IMDb Founder: Jeff Bezos's best advice & learnings from watching 15,000 films - Col Needham

0:05I feel like I'm in this enormous lab of human knowledge that is being poured into me thanks to the magic of film TV and entertainment. them. Very exciting. People love what other people are passionate about.

0:28Cole Needham is the founder and CEO of IMDB, the 32nd most visited website in the whole world at time of recording. Launching in 1990, IMDB was one of the first hundred websites in the world, and it's one of extremely few that have survived to this day. It didn't start out as a business, it was just a way for film lovers to geek out. In fact, Cole admits they didn't really think it would go anywhere. Two years after Cole became IMDb's first paid full-time employee, the company became one of Amazon's first acquisitions, way back in 1998. This makes Cole one of the 40 longest-tenured Amazon employees and means he has learnt plenty from spending time with one of the best entrepreneurs the world has ever seen, Jeff Bezos.

1:15With over 10 million titles, 11.5 million entries for people, and 83 million registered users, it's easy to understand why the utterly ubiquitous movie database is the go-to for people whenever they can't quite place where they've seen that actor before. Now I think of myself as a movie buff, but Cole obviously put me to shame. Despite being in the game for decades, Cole is still as passionate as ever and it is incredibly infectious. But how many films has he seen? 14 ,939 since the 1st of January 1980. 100 % true. And by the way, that doesn't include repeat viewing. So my all-time favourite film, Vertigo, I've seen it more than 50 times.

1:58That is one of the 14 ,939. So I'm edging towards my 15 ,000th unique movie some point over this summer. Wow. What are you going to do to celebrate? Oh, you know, I'll probably end up doing something. So I do this with all of the thousands. It's always a shame, I think, when somebody, especially somebody who's no longer living or at least no longer working, when I've seen every film that they've made, then there's no more surprises left to be had in their work. And so what I do is I keep a kind of like selection of mostly DVDs, mostly DVDs, because these are mostly old films. And it's kind of like an old wine collection.

2:56So you would not drink all of your wine, your classic wine cellar in like one evening. And so I save them for special occasions. So my all-time favourite actress is Katharine Hepburn. And so I have a few unseen Katharine Hepburn movies. And so I may, for the 15 ,000th, if there isn't something that's, you know, going to be like a big dazzling premiere, I will grab one of those Catherine Hepburn DVDs and reduce my reserve of Catherine Hepburn movies. Wow. Not messing around. Okay. No. I've got another one for you then. Favourite film and least favourite film. Do you have a least favourite film?

3:43I don't have a least favourite film. So I've rated all 14 ,939 on IMDb, and there are a collection of one out of ten, one out of ten movies in there, but I don't have a specific least favourite, but my all-time favourite film is Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. My wife and I were at the world premiere of Inception in July of 2010. Inception is my number two favourite film of all time. It came close. Okay, so Cole, what are your top three quotes from all movies of all time, your top three that people need to hear? Okay, so this is my all-time favourite movie quote. It is from Grand Canyon from 1991.

4:33All of life's riddles are answered in the movies. My number two favourite quote is from La La Land. It's a line delivered by Emma Stone. People love what other people are passionate about. And then my number three favourite quote is from Catherine Hepburn, my favourite actress, from the Philadelphia story. The time to make up your mind about people is never. That's brilliant. So the beauty of film, television, entertainment is you can be taken on a journey to another culture, another country, another time, another place, an imagined world, a world that's like this one, but the constraints are kind of slightly different.

5:23And you can get to learn what it might be like to experience that through the characters that you see on screen. And so I feel like I'm in this enormous lab of human knowledge that is being poured into me, thanks to the magic of film, TV and entertainment. Very exciting. Beautifully said. Okay, Cole, we're going to learn a little bit more about your story. Where did your love of films come from? My first ever film in a cinema. So I was five years old. I was staying with my grandmother and my grandmother said to me, would you like to enter a colouring competition? And I'm not sure if five-year-old me knew what colouring competition was, but, you know, she handed me some felt-tip pens, and from the local newspaper, there was a scene from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and you had to colour between the lines to make it into a nice picture.

