An Interview With Barry Diller

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B.D.: Well because we’re complicated. We’re hard to understand. And they’ve been, over the long term, very kind to us. Because if you invested a dollar when we invested, you’ve done extremely well.

L.G.: When would that have been, Barry?

B.D.: Well that’s now 10 years ago. It’s a good return. But if you look at our stock graph over three years or five years or whatever, it’s very volatile. And the reason is that what we’re doing—trying to do—is so much more complicated than having a one-product company. There are 60-plus products in this company. We have 12 discrete business divisions. We do everything from finance, mortgage business, to dating, to search, to invitations, to commerce, to TicketMaster, live events, etcetera. So we are an interactive conglomerate, so it’s hard for people to understand. It’ll take time. And we’re patient.

L.G.: And now games.

B.D.: And now games, yes. We keep adding things. I mean, every month we’re adding a few things here or there, so we’re tremendously acquisitive and opportunistic about ideas, and we have a system that internally tolerates it. Externally, I think, until things come through, people are skeptical, and that’s okay with me. It just gives us an opportunity to buy more stock, because we throw out so much cash.

L.G.: What attracted you to GarageGames and this whole idea of getting games off the internet, not having to deal with the manufacturing of consoles?

B.D.: Well, because if you go over there [pointing to a large flat-screen TV and a couple of videogame consoles in his office] and see there are—well one is not, they took it away—there are three different game consoles.

L.G.: What have you got here? The Xbox?

B.D.: The Xbox and the PlayStation—and of course they’re incompatible with each other. And they’re whiz-bang on graphics—they’re beautiful. But on both sides of it—on the equipment side of it that you have to purchase in on, the production side where you make a game—you’re spending huge amounts of money. The Web, as is proven in so many other areas, is a pretty good distribution mechanism for programming. And very few people have done really high-graphic Web games in a system that will have—in InstantAction.com, which is a gathering place both for people who make the games and for viewers to get them—where there’s one easy-to-use, fast place to do pretty sophisticated games. So we think it’s a really original and good idea.

L.G.: Does this attract you because you know there’s a market for games and people like to do it, or is it because you yourself enjoy them?

B.D.: No. I mean, I enjoy doing it. I enjoy playing games, but I am not the audience, you know. I’m too old and I have too many other things that I do. But I shouldn’t even say that. Even if I had nothing to do I still wouldn’t be playing games hour upon hour. But, you know, if you get me started, it’s great—it’s great fun. And it really is, because I think there’s an opportunity for what we have expertise in. This company has expertise in all different areas of the internet, deep and wide, and this company has 20,000 people; we have 3,000 engineers, meaning people who do programming, internet programming of various kinds. We’re very big players in advertising, both buying it and selling it, we have expertise in how to search the internet, search engine authorization, which is how you get people to come to your site, so you have all these levels of expertise. So when something comes along we think is an original idea or something that we think is interesting to do because of the experience and expertise we’ve built up, we plunge in. And in this case, this investment is more than $50 million dollars.

L.G.: I was going to ask you to show a little ankle on that.

B.D.: It’s not a little start-up.

L.G.: As you mentioned, there are 60 odd units in this company. Do you have any favorite children?

B.D.: Yes, I have favorites and I have things that drive me nuts. But it would not make me feel better—or any of the other people who are engaged in the ones not, or probably in whatever scale it would be, or whatever area anybody played in—it wouldn’t do anybody any good to tell you what they are.

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