🍿 How TED became the biggest non-profit media company...

Welcome

Whats up! Welcome to Wouters blog. It’s Friday! That means i’m going to be covering:

• A media personality breakdown.

Today we’re talking about Chris Anderson. The “curator” and owner of TED.

He acquired TED 23 years ago for $6M with the most specific vision: To address global challenges through media. 

At first TED was just conferences, but it became “an odd, quirky media company in the service of ideas rather than news or gossip”.

In the service of ideas … that resonates

He was able to entangle a perfect flywheel. A whirring machine that produces free, amazing talks, backed by an army of 50K volunteers.

Sounds like a f*cking masterplan. 

And today we’re finding out how he did it.

INTRO
Backstory and what is TED?

TED doesn’t leave anything to chance in terms of quality and content. Quality is a key Tennent of TED talks. You will listen to someone you don’t know, because it’s on a TED youtube channel.

Now hear this, you’re expected to write the exact script of the talk ahead of time and deliver the talk on script, word for word.

You have to achieve a Happy-Birthday-level memorization of the talk.

And you have 2 tests to qualify: 🤯

• Record the talk and play it back at 2X the speed. Say it out while staying ahead of the recording.

• Recite the talk while simultaneously doing an unrelated task.

• Yeah, easier to say it this way →  Spend eternity prepping.

TED talks are timed at no longer than 18 minutes, this was determines by Anderson saying that the Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech lasted 17 minutes 30 seconds

This is how the typical prep looks like:

In Aug ‘15, Tim Urban was invited by Chris Anderson to do a TED talk.

If you know how Tim is, his first response was “Would it make more sense for me to do this a couple years down the road when I’ve done more speaking?”

Urban was skillfully convinced by a significant pause and Anderson's advice, “There's no time like the present”

This led Urban creating one of the most famous Ted talks in the world.

Inside the mind of a master procrastinator – 54M views.

BACKSTORY
So who is this guy?

Born in Pakistan in ‘57 (67 y/o), he graduated from Oxford University in ‘78 with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics. 

His professional career began in ‘84 when he became editor of 2 of the UK’s early computer magazines. He then founded Future Publishing in ‘85 with a $25K bank loan, sold it to Pearson plc for $80.6M in ‘94, bought it back for $235.7M in ‘98 lol.

Then in ‘94 he established the Sapling Foundation, a non-profit organization with the aim of addressing global challenges through media.

The Sapling Foundation acquired TED in ‘01 for $6M, as a result it led to him leaving Future to work full time on TED in ‘01

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BEFORE YOU GO!

Don’t forget

Don’t forget to come back next week for Mondays newsletter where I will cover:

• An insane newsletter sales secret.

• The deals of this week, and

• Everything trending right now!

Talk soon have a great weekend 🙂