The Success Nuggets

Success Nuggets #45 - Larry Namer: From $90 a Week to $7 Billion Screens

• David Abel • Season 3 • Episode 4

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From splicing underground cables in Brooklyn to launching the $7 billion global media powerhouse E! Entertainment Television, Larry Namer’s story is one of audacity, strategy, and seriously smart thinking under pressure.

In this episode, Larry shares how growing up with Turkish immigrant parents shaped his views on risk, why constraints can fuel creativity, and the game-changing decision to bet on talent instead of big budgets. With just $2.5 million, when most networks raised 20 times that, he built a brand now seen in over 140 countries.

But what sets Larry apart isn’t just media success—it’s his contrarian approach to passion and purpose. “I’m the anti-follow-your-passion person,” he says. Instead, he offers a powerful blueprint: become great at something valuable, then use it to buy the freedom to pursue what you truly love.

This episode is a must-listen for entrepreneurs, creatives, and anyone curious about turning limitations into leverage.

👉 Tap in for golden lessons on reinvention, resilience, and seeing white space where others see walls.

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🌐 Visit onegoldennugget.com


Speaker 2:

Thank you about the patterns that drive progress. Get ready to dive into a world of insights and inspiration. This is the Success Nuggets podcast, with the founder of the Digital Lightbulb and your host, david Abel.

Speaker 3:

Success isn't just about one big break. It's about the patterns that shape us from the start. My guest today grew up in New York surrounded by a close-knit, multi-generational family and somehow made his way from that world to co-founding E Entertainment. So how would you go from the streets of Brooklyn to building a global media empire? And what keeps the fire alive after decades in the industry? Let's find the golden nuggets of Larry Namer. Great to have you on, larry. Hi, good to be here. I'm so fascinated by your story. Being from the UK, could you describe what it was like growing up in New York with a big family and how did you kind of get into entertainment through that Sure?

Speaker 1:

Well, you know, I grew up in Brooklyn, new York, in an area of Brooklyn. Before Brooklyn became trendy, lone Coney Island, which was the hood, still is the hood. The family origination is from Turkey, so they brought a different set of values than most. My parents' aspiration for their children were to get a civil service job and have security and be able to retire at 65, and all of that. But I was the first kid to go to college, not because I wanted to, because I was sold on going to college. I graduated with an economics degree. I was supposed to get a job as a teacher or an economist and found out that neither of those was really going to turn into a job. So I took what I thought was going to be a temporary job. I figured I'll do this for a few months until I figure out what I do with my college degree, do this for a few months until I figure out what I do with my college degree. So I actually got a job in the electrical workers union working for what was then considered a new media, which is cable television. So they gave me a job as an assistant underground slicer where I would go under the streets of New York every day and put the wires together and they paid me 90 bucks a week. So that's how I kind of got into the business. Not that that's necessarily the media business, but it rubs up against the media business Because while we were building the cable systems we had to deal with all the people who were programming for those cable systems and stuff. And I eventually rose through the ranks there. So I became an assistant to a construction guy. So I kind of went all the way up the ladder there.

Speaker 1:

Eventually a company called Time Inc before Time Warner bought the company and they wanted to become a media company as opposed to a publishing company. And when they came in there was a lot of Harvard dailies and all the I-50 kind of folks and they kept telling me that it wanted to come into management, which eventually I did. And I think I was 25 when I became director of operations at Manhattan Cable, which is the largest cable company in the country at that point. But then when cities began to issue franchises for cable television because they began to realize cable was more than just good reception, they wanted the cables to go under the ground. Well, the only person around who knew how you build underground cable system would make. So I think at 31, I got recruited to come out and build Los Angeles for a Canadian company. And you know you're a Brooklyn kid and you come out to LA and everyone's going to the parties and premieres and you know, meeting with celebrities and stuff, so you know that kind of was. When I got out of here I said I want to be part of that. And then when the company sold and went back to Canada, I said I didn't go from New York to LA to go to Toronto. I said I'm done with cold so I'm going to stay in LA.

