Why did young entrepreneurs seem to profit from the Internet early on while media giants could not?
Motavalli: In a given industry, you do a certain thing, and the whole company is geared up to do that. If you’re a magazine company, and you’re told that you have to produce a TV show, you probably wouldn’t do it very well. Your company is geared to do a magazine, which is a process that’s not at all like producing television. At a typical monthly magazine, like Vanity Fair, every little cog in that machine knows what they’re supposed to do. If you went to [Vanity Fair editor] Graydon Carter and said, “Figure out the Internet for me,” what guarantee is there that he would know how to do that? Even today I couldn’t tell you what a Web site for Vanity Fair should be like. Should it be a bunch of articles? Or some sort of community bulletin board? Even after all these years it’s hard to figure out what it should be. And that leads you to the conclusion that there isn’t any reason to do a Web site at all, which I support. If Conde Nast hired me and asked me to describe what they should do
