Pressure to Innovate

You oversaw the creation of the company's first digital media division. And so we're now living in an era where we're experiencing monumental changes in how people consume media and content. And then we're seeing the rise in services like Netflix and Amazon. That really turns up the pressure to innovate. So how do you encourage your people to think creatively about their new offerings so that the company can stay competitive in this environment?

It's a theme for us. As I said, the venture market is a really competitive market right now and it's a buyer's market in that the best entrepreneurs have an opportunity to take money from a wide variety of funds. And you know what we need to do is to sort of support them in a way that they may not find support from other funds. We have a number of products of services. One, probably our first and in some ways to date our most successful is our advertising product. So if you're an entrepreneur with a consumer facing product like Away luggage, if you're a digital native, you often assume that the only way to market your product is by advertising on Facebook and Google. And you don't necessarily think about TV or you think that TV is too expensive.

What we've been able to do is to show our consumer facing companies or the founders of our consumer facing companies that television can be both more effective and more cost-effective. And it's a wonderful example of what we call symphony, which is we demonstrate to our portfolio companies that, in fact, they should be advertising on TV. The television advertising works for them so that their companies grow faster than they expect. And at the same time, they become new clients and customers for the Comcast advertising, whether or not it's on the cable side of the House or the ABC side of the house.

It's your big differentiator.

It's our big differentiator.