Speaker 1:

And me and my friend Alan just started kicking around ideas and our early thinking was we went to mtv of the movies or entertainment tonight, 24 hours a day, and, um, you know, we wrote a business plan. We thought we were brilliant and um, I think at that point tv networks were running somewhere between 60 and 100 million dollars us a bill. And after three and a half years of not raising any money, we, you know, we realized nobody was giving us that kind of money. Everybody said you're like regular people, regular people don't start TV networks. So big media companies start TV networks.

Speaker 1:

So we just, I don't know, maybe we weren't smart enough to listen or whatever. But we just kept going until we found someone on Wall Street who said I love the idea, but I can't give you that kind of money. I can give you two and a half million dollars. And, um, you know, we just said you know what, we'll take the two and a half and we'll figure it out. And I had a friend who was teaching radio, television, film at university of texas in austin and I called him up and said, hey, you got a bunch of kids that need intern jobs for this summer. And he said, yeah, we had trouble placing, so he sent 31 kids to la. And what people don't realize, because he is huge. I mean it's huge. It's now we're in 142 countries and valuation is somewhere up around 7 billion uf, started by two guys with 11 employees and 31 interns yeah, that's amazing, so cool.

Speaker 3:

What inspired you to do the interns and how did that pan out? I just I spoke to someone last week and they said they just kind of stayed forever with a band and then he supported the Rolling Stones.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it was interesting because my friend who was teaching at UT, texas, wanted to kill me because as soon as we went on the air people went oh that's what you wanted to do, we would have given you the money. Three years ago we were the fastest growing cable network in the world. At that point, I think in the first year we were in 14 different countries. So the kids who started with us as interns at the beginning of the summer I mean half of them were vice presidents by the end of the summer. So half of them never went back to Texas and my friend was not happy with that.

Speaker 3:

What a great story. I know guys who were in sort of digital at the beginning in e-commerce, selling to brands, and they were so successful that all of them became e-commerce people. So did you all just become media people? Because, like you say, you were still a bit green and you'd never done it.

Speaker 1:

Totally. I mean, there's that saying that necessity is the mother of invention. Because we had no money, we had to be incredibly creative with what we did with our $2.5 million. Again, everybody else was spending $60 to $100. We had $2.5. We didn't have enough money to buy real broadcast equipment. We ended up finding a corporation that had old equipment that we're using for sales training tapes. So we bought that.

Speaker 1:

You know, we said with with a limited amount of money, we're not going to dazzle anybody with fancy production values, but the most important thing we could do is pick hosts that people either love or hate, but feel something for. And, um, you know, even today a lot of people say, oh, you were so lucky, you had all those great hosts, because a lot of people for me went on to become, you know, very, very popular. That was not an accident, that was very deliberate. We said if we have whatever money we have, we're going to put towards finding those incredible hosts. So we actually, I think we interviewed almost 10 000 people and put like 7 200 people on tape to pick the first five hosts, and we had good instincts. Our hosts went on.

Speaker 1:

Red Caneo won Academy Award. Joey Warren went on to be the first woman to do Wide World of Sports, and Katie Wagner did Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Mark DiCarlo did Studs, so we were right on with that. That was not an accident. We were very deliberate that that was where we were going to spend our money.

Speaker 3:

Right, I love that. Yeah, creative marketing. Where did that idea come from? Because I guess that was the white space then.

Speaker 1:

You either loved them or hated them, and it was just the attention they brought. Yeah, well, you know, you looked at the early days of cable and I always use this analogy. Cable TV was like an electronic newspaper and I said, okay, so CNN is the headline, ESPN is the sports pages. What was missing was the second most read section of any Sunday newspaper, which was the entertainment pages. You know, for us it was clear as day, you know, and we said this has the ability to be bigger than just about any cable network out there. I mean, when you look at people in different countries are not necessarily interested in the news in the US, and you know who cares about the weather channel in the US if you live in London. And yeah, we said, but interest in celebrities and celebrity life is a universal thing, People, all the Hollywood stars on the pedestal, and so we always thought of it as having tremendous, tremendous opportunity outside the US as well as inside the US.

Speaker 3:

Thank you for sharing that. That's such a great insight. I just love the approach on that. When you talk about equipment that you use not being the big state-of-the-art cameras, you're talking recently about how, like in the far east now, everything is only used on mobile and the cost of production is a lot less these days yeah, I mean we have a, I have a company and I.

