Henry Blodget: Thankfully, for all of us, I'm not in the stock-market...

The definition of strong leadership is not about making decisions that are popular. Making popular decisions is easy - you don't need to be a leader to do that. The definition of strong leadership is to make decisions that are unpopular, but are nevertheless sound.

Henry Blodget

strong decision leadership

I'm no expert in vibrators, but I was surprised to learn that one could fit in that little box.

Henry Blodget

fit experts littles

Digital advertising is now larger than TV.

Henry Blodget

advertising digital tvs

It's all about who your team is and who your people are.

Henry Blodget

team people

[T]here's a difference between confident leadership and empty-headed delusion or cheerleading. And this is a difference that many CEOs miss.

Henry Blodget

cheerleading differences missing

People have been predicting the death of television for 20 years now, and so far it's been entirely wrong. But it does seem viewership habits are starting to change.

Henry Blodget

doe people years

When television came in, everybody thought that was the end of the movie business, which was not and is not.

Henry Blodget

movie-business ends television

In the era of networks only, I cannot tell you the number of shows that we don't know about that did not survive. They got canceled. But there are a few that survived by accident, because they didn't have anything else to do, and they stayed with it.

Henry Blodget

eras shows numbers

Arrogance follows distribution strength.

Henry Blodget

distribution arrogance

Wrapping rubber bands around a watermelon is not journalism. It is entertainment. But the key to success in media has always been a broad mix of serious reporting and entertainment. The New York Times does not make its money on reports about Iraq and Syria. It makes money on its gardening section, food and, yes, stories about cats. "The Today Show" is a very successful program because it is a mix of the celebrity chef and the crazy pet who does the rolls and serious news and interviews.

Henry Blodget

cat crazy successful

Successful publication is all about the mix. What Buzzfeed discovered was that people like cat pictures. We can pretend to be embarrassed about that as a species, but it is actually a truth. So Buzzfeed publishes a lot of cat pictures. But they use the money from cat pictures to build an exceptional newsroom that publishes stories that far fewer people want to read, but it is very important journalism.

Henry Blodget

cat successful people

When CNN launched in the early 1980s, everybody said: A 24-hour news network won't work. They launched, they did ok, CNN went almost bankrupt because of the risks they had taken, they got bailed out, and 25 years later CNN is a huge global brand. I think the same is going to happen in digital. If you look at the younger generation, there is a huge consumption of digital media and almost no consumption of print or traditional television. Eventually money will follow that. It is just a question of which companies win, how long it takes to get there and what kind of model you need to apply.

Henry Blodget

taken winning thinking

Fifteen years ago, nobody thought that content would ever work as a business. It was impossible to raise any money, initial investments were $10,000, seldom $100,000. It is only over the last two or three years that we have started to see very large amounts of capital coming into the digital industry. That has created a lot more competition.

Henry Blodget

investment competition impossible

My mission is to figure out the journalistic model for the digital medium, finding out how we get the right stories readers want, at the right time and wherever they want to read them.

Henry Blodget

right-time

In the new world of digital, there are no must-read publications any more.

Henry Blodget

world

The Financial Times is a wonderful publication, as is the Wall Street Journal and many others. But the new generation is consuming media fundamentally differently. At Business Insider, we have the chance to embrace that whole-heartedly. We do not have a print legacy, digital is not our second business behind a newspaper. It is our only one.

Henry Blodget

wall legacy chance

We have more information than ever before, and it is harder to avoid actually seeing what the other side is saying. Yes, we in Business insider focus on publications that we feel speak to us, but that is the same way it was 20 or 100 years ago. In the US, two million people have subscribed to the New York Times and many more millions think it is a terrible, liberal paper they would never read. We can choose to put ourselves in a bubble of only people who agree with us, but in the digital world there are many more ways of saying "Hey, here is something you might want to consider".

Henry Blodget

focus people thinking

Before the internet, big publications were like hydrants in the desert. There were relatively few of them, we needed each one of them tremendously and they had control over what was delivered. Now they are like little streams flowing into a massive ocean.

Henry Blodget

internet ocean

Before the internet, a journalist would write an article about a company that the company felt was unfair and missed a point. All they could do was write a letter to the editor and wait, and maybe a week later it would be printed, or not. Now, they can go to medium.com and immediately publish a long rebuttal, saying the journalist forgot this and did not consider that, the analyst is wrong here. Everybody pulls that immediately into the debate. So it is a much more democratic field for ideas.

Henry Blodget

waiting writing long

Some things go slow, slow, slow, and then - wham! - they're over.

Henry Blodget

Thankfully, for all of us, I'm not in the stock-market prediction business anymore. I do think the tech industry is in a boom that will end the way all booms do - in a bust, but the magnitude of what's happening today is just a faint echo of what happened in the 1990s.