This morning’s post is more personal than usual. I was motivated by yesterday’s article in The New York Times reporting that James Murdoch, via his company Lupa System, had acquired Vox Media’s podcast network, as well as New York Magazine, a publication once owned by James’s father Rupert Murdoch; noting further that Vox Media’s podcast network includes the Pivot podcast, hosted by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway – one that I listen to on a fairly regular basis.
There are a bunch of dots in there that I thought I might join for you, as a way of demonstrating how the universe can sometimes work.
Dot One
The story begins in 1985. I was completing the second year of my MBA studies at Columbia Business School in New York, and for whatever reason I had become obsessed by the idea of working closely with Rupert Murdoch.
Media and communications had become my thing, and I’d even crafted my own customised “Communications Management” major at B School by cross-registering for subjects in the Schools of Journalism and the Arts. At every opportunity my MBA field work involved companies operating in that space there in Manhattan: Dow Jones, HBO, the New York Post, Paper magazine and others. Total immersion.
News Corporation had acquired 20th Century Fox and had just announced its purchase of the Metromedia group of independent television stations, setting the stage for the launch of a fourth US commercial broadcasting network, something that the “experts” had been saying for a long time was impossible (but which my own final year thesis had argued was do-able). Rupert was well and truly on the move in the United States, playing by his own rules and ruffling all sorts of establishment feathers.
As an outsider myself, and an Australian to boot, I found it fun to watch. Maybe, with the benefit of hindsight, I should have been less gleeful – although, who was to know what Fox News would be turning into over time.
The maverick in me was attracted to the ascendancy of this alpha maverick, and so I set about working on ways to hitch my wagon to that star. I had mixed success to begin with. Like most MBA students I did a summer internship between my first and second years of study. My internship was with Murdoch Magazines. At Rupert’s suggestion I did end up doing “some real work somewhere under Marty Singerman” at the offices of New York Magazine. (One of the perks of the internship was a free personal ad, but that’s a whole other story.)
It wasn’t a great experience. I didn’t really fit the profile of the unquestioning loyalist to the Sun King, and I think that Marty and the other loyal lieutenants thought of me as a bit too interested in my own ideas and opinions.
This less than ideal experience didn’t put me off working with Rupert, but I decided that I’d be better off working directly with the man himself. So, I spent much of late 1985 plotting my pitch to become his right-hand MBA. I was thorough – schmoozing both of his PAs, Dorothy “Dot” Wyndoe and Paige Mallory. (I even took Paige to lunch and received coaching from the inside.)
I eventually got them to schedule the meeting with Rupert, and I felt confident that I was going to be able to sell him the idea face to face. That’s when fate intervened. I received the news that my father was close to death. A hastily booked flight home to Sydney meant that I was going to have to postpone the meeting. Life took some more twists and turns, and that meeting was not rescheduled.
I realise now that my Rupert obsession was never going to have a happy ending. There was only ever room for one Sun King on that mountain, and for me to be able to be me as a player and communicator at any level, I was going to have to start my own mole hill aka REMO.
Even so, I stayed in contact with News Corporation, thanks largely to my friendship with the late John B. Evans, a senior News Corporation executive, ex-publisher of The Village Voice AND a big fan and supporter of, and believer in, REMO. He even encouraged me to hit Rupert up personally for some backing – and that rejection letter (see below) is just one from a collection that includes letters from Barry Diller, Luciano Benetton and (wait for it) Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Another Dot
In 1997 I would independently meet with James Murdoch in New York as part of my multi-city quest to secure the employment that would enable me to shift my young family from Sydney to the United States. That sponsoring company eventually turned out to be frog design in Silicon Valley and not News Corporation. Even so, I did enjoy meeting with James – and have fond memories of him standing on his office chair so that he could blow his cigarette smoke out of a window high up on the wall.
Final Dot
For the final dot we fast forward a couple of years. Post-frog I was working as the first ever brand strategist at Organic, an online development company in New York – but I was simultaneously attempting to raise money to launch a US-based web-centric version of the REMO General Store.
The NASDAQ crash of 1999 ultimately ended up raining on that parade – but not before I had successfully raised an angel round of money from a group of investors that included – Scott Galloway.
I guess that the take away here is that if you’re out there doing things for enough time, you eventually accumulate the components of a pretty interesting network – and you never know when one of those dots is going to resurface and/or connect with another.
Postscript
I told much this story in a chapter of my 2014 book General Thinker (see below). If you are interested in securing a copy, you can do so until the end of May at 50% off by entering the code GTMAY during checkout.
General Thinker Chapters
Great story! And it even ends well :)
Working with you on Paper is a great memory whatever the results. Also I remember you bringing me to a networking party at Galloway's. ❤️