P1: Tell me who Jason Kilar is

Jason Kilar is a technology and media executive who was the CEO of WarnerMedia from May 2020 to April 2022.

Of course, this was when what is now Warner Bros. Discovery (minus Discovery) was an asset of AT&T they called WarnerMedia after they bought Time Warner, purchased for a staggering $85 billion.

Kilar previously was the founding CEO of the streaming service Hulu, founder and CEO of Vessel (sold to Verizon), a now-defunct video startup.

Kilar also held various executive positions at Amazon.com. How he and his classmate, Andy Jassy got there is an interesting story Brad Stone shares in a Chapter titled “Fever Dreams” of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

In 1997, Jeff Bezos flew to Boston to give a presentation on his new company, Amazon.com. The presentation was at Harvard Business School, to a class of students taking a course called Managing the Marketspace.

The consensus after Bezos talked to the class?

Amazon was unlikely to survive the wave of established retailers moving online.

“You seem like a really nice guy, so don’t take this the wrong way, but you really need to sell to Barnes and Noble and get out now,” one student bluntly informed Bezos.

After the class was dismissed a few stuents went to talk to Bezos, one of whom was Kilar, who would spend the next nine years scaling executive ranks at Amazon and eventually, found a company called Hulu (Mandarin).

As Kilar says, Hulu has “two interesting meanings. The primary meaning interested us because it is used in an ancient Chinese proverb that describes the Hulu as the holder of precious things. It literally translates to ‘gourd,’ and in ancient times, the Hulu was hollowed out and used to hold precious things. The secondary meaning is ‘interactive recording.’”

A website, now app across iOS Android Roku etc, that houses online videos, certainly falls in line with a hollow gourd that holds precious interactive recordings.

And indeed, I have memories of seeing many shows and movies on Hulu from Everybody Hates Chris to Shark Tank to many many more titles.

P2a: Tell me how you heard about him

I first heard about Jason Kilar in April 2020, during the pandemic.

My YouTube and Safari search history tells me April 1, 2020, I watched “How to Build the Future in Four Steps | Jason Kilar | TEDxYouth@TheNuevaSchool” and found this article in Seattle Times titled “WarnerMedia names former Hulu chief Jason Kilar CEO”

From what I gather, Stankey was on track to succeed his boss Randall Stephenson for the AT&T CEO job, after Randall bought Time Warner from Jeff Bewkes, vertical integration.

Stankey managed the acquisition and rebranding into WarnerMedia, then Stankey calls Kilar and says “hey Jason, come manage this,” and Jason comes in to be CEO of WarnerMedia.

I’ll link a bunch of other videos of Jason Kilar talking from my YouTube history.

P2b: why this guy matters

Because I want his job one day, CEO of WarnerMedia!

I cannot even hide it. I would come home from school and watch KidsWB, saw the CW come via M&A, saw the “an evil plot to destroy the world Hulu Super Bowl commercial with Alec Baldwin which, in hindsight, I feel like Kilar himself wrote.

P3a: A.M. Final Thoughts

Per Scholas managers are very cool, as I said before.

I like working on PS RTT during my day, but back in 2020, during the pandemic, I was learning about Amazon autodidactically, reading Brad Stone, looking at Jason Kilar (rhymes with Tyler).

I thought of myself as a media corporation on a micro level, but also myself leading a media corporation like this guy who reported to Bezos as a MBA student and was picked to run WarnerMedia and create HBO Max.

This is the same guy Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight director and more, ripped a new one because he made the same-day theater same day HBO Max decision which set Hollywood on fire, and the ramifications of which WBD CEO David Zaslav, Kilar’s successor, has to deal with today at CinemaCon: “We Do Not Believe In Direct-To-Streaming Movies”.

I feel like if I worked for Kilar, I’d be inspired, but also I would have to be ready for people to tell me, “Akash your boss is crazy.”

I’d respond, “it’s the good kind of crazy, the Bezos kind of crazy, Edison, Tesla, Musk.”

Kilar tweeted about Hulu celebrating 15 yrs back in March 2023. He writes “At 48M subs, Hulu has come a long way from being called Clown Co (the nickname given in 2007 by a competitor prior to the naming and launching of the service ), and gives us 4 lessons from Hulu and some little-known tidbits for us to learn and smile about.

P3b: What is the future of film, television, and the technology making it possible

An Indian-American boy growing up in Central New Jersey, I was addicted to every screen I could gain control over.

Apple screens, Nintendo screens, Sony screens, and so on. I had thick glasses from the age of 7, which writing this now, at almost 27 years of age, still feels like yesterday.

I write this with eyes with vision made possible through laser eye surgery, but there was a time my visual prescription was so high, like -8 and -6.

The pursuit of visual literacy literally blinded me.

I obsessively played video games. Got curious, searched Google, and YouTube, watched lots of YouTube, obviously. I still watch lots of YouTube.

I read books in the dark, voraciously, books Kilar would read or that Dr. Seuss had written.

TV. Anything that captures my attention, told me a story. I surrender my attention to it.

I surrendered myself this evening to the page of this blog, which began on my iPhone and was shared as a Microsoft word document, eventually ending up here for you, the reader.

The tool is not important, Scorsese or Steve Jobs or Kilar would say, but that the story is told well with the tools available.

What we do with the tool is far more important, not the tool itself.

A book or a blog is a tool. A tool to be respected. Loved, even.

Read over and over again. Bookmarked, shared. Anything you or I write should capture the your imagination.

Silly activities you did in middle school and high school, being five years old again, is how you invent the future.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." - Albert Einstein

The human body has senses like eyes and ears, but the mind is our tool that also has its own eyes and ears, the ones within the confines of the mind.

Scorsese manages creativity, turning movie stars into artists, but he also manages the eye and ear of the audience with editing. Writing with image and sound, editing is.

But anything he makes, this 80 year old man, will be passed around by 50 year old executives like Kilar.

If I make something, I want to protect it, and simultaneously get it sold, by executives like Kilar, who hopefully are fans of movies and TV and also, visual literacy.

And well, WGA strike notice just went out, hot off the presses, April 25, 2023 5:39PM PDT. This is not a new situation.

That’s all for now! Feel free to look at more of my stuff if you have the time.

Thank you for reading!