Dare to Dream

Page 83

Dare to Dream!

83

that he’s no lightweight in the entertainment industry. This guy was obviously a serious player in the business! I told him my new enterprise was a dot-com company. The only people who even knew what that meant at the time were in the communications industry, so Dick knew exactly what I was talking about. I found out later he had been in meetings before our chance encounter with people like Barry Diller and others who were actively moving into the dot-com space, so he was very tuned-in to what I was talking about and was well aware of the future potential of this medium. I went on to tell him I was combining the dot-com business with direct sales, and happened to mention Herbalife as an example of what I was talking about. Dick told me he knew Mark Hughes, the founder of Herbalife, personally, as well as the founders of Amway. Then, for the next 15 minutes as we were landing, Dick told me the story of how he had started one of the first commercial cable television stations back in the mid-1900s. He started by serving his friends and grew it quickly into a business with subscribers in the six digits. Time Communications bought him out when he was 25 or 26 years old for tens of millions of dollars. So he became wealthy at a very young age and became president and CEO of what became Time-Warner’s cable company. He retired some time later and bought a yacht. He and one of the founders of Amway captained their yachts around the world. So now I found myself in a position where I had spent the last couple of hours building a relationship with Dick by listening to him tell me all about himself. What a match! Here was a guy with money, who was very involved in and understood the communications industry, who knew and understood


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