Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Rob Burgess wasn't chasing cartoons -- but with Macromedia's Flash and Shockwave enabling a faux broadband experience, he's suddenly tight with Stan Lee.
Nov 15, 1999 | Canadians like Mike Myers and Jim Carrey have presided over the entertainment world of the 1990s. Born and raised near Toronto, Rob Burgess, 42, may well carry that tradition into the 2000s -- at least in the nascent world of online entertainment. Unlike his show biz counterparts, Burgess is a software exec -- the CEO of Macromedia, a 3-D graphics company he is credited with transforming from a moribund, money-losing victim of the collapsing CD-ROM market into a profitable producer of animation tools for an increasing lively Web.
Last July, Burgess' company launched Shockwave.com, a Web entertainment hub featuring animated games and cartoons like Comedy Central's "South Park," Showtime's "WhirlGirl," and -- in an exclusive deal signed last week -- Spiderman creator Stan Lee's Seventh Portal. Shockwave.com has quickly become one of the most popular game and animation sites around; it averages 2.1 million page views per day and registered over 5 million visitors in its first three months.
Burgess took on the CEO role at Macromedia in late 1996, after a stint as a senior executive at Silicon Graphics. He quickly laid off 10 percent of the workforce, revamped Macromedia Director for the Web, and introduced new Web products like Flash, a vector-graphics based tool that delivers high quality animation over slow Web connections. Flash and the company's popular Shockwave plug-in are key to the current explosion in online entertainment of which Shockwave.com is a part.
Burgess races through long work days as if he were born with an extra set of adrenal glands. A star track and field athlete (he ran a 5-minute, 30-second mile at age 11) and life-long hockey fanatic, he wooed his wife by offering to take her to the Galapagos islands -- on their second date. He once stole the show at Silicon Graphics' annual lip-sync contest by dressing like Annie Lennox in black leather pants, red bra and a spikey blonde wig -- belting out "Would I Lie To You" to much applause. Shockwave.com's interim CEO, Burgess may have a bit of Hollywood in his blood after all.
Hollywood and Silicon Valley have had a terrible track record for working together, suffering one "convergence collision" after another. Why?
Silicon Valley and Hollywood are totally different in the ways that their businesses are structured, deals put together, language, values -- everything. In Silicon Valley, the venture capitalists are creating this new economy. Down in Hollywood, it's the lawyers and the [talent] managers. In Silicon Valley, the talent is the engineers, while in Hollywood it's the actors. In the valley, if you have an idea for a business, you put a business plan together. In Hollywood, you put together scripts, actors and combinations of people for a show, then see how much you can sell the package for. I think that's the reason why there are so few deals between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Both sides come together, and each side knows they are making sense in their respective worlds. But they aren't making sense to each other.
Brad Grey of [the Hollywood management/production company] Brillstein/Grey said something very interesting to me recently. We were talking about the huge differences in culture and language between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Toward the end of the meeting he looked at me with a big smile on his face and in good humor said, "You know Rob, you can't imagine the rage among the members of the Hollywood community." "Why?" I asked. "Because," he said, "we [in Hollywood] are used to being the overpaid guys. Now you Silicon Valley types are the ones who are ridiculously overpaid."
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