for a while. It's offbeat. There's nothing else like it. It pushes the edge. It's funny. It's irreverent.”
Source→“We would find people like Mike Judge at animation festivals... He would go to places where a lot of this young talent who had ideas in their head, and they were animators, but they didn't want to go to Hollywood and get immersed in the factory animation scene.”
Source→“There was a fellow who was a champion for it internally named Doug Herzog, who eventually would go on and become the head of Comedy Central.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.