There are plenty of entrepreneurs in Los Angeles who have started more companies than Richard Rosenblatt. But you’d be hard-pressed to find many who have sold them for more.
Since 1999, the current chief executive of Santa Monica-based Demand Media Inc. has sold two companies – iMall and MySpace.com – for a total of $1.1 billion. And there’s good reason for his success.
Unlike many big-picture entrepreneurs who struggle with details, Rosenblatt has been successful by adeptly handling both.
At Demand, his latest creation, Rosenblatt is known as a driven and detail-oriented leader who will even take time to help his quality assurance testers try out new products before launch. And sometimes, he’ll catch bugs that slip past others.
“We often joke that Richard is our best Q.A. person,” said Quinn Daly, Demand’s senior vice president of marketing. “He’s very much a devil-is-in-the-details guy.”
Demand, which has garnered more than $350 million in funding since its 2006 founding, has become a leading and profitable Internet company under Rosenblatt’s watch. It grossed some $200 million last year through its business of buying niche Web sites and turning them into money-making properties by populating them with content and ads.
Demand’s leading property, eHow.com, produces hundreds of online how-to videos and manuals that instruct people on a range of activities, including how to carve a turkey and throw a football.
A graduate of UCLA and USC Gould School of Law, Rosenblatt credits his legal education for his approach to business.
“I am very entrepreneurial, I like to start these things, but law school gave me the structure of how to think,” he said. “Now, when I’m thinking through a problem, I go about it in a very structured way.”
By the time Rosenblatt founded Demand, he had already enjoyed the kind of career arc that most entrepreneurs would envy. In 1999, he sold his first Internet startup, iMall, for $565 million to Internet portal Excite. He then took over as chief executive of a startup called Intermix Media in Beverly Hills, which was then testing a little-known social networking site called MySpace. Rosenblatt later sold MySpace to News Corp. in 2005 for $580 million in one of the first big Web 2.0 deals.
Rosenblatt’s tenure at MySpace helped make his reputation as a problem-solving executive who doesn’t shy away from tough decisions. When Rosenblatt took over the company, it was in financial turmoil, its share price was under $2, and its payroll was bloated.
“What Intermix needed was a breath of fresh air and a positive thinker, but also a CEO who could sort through some nontraditional issues such as accounting problems,” recalled Brett Brewer, a co-founder of Intermix Media who hired Rosenblatt to run MySpace.
On his first day, Rosenblatt gave a speech to the company’s 400 employees warning he might have to lay off as much as half of them. That encouraged less dedicated employees to leave, and Rosenblatt immersed himself in sorting out MySpace’s financial problems. When Rupert Murdoch bought the company 18 months later, it was for $12 a share.
But while his name carries heft in the world of tech, Rosenblatt prefers to stay out of the lime light. He eschews the traditional networking circuit in favor of spending time with his wife, Lisa, and their three children.
“I just don’t like to network,” he said. “Whatever free time I have, I like to spend it with my family.”
But he’s also a tireless worker known for peppering his staff with e-mails at 2 a.m. or over the weekend.
“He’s famous for sending e-mails to the Demand team on a Sunday night, saying, ‘Alright, I’m opening a bottle of wine and settling in for an evening of work. Who’s with me?’” said Daly.
LARGE PRIVATE COMPANY
RICHARD ROSENBLATT, 40
Demand Media Inc.
YEARS ON THE JOB: 3
QUOTE: “I am very entrepreneurial, I like to start these things, but law school gave me the structure of how to think.”