Speaker 1:

My company in the us is different than my company in china. But in china we do tv film branded content, you know immersive. We do a lot of ar and vr and stuff like that. But in the tv world about 70 percent of the people that watch our stuff actually watch it on a sofa. So it's totally changed the way we approach production. We'll change the way we approach storytelling because we know the device people in the us.

Speaker 3:

If I'm editing something where we're doing the final edit on a 55 and kiwi set in china, when we edit something, we do it on an iphone only six or seven years ago we were talking about having on demand watching wherever you you want, whenever you want, and it seems like it's been with us forever. I'm really fascinated because I think this as well that as people we sort of change like technology and we don't notice it. Can you tell us about how you've noticed transformations in yourself in time periods?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, One of the things that I've most noticed about me is I'm fairly egoless. I don't hang on to ideas. I reevaluate all my ideas every night. Most of them are pretty dopey and I get rid of them.

Speaker 1:

But I've always said from the very beginning there were some very basic changes happening in the media and entertainment world and everybody just thought I was out of my mind on drugs, you know. The first is the thought of Hollywood as a geographic place. I said it's so wrong. It used to be back in the day that if you wanted to make any kind of visual entertainment you had to come to Hollywood. You needed the big sound stages and cameras were $250,000 for a camera. I mean now my iPhone is a better camera than the $250,000 cameras. So people were able to make visual entertainment anywhere in the world. You don't have to come to Hollywood per se, but Hollywood is more of a measure of creativity, it's a measure of quality, but it's no longer the geographic center of the media world where you had to come.

Speaker 1:

So you know number one. Number two is you know just technology. Like I say, cameras used to cost 250 000 and now you get an iphone for free. So it's just made it anybody with talent and work ethic. And that's where a lot of people go wrong and say don't understand the work that goes into this to make visual entertainment. I mean, so it's totally changed. But I've always said there's a very simple equation. I mean, I ask people this question do you want to watch what you want to watch when you want to watch it on the device you want to watch it on, or do you want to watch what NBC wants you to watch when they tell you that it's going to be on? We all know the answer to the question. You know if you're not stuck with tremendous overhead and investment in old technology, you know where it's going, so why not get there as quick as possible?

Speaker 3:

What's the most fun you've ever had making a show.

Speaker 1:

You know people always want me to say I mean obviously we've done tremendously well with it. I mean, you know, the first real anchored TV show we did was called Top Soup, which you know. When we told people what we wanted to do they went Larry, you're crazy, you want to do a TV show that makes fun of TV shows. And you know that show won 26 years. But you know he obviously was a lot of fun and we had a great time and it just sped through.

Speaker 1:

But I started doing stuff about a dozen years ago in China and actually I wrote a comedy about the contradictions of modern Chinese life and everybody says comedy is the hardest thing to do and you certainly can never do it for a culture you didn't grow up in a language you don't speak. So I created this comedy. It was the first time they ever allowed an American writer to be on national TV and the show ended up going 72 episodes and got nominated at the Asian TV Awards and we didn't win. But it was the only comedy from China that was nominated and I said how ironic is that that the funniest TV show in China is written by a guy from Brooklyn.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's a great sketch in itself. If you could create any show now, there's no limits what would you really want to make?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm actually doing one that I've had in my head for a while and actually it relates to you guys in the UK. In the US, oddly enough, there are no women in late night television. It's all guys and it's all the same show. It's all promotional. So, tom Cruise, tell me about your next movie. Ah, boring, I don't, you know, it's so tired.

Speaker 1:

When I found this gal eight years ago living in London, homeless mom with a kid, single mom, and you go to eight years later, here she is living in the US, life coaching Will I Am and Steve Iocchi, and so we built a talk show around her. She's a motivational speaker. She's now considered one of the top women motivational speakers. So we created this show. It's somewhere between an old show that was in the US called Playboy After Dark, so it's Playboy After Dark meets Graham Norton. You know it's a much more free-form kind of show, but it's motivational, inspirational. It's not promotional. So she really will bring people in that you normally wouldn't see and they'll talk about relationships and life and stuff like that. That's kind of my mission now is when I launch that show in July. I'm one of the big platforms here well, global platform, actually one of the streamers, and that's a lot of fun because we get to do stuff that nobody's ever done before.

