Ted Leonsis, Vice Chairman of AOL on Entrepreneurship

Posted on November 29, 2007
Filed Under Business & Entrepreneurship, Ideas, Leadership |

The latest issue of Knowledge at Wharton talks about Ted Leonsis, the keynote speaker at the recent Wharton Entrepreneurship conference.  Leonsis started his first successful company at age 24 and later sold it for $60,000,000 and later he realized money was not the metric to measure success with, but rather how much good you are doing. 

He has some interesting thoughts about the future of business and media and the role of the consumer:

Meet the new consumers of the new media age. They want things to be better, faster, cheaper and, even more important, free.

“This new consumer is very, very different from [the ones] we dealt with before,” said Ted Leonsis, vice chairman emeritus of AOL, who is considered an Internet pioneer and whose business portfolio over the years includes an impressive array of online companies. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in — restaurant, real estate or financial services, he added. “We’re living in a world where consumers have taken control of everything.”

And I am also encouraged by his thoughts on entrepreneurship in today’s world:

Being successful with an online business is all about being smart with math and algorithms, Leonsis noted. “Marketing isn’t just to people anymore. You have to market to algorithms.” Also, “the basic unit of life in this world is the pixel and every pixel matters on a page.” The ability to cross promote is a powerful benefit of the Internet, he added, citing Amazon.com’s algorithm-driven marketing effort that alerts customers who bought certain book titles to other titles they might also like.

Leonsis, who stepped aside this year from day-to-day operations at AOL, said that “while it’s never been easier to launch a new world-class business,” entrepreneurs need to know that the pace is dizzying. It used to be that investors wanted 40% annual rates of return, but now, “if you can’t grow 25% month over month, we don’t think you know what you’re doing.” If a startup doesn’t take off fast, “you fall behind very, very quickly.”

Leonsis ended his talk on entrepreneurship on a wistful note: “I wish I was 25 again,” he said. “I think it’s the greatest time to be an entrepreneur.”

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