6:22So I diligently did that. My grandma posted the competition entry off, and a few weeks later, Later, a letter came through the post. I actually have a copy of the letter here announcing that I had won the colouring competition in my age group category. And the prize was two tickets to go see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the local cinema. So I went along in a taxi with my grandmother and that was my first film in a cinema. and I fell in love with cinema at that point. I can still feel the emotions that I was feeling when I first went, even now I'm talking about this, several, many, many decades, many decades later.

7:13So that's how I got into film. And as soon as we'd left the cinema, all I wanted to do was see more and more films. Now, all of this, you know, this led, my love of cinema led to the creation of IMDb and everything that I did. And so about 15 years ago, I was talking to my grandmother about IMDb. And we're having a lovely conversation. And I said, well, it's all thanks to that colouring competition that I won when I was five. And my grandmother looked at me and she went, oh. ooh. I'm like, what do you mean? Ooh. I said, well, I've got a terrible confession to make. And I'm kind of like, well, what do you mean?

8:00What do you mean? And she said, well, after you went to bed that night, I just couldn't help but go over all of the lines that you missed and all the colours that you got wrong. I looked at her and I'm like, you mean we cheated in the colouring competition. I'm just like, I'm terribly sorry, but yes. And I don't know how well you know the movie Fight Club, but there's a scene in the film where Ed Norton's character finds out what's really going on. And I have lived that moment in my life because my great love of cinema, my hobby, my passion in life, my job, my role, my career, everything that I do is down to a fraudulent colouring competition entry.

8:47You are living a lie. That's right. So there you go. That's how I got into cinema. So take us past. So your granny's helped you really set you up for life in the most unusual of ways. Can you give us the snapshot? How big is IMDB? Like how, you know, give us some of the grandiose stats to explain to listeners that maybe who are younger who haven't used it before and don't know it just the sheer size and scale of this this database so so we have information on every film tv show video game now music video now podcast that that's ever existed all the way back to kind of like the late 1800s early experiments all the way forwards in future to the fifth Avatar sequel, which is now coming out in 2031.

9:44Anything you could possibly imagine connected with those titles, from who wrote, directed, who made them, to trailers, quotes, plots, keywords, absolutely anything that you can think of and anything that you would want to know about any kind of entertainment. we either have it or there's room for it within IMDb. And so that covers more than 11 million titles and 11, actually 11 million cast and crew members and creators that have worked on those things, including everything that you would want to know about the people behind your favourite bits of entertainment. So that's kind of what we do. Okay, and where did it all start?

10:36So it all started with my obsession with film in the 1970s. I guess it's an interesting kind of story because there's an intersection between my passion for film and my interest in technology. So at quite an early age, I got my very first home computer in the days when people did not have home computers. OK, so I was 12 years old, 1979, got a computer for Christmas. And that kind of like sparked my interest in technology. So I'm a kind of self-taught software engineer before the term really even existed. By 1981, the UK was in the middle of the VHS revolution. so VHS tapes were everywhere you went you could kind of rent a film on a VHS tape and for me this was like a dream come true so no longer did I have to wait to go to the cinema or wait for a film to show on one of the three tv channels that we had in that time you could go to the video store and rent a film.

11:53I began to see more films than I'd ever seen before. Classic film geek moment in the summer of 1981. I was 14 years old and a family friend lentils a copy of Alien on VHS tape for two weeks. In 14 days, I watched Alien 14 times. So I'm kind of like, you know, my film geek is kind of inner film geek is growing. But this creates an interesting problem because I start to lose track of what I've seen and what I haven't seen. So the classic film geek thing to do is to go buy a paper diary, which I did. And so I would write down the names of every film that I saw on the day that I saw them. Now, but, that's great for keeping track of what you've seen, but I'm also a great reader of credits, and I would kind of like see patterns of, oh, this person, this director often works with this composer, or this producer often works with this writer, and that kind of thing.