Speaker 3:

That's great. That's so inspiring. I love all of that and she sounds like a fantastic person. And straight to you as well for getting invested in that. Um, just two more questions before we go, if we can. What patterns create progress? Well, I'll explain that a little in terms of if people want to progress in life, what patterns do they need to follow to hit those waves, or or stay by them constantly?

Speaker 1:

well, but the one thing that I always say and people look at me funny is there's this whole thing about follow your passion, and I'm the anti-follow your passion person. I think we all have some common needs in life. We need to make enough money to pay the rent and eat and feed our kids and send them to school and do all of that stuff, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs now get caught up in this. Well, I had this idea and I got them to stay with it, and they stay with it too long.

Speaker 1:

I think everybody's got to realize that for the most part, we're all here for a very limited period of time. The most valuable thing we have is our time and if we follow our passion, maybe it wasn't a good idea, maybe it was, but maybe technology changed, maybe politics changed, maybe the environment, whatever it is, it may not be something that's going to eventually lead you to financial wellness that's going to allow you to live the lifestyle you want to live, and I reassess everything I do literally every day and knowing am I using my time, my most valuable resource, in the most efficient way? And that's kind of the advice I give to people.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's really key as well. And what about the vehicle? Do you think the vehicle's always changing? For people, anyway, they're driving one minute and then they go traveling and they come back completely different. And all the time we're changing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think we are. Yeah, I travel a lot around the world and I had a big company in russia and I have a company in china and stuff. I think 80 percent of people anywhere. We have basic humanity, we have basic needs. 20 is cultural, we grew up and stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

But technology is changing unbelievably and I tell people, when something has the ability to do good, it's going to happen, whether you like it or not. I mean and again I use the example you go back to the late 1800s. You know the United States. We had horse ranchers all over the place and then when Henry Ford came up with the automobile, the horse ranchers weren't real happy. They wanted everybody to have a horse and buggy. You know, and I said, do me a favor, look out the window, tell me how many cars you see versus how many horse and buggies. Ai is going to happen. Artificial intelligence is one of the most valuable things that we're going to enjoy in our lifetime. And you're not going to fight it, it's not going to go away, it's going to happen.

Speaker 1:

And for me I mean, if you were to tell me and say, larry, could you design a TV series based on any subjects, it used to take me five days to kind of do the research and put it together, and then you do the PowerPoint and all that. Now, using GBG4, I do the same thing. It takes me 30 seconds. I spend an hour cleaning it up. So now in one hour I'm doing what used to take me five days and I tell people I go.

Speaker 1:

How do you not love that? I mean I could do more of them and make more money, or I could spend time with my grandkid, or I could learn how to speak Spanish. I mean I've reclaimed the most valuable asset that we have people have. So it needs to be regulated. There needs to be some deterrence in there so bad people can't do bad things or at least there's penalties for it. But right now there's nothing, because all of our politicians in this country, in your country, just think that if they put their head in the sand it's going to go away. It's not going away.

Speaker 3:

And finally, larry, what is your one gold another for life, please?

Speaker 1:

I tell people, find something that you're good at and just work the hell out of it and become great at it and eventually what it does is it provides you the resources to really follow your passion, because you've you kind of got the necessities of life covered For me. I've been an avid cook since I'm 12 years old. I love cooking. I buy a cookbook every month and I cook the book. But if I followed my passion I'd be in the kitchen of some restaurant, you know, putting sauce together or something at best. But because I do what I do, I do a food blog. I just wrote a book where half of the book is recipes and stuff like that. So by coming really good at this other thing, it's given me the ability to follow my passion and still have the financial resources to continue and deal with the necessities of life.

Speaker 3:

Yeah you still love the cool side projects like that as well. They're sort of just calm and they're a bit more fun and playful and you can mix them up yeah, absolutely wonderful well, larry, it's only a short show. It's been so wonderful having you on and discussing that fast-paced wisdom how to get there. Thank you, larry thanks for having me and take care join david and his incredible guests next time on the Success Nuggets podcast, and to find out more, visit onegoldennuggetcom.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for listening.