How an IMDB co-founder achieved three successful media exits

Alan Jay became extremely good at scaling up ad-supported media businesses without raising any venture capital.

In the early 1990s, Alan Jay was sitting in his London office when his phone rang with a peculiar request. On the other end was Jeff Bezos’s assistant. “She says, hi, I’m Jeff Bezos’ assistant. He’s going to be in London next week and wonders whether you’d be free for a meeting,” Jay recalled. That meeting, as it turned out, would set off a chain of events that ended with Amazon acquiring IMDB, the online movie database Jay had co-founded.

After the acquisition, Alan didn’t rest on his laurels; over the next two decades, he went on to co-found two other media companies — one in entertainment and the other sports — both of which found success and ultimately sold to larger companies. But he insists that building a sustainable media business today is far harder than when he started. “The current world we’re living in,” he said, “trying to be in the media business is unbelievably hard. None of the old rules work any longer.”

Building IMDB Before the Web Existed

Long before the World Wide Web as we know it, Jay was tinkering with early networks. In the late 1980s, he was one of the first two people in the UK with commercial internet access—a 64-kilobit leased line that connected his publishing business to the wider digital world. “It was so exciting at the time,” he said. “Most people accessing the internet were in universities or research establishments. Email and newsgroups were basically all there was.”