reports, IAC is an Internet giant that Diller sewed together, piece by piece. Diller has for years had a reputation as a business visionary from his success in Hollywood when he ran Paramount Pictures and then created the Fox television network. He's now in his third act, as his own boss.
This time the vision was that a TV screen could do a lot more than entertain us. It all started 15 years ago when he looked into the future. The year was 1992 and Barry Diller, who had turned 50, was wandering around the country in search of a new idea.
He had just done the unheard of: leaving one of the top jobs in Hollywood, running the Fox studios. "I thought, this is the dumbest thing I've ever done in my life," Diller remembers. Asked if it was dumb or scary, he admits, "Oh, [I was] totally scared.
It was like 'What the hell am I going to do?' 'Cause I didn't have an idea in my head." His companion on the journey was his best friend and now wife Diane von Furstenberg, the fashion designer.
They were two vagabond millionaires. "We didn't know what we were gonna do," von Furstenberg recalls. "And then one day I went to visit QVC.
" She was going to the home shopping cable channel in suburban Pennsylvania to sell her designs; Diller happened to tag along to the studio that day. "And I was struck. I'd never seen a television set used that way.
All I'd known from television screens is telling stories," Diller remembers. "I saw this interactivity, this primitive interactivity and this mix of computers and televisions and phones. And I thought, 'I don't know.
' This seized my curiosity.
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