13:04So I'm fascinated with kind of like the way films are made, but I'm completely, you know, I'm a teenager in Manchester, completely on the outside of the film world. But I'm interested in these connections. So I'm kind of like, well, you know what? I could go to my computer and create a database to track these films in more detail. So that's simply what I did in the summer of 1981. And from that point onwards, I would rewind the VHS tape after I'd watched the film, press play again and pause and type in the main credits, not every credit, but the main credits for the film. And then I could run all of these different reports in my database, you know, kind of like how many Alfred Hitchcock films starring Cary Grant have I seen?

13:56And four is the answer, that kind of thing. So that was fuelling my knowledge of film and the connection then between what I saw and recording the credits in a database. I got online in the summer of 1985. And at that point, that's when I started to exchange email with other film fans around the world. So this is pre-web. No World Wide Web at this point, but there were mailing lists for film buffs. And so, you know, you would discover, oh, wow, that my weird obsession with film that I thought only I had. Turns out there were other people like me around the world as well. And so that kind of progressed across the late 1980s until kind of like about 1989.

14:44And I found myself in a Usenet discussion group all about film and where you would post a message and then somebody would reply to the message. and, you know, kind of like a little, you know, message boards type thing, but still no World Wide Web. In that group, people would always ask questions like, oh, I've just seen a new film directed by this person. I've just seen a new film in which this person appears. What else have they done? And so I would always kind of like, well, I've seen these five films by this person or I've seen these 15 films by this person kind of thing. So there was kind of like a growing kind of Q &A kind of like thing going on.

15:26And the funny thing now is that this is one of these things where people like would look at you today and go, well, you want to know who works on a film? Well, why don't you go to IMDB? So one of the people in the group began a frequently asked questions list all about actresses. And so I gave that person all of the actress credits that I had in my database and they incorporated them into their frequently asked questions list. And from that point onwards, whenever I saw a new film, I wouldn't have to type in the actress names because I could pull them from this frequently asked questions list.

16:02But that was only of use for actresses. And I had actors, I had directors, composers, I had various crew roles that were in my database. So it was kind of like, well, we need more data. We need more data. So in August of 1990, I posted an actors frequently asked questions list in the group. And as soon as I posted that in the group, people began to mail me actor credits for films that I hadn't seen. And it was kind of like, oh, my goodness, this is working way better than I ever expected it would work. So within a couple of weeks, someone had mailed and said, oh, I love these acting frequently asked questions lists.

16:50I'm a big fan of directors. Why don't you do a director's frequently asked questions list? And it's kind of like, oh, yeah, that would be great. But I'm like busy with the on the actor's side. So I said to the person who mailed, well, I mailed them back. I mailed them back and I said, hey, how about would you like to volunteer to manage a director's section? And they mailed back and said, yes, I gave them the directors of all the films I'd seen. I gave them some software to manage the data coming in, some software to publish it back out into the group on a monthly basis. And so we had actors, actresses and directors.

17:33Then September into October 1990, one of the people in the group said, these frequently asked questions lists are great, but what we could really do with is a database to search them. And so it was kind of like, OK, yeah, I could kind of like take a bit of the software that I've got already, kind of combine it here and there and kind of like make it work on any computer that was connected to the Internet back in the day. And so on October the 17th, 1990, IMDB was launched. I published the software into the group and anybody connected to the internet back in those days, and it wasn't many people, could download the software and have their own copy of the database on their own computer.

18:23Two weeks later, get an email from somebody going, hey, love the database, but I'm a big fan of writers. so you can imagine how that conversation went gave them the writers they joined the team volunteer remember there's no commercial use of the internet there's no world wide web so we now had writers couple of weeks later somebody pops up i'm a big fan of composers and so over the next few years every few weeks every month or so somebody somewhere in the world would pop up and say, I really love this aspect of filmmaking or this aspect of TV. It'd be great if the database covered it. What do you think?

19:04And I would always say yes. And going back to my movie quotes, of course, people love what other people are passionate about. So if there was somebody that cared enough that they wanted this type of content added to IMDb, I would always say, yeah let's go let's let's see what happens and sure enough you know all the fans of that content would begin to contribute to it so we we grew we grew like that then the summer of 1993 so kind of kind of coming up to 30 years ago i get an email from a guy called rob harter and rob at the time was a PhD computer science student at Cardiff University in Wales.

