Recently, alumni of The Walt Disney Company who've hurdled
to Internet success--like Edward "Toby" Lenk, founder of
eToys, and David Hodess, founder of Cooking.com--have made the
entrepreneurial world wonder what Disney's putting in its water
cooler. Start-up fever hasn't quite reached epidemic
proportions, but the number of Disney innovators forfeiting their
posts to launch solo careers is on the rise.
Jake Winebaum, former president of Walt Disney Magazine
Publishing, founder of Disney Online and chairman of Disney's
Buena Vista Internet Group, started and ran Disney.com,
ABCNews.com, ESPN.com and Go.com for the media giant. Although
already an old hand at start-ups pre-Disney (he founded FamilyFun
and FamilyPC magazines and sold them to Disney in 1992), Winebaum,
40, says the company's entrepreneurial vibe reinforced his love
for building companies from scratch. "The process of launching
businesses within Disney is not dissimilar to the process you go
through when you try to get funding on the outside," he says.
From pitching an idea to influential executives to getting
financial support from Disney's strategic planning group, the
mechanics closely parallel creating a business plan and finding
angel or venture capital.
Now Winebaum's incorporating his Disney skills and fondness
of everything high-tech to help young Internet companies soar.
Winebaum's start-up for start-ups: eCompanies LLC, a Santa
Monica, California, incubator that offers finance, recruiting,
technology, business development and marketing assistance; and
eCompanies Venture Group, a $130-million fund that invests in both
incubated and nonincubated companies. Winebaum and partner Sky
Dayton, the 28-year-old founder of EarthLink, call the 7-month-old
for-profit venture an "entrepreneur's dream come
true." Their goal is to get businesses from concepts to
full-blown companies with world-class Web sites and management
teams within 90 to 180 days. These start-ups will have the
expertise of the founders and about 50 industry veterans at their
disposal.
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Thanks to Disney, Winebaum can better determine what makes or
breaks an Internet venture. "Disney goes about entering new
businesses in a very disciplined way," he says.
"`What's the brand going to mean? How will it be
communicated and grown?' [That philosophy] is useful when
you're looking at Internet companies at hyper-speed, because
you can't throw caution to the wind. You need to analyze the
opportunity a lot faster."
Although Disney has fostered countless brands, customer
satisfaction has allowed all of them to thrive. That's what
Laurie McCartney, 32, kept at the heart of her business plan when
she resigned from Disney's strategic planning group after four
years to start eStyle Inc., the Los Angeles parent company of
flagship site babystyle.com.
Pregnant with her son, Jack, McCartney had no problem securing
funding after expressing her oneness with the $13.5 billion
maternity and baby market. Using input gathered by eStyle
"ambassadors" who questioned friends in Lamaze and Mommy
and Me classes, she signed up more than 300 vendors offering
stylish maternity and infant wear, baby gear and nursery
furnishings, and hired customer service representatives who are
also moms. Since its launch last summer, babystyle.com has even
added interviews with celebrity moms and advice from new parent
Cindy Crawford. In short, Disney taught McCartney and her
management team (some of whom are also Disney alums) how to give
the people what they want.
"We learned how to build a powerful, high-quality brand
that speaks to our consumers and grows with them through various
stages of their lives," says McCartney. "And that
everything within the organization needs to reflect the
brand." With eStyle established as a multimillion-dollar
company in its first year, Disney 101 seems to have served its
purpose.
So how does Disney attract such minds? Says Winebaum,
"Disney has historically recruited very well. That's
another lesson we've applied [at eCompanies]." And when
valued employees can venture off into the expanse of
multimillion-dollar opportunities, it only means the company has
done its job.
"Disney prides itself on training and developing its
employees," says McCartney. "They build really
entrepreneurial people who sometimes go and do other things. At the
end of the day, it's really about building the best possible
work force."
But is the post-Disney success rate due to its nurturing,
creative environment, or are they slippin' employees Mickeys?
You be the judge.
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