NEW YORK -- The Barry Diller version of electronic-commerce success is filled with lessons learned from painfully expensive mistakes.
Diller, the high-profile chairman and CEO of USA Networks Inc., delivered a how-to of screw-ups and success here Wednesday at the Gartner Group Inc.'s Internet & Electronic Commerce conference.
While one may think of Diller as just a TV mogul, he's quick to point out out that there's a lot more to USA Net-works. Don't forget that Diller is the man who runs the Home Shopping Network, and USA has a major stake in Ticketmaster. It also runs the Internet Shopping Network. And it made a failed attempt to merge with Internet portal Lycos Inc. last year -- a topic that Diller conspicuously avoided in his speech.
That's not to say that Diller avoided tweaking his own company's Internet follies. Less than two years ago, USA had started First Auction Inc. It worked well, so Diller wanted to do something more. He envisioned selling things like jewelry online, and USA had a lot of money to do it. Unfortunately.
"It turns out, upon some scratching, that we made every conceivable mistake," said Diller. What did USA do wrong? Plenty.
"We said, 'Just get it ready by September'," he said. The company's best estimate for the project's price tag was $35 million. But by July, it had jumped to $62 million. By August it was $85 million. The total quickly topped $100 million once the site was launched. Diller said it stayed up for all of 8 hours.
"It crashed," he said, "to never scale again."
It's a hard-knock life
But Diller said he learned a lot from that experience, which he has turned into a handy list of easy mistakes for launching a Web site.