19:55So I'm in Bristol in the southwest. Rob's about kind of like 40 miles that way. And Rob's email went something like this. Hey, Col, just installed the movie database software. I think it's really cool. But have you heard of this worldwide web thing? Because I think it might be quite big. would love to write a wrapper around your software and we could have a website interface i had heard of the world wide web um uh the person in the next office to me at work had written their own web browser so i'd been out on the web and in fact just just to set a little bit of historical context here we were somewhere in the in the first 100 ish websites to launch you You know, the numbers are a bit tricky to get hold of, but it was that order in terms of how many sites there were out there.

20:53And there used to be a website called What's New on the Web. And you could go to that website and it would list every website that went live in the previous day, all two or three of them. You could go back through history and visit the entire web just by working your way backwards. So very, very, very, very, very early days. We soon filled up all the spare capacity at Cardiff University. So we ended up with copies of IMDB on university web servers just spread throughout the world. 1995, the web suddenly hits more mainstream than it had been up to that point. And in a two-week period, our traffic doubled.

21:44Then two weeks later, it doubled again. Then two weeks later, it doubled again. And two weeks later, it doubled again. And our little tiny hobby that, you know, I was doing this on a Saturday morning before I took my daughters to the park on Saturday afternoon. this little tiny hobby was suddenly becoming this uncontrollable monster where the you know the volume of data to coming in for us to process was doubling every two weeks we were constantly scrambling to get other copies of the site on other university web servers so that we could cope with the traffic growth and it was it was just kind of like oh my goodness what do we do And there were two possible alternatives that we could see.

22:34Number one was we could say, that was a fun five years, but we can't do it anymore. And we just closed down. And quite a lot of those early day sites closed down. Or number two, we could see if we could sell some advertising. and maybe one or two of us might work part-time on keeping the database up to date. Now, here we are in 2023. This sounds ridiculous. It's kind of like you were online for five years and you didn't think there might be a business in here somewhere. And you were full-time somewhere else, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was working for Hewlett-Packard in Bristol in their research labs.

23:24Everybody else on the team had a full-time job or was in full-time education. This was just our little hobby. We wanted to share our love of film, TV and entertainment with other people online. That's what we were doing this. That's what we were doing this for. And it's basically still what we're doing this for in 2023. And again, for context, you could count the number of websites that were advertised and supported on two hands. And, you know, you didn't necessarily know if they were profitable, if they were going to be around. You know, this was a whole brand new business area. So we decided that we would try.

24:09And so we incorporated in a cross kind of like 95. We were kind of like, we agonized over, you know, what would our customers think? What would our contributors think? You know, what would happen? Where would this go? We kind of like figured out how we would divide the share capital of our about to be incorporated company. We figured out a little formula that depended upon how long you'd been involved and how much effort you were donating into the project kind of thing. So we came up with an allocation of shares that everybody was happy with. We incorporated in January 1996 as a UK limited company.

24:53IMDb was up and running. We launched IMDb.com in time for the Oscars in 1996. To do that, we needed a web server. And this is before AWS or anything like this. So we needed to buy a web server. So we sent one of our team out in Wisconsin, of all places, to his local computer store with one of our credit card numbers. He bought a PC that we could repurpose as a web server. We negotiated with his local internet service provider to give us free hosting in exchange for promotion on the homepage kind of thing. And as I say, imdb.com went live in time for the Oscars in 96. Two weeks later, I am on the phone to our first potential advertiser.

25:53They have never bought any advertising before. I have never sold any advertising before. So they're like, so how much is it for a month? And I'm like, a month? A month? and and so so so the number that came into my head was three times what we owed on the credit card and they went sure we can do that deal done we paid off the credit card in the interest-free four weeks and thus became the world's first profitable internet company you know i might be romanticizing that a little bit maybe there were some people making a profit on the internet we will we will take we will delete these caveats that's artistic control sounded much better sounded plausible as well i mean let's be honest uh so we immediately bought some more web servers um and in the summer of 96 we sold our first piece of advertising that was to a film studio so we sold some advertising to 20th Century Fox for the film Independence Day, launched in July, early July in the USA.

