The woman right next to me was alive one second, then a taxi came up on the sidewalk of 42 Street between 6 and 7 Avenue, hit her and veered off and now the woman was lying in the street, blood everywhere. This happened on the first or second day of my work when I started at HBO. I tried to call 911 in the payphone (there were still payphones in August, 1994) and then I had to go. The woman was dead.
I loved HBO like I would love a parent. I wanted them to approve of me. And kiss me as I went to sleep at night.
Before I got the job offer to work there I would watch HBO all day long. My friend Peter and I would watch HBO or MTV for 10 hours straight. I’d go over his house around 1pm in the afternoon and by 10pm we would look at each other and say, “what the hell did we just do”. Everything from the “the Larry Sanders Show” on HBO to “Beavis & Butthead” on MTV. We couldn’t stop. I loved the product. I wanted to work there.
Rule #1: Love the product.
You have to love the current output of the company. If you work at HBO, love the shows. Watch every single show. No excuses.
If you work at WD-40, know every use of WD-40. Make up a few more that nobody ever thought of. If you work at Otis Elevators, understand all the algorithms for how it decides which floors to stop on when.
If you work at Goldman Sachs, read every book on the history, study every deal they’ve done, know Lloyd Blankfein’s favorite hobbies and how he rose through the ranks. You have to love the product the way Derek Jeter loves playing baseball.
Rule #2: Know the History.
When the business I started, Reset, was acquired by a company called Xceed, I learned the history of the mini-conglomerate that Xceed was created out of. There was a travel agency for corporations. I visited them in California. There was a burn gel company. I visited them and met all the executives and learned the technical details how the gel was invented. There was a corporate incentives company. I met with them to see if any of their clients could become my clients.
At HBO, I learned how Michael Fuchs (the head of HBO Sports at the time. Later CEO of HBO) in 1975 aired the first boxing match that went out on satellite. And how Jerry Levin (the CEO of HBO, later CEO of Time Warner) used satellites to send the signal out to the cable providers. The first time that had ever happened. Ted Turner had been so inspired by that he turned his local TV affiliate, TBS, into a national TV station, and the rest became history
Rule #3: Know the history of the executives.
At HBO I studied the org chart religiously. My title was “programmer analyst, IT department” and yet I was always asking around: how did John Billock become head of Marketing (he trudged around house to house selling HBO subscriptions in Louisiana when Showtime started up, for instance, decades earlier).
Where did my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss work before arriving at HBO (Pepsi). Where did the head of Original Programming get his start? (he was a standup comedian, later CEO of HBO, before being forced to quit when choking his girlfriend in a Las Vegas parking lot). It was like reading about the origins of all the superheroes. I was a fanboy and my heroes were the other executives. I wanted to be one of them. Or better.
Same thing: know all of your colleagues and what their dreams and ambitions are. Get to work 2 hours before they get to work. If they need favors, do them. You have a whole two hours extra a day. You can do anything.
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