27:09And that was my cue to quit my day job. It's kind of like, okay, look, we're now selling advertising to film studios. I think this has a chance at turning out well. So I became our first employee. All of the other volunteer shareholders are all still working on a volunteer basis, but they have their shares. as the revenue run rate grew to cover another salary, I would call up the next volunteer shareholder and say, hey, you can quit your day job and join the team. So we gradually were converting our volunteer shareholders into paid employees. And that was working very, very well across the rest of 96, across 1997, and then in December 97, I get an email from a guy called Alan Kaplan.

28:07Hi, Carl. Jeff Bezos and I were discussing movie websites the other day. Naturally, IMDB came up in the conversation. We're going to be in the UK in January 98, and would love to meet to discuss some business ideas. So it's kind of like, you know, oh, okay, that sounds good. You know, mailed back and said, yeah, you know, here's some availability, that kind of thing. Now, imagine you're running a startup in 2023 and you get an email like that. Before you've even replied, you're going to be breaking out the exit champagne. You're going to be on tesla.com booking a test drive. However, December 97, Amazon.com only sold books.

28:55They'd only been a publicly traded company for seven months, and they had never acquired another company at that point. So we thought we were going along to discuss the ad deal that we had with Amazon. So Amazon were advertising books on the IMDb website. And so we went along to myself and one of the other team members who happened to also be called Alan. So myself and Alan and then Alan and Jeff met us in this hotel room in London and we exchanged kind of founding stories. And then Jeff said, well, I expect you want to know why we called this meeting. And so I said, well, to talk about our advertising deal.

29:39And then Jeff looks at Alan and he goes, are we advertising with these guys? And gives us a huge Jeff Bezos trademark laugh, leaving myself and Alan looking kind of confused, kind of like, what's going on here? And then Jeff went on to explain what was going on there. Amazon would be going from selling books to music. And then later in 1998, they were going to open an online video store. And they were looking for people to partner with in this venture. And anything would be possible from a licensing deal where Amazon would take the IMDb content and build a great web experience for purchasing, VHS tapes and these shiny new round things called DVDs, if they ever catch on, all the way through to possibly an acquisition.

30:34And an acquisition was the most attractive option from Jeff's perspective. That's what he said. And so we discussed, we went for lunch, we came back from lunch, we chatted further. And it became so clear that Jeff had a brilliant vision for where Amazon was going and how IMDb could ride along to that destination. Amazon would build an amazing video store experience and IMDB could continue to build an end customer experience where the information was optimized for browsing, searching and that kind of thing. So it's kind of like, oh, okay, okay. That's what happened. I came back from London. I mailed the rest of the team and said, hey, just had this most amazing meeting with this guy, Jeff Bezos, in a hotel room in London.

31:31What do you think? So some of the team mailed back were kind of like, oh, I don't know about that. I've just looked up Amazon online and they're losing money. nobody knows if there's any future in e-commerce and here we are like imdb was and is profitable so at the time we had this meeting with jeff we were more profitable than amazon because amazon were at the time not profitable i went over to seattle in like the february of 98 met the amazon leadership team um kind of found out more about what was going on and how things would work and everything. And one thing led to another. And on the 24th of April, 1998, IMDB became Amazon's first acquisition.

32:23The funny thing was, we were their first acquisition, but on the same day, Amazon announced two other acquisitions. So we're jostling for who is the first acquisition here, because Amazon acquired a UK bookseller, which became Amazon.co.uk, a German bookseller, which became Amazon.de, and IMDb, which remains IMDb. So in the media, like the coverage at the time was kind of like, Seattle bookseller buys UK bookseller, check. Seattle bookseller buys German bookseller. Check! Seattle bookseller buys entertainment database. It didn't stop there. So a few years later, Amazon launched downloadable film and TV.

33:16Now, this is before the internet was fast enough to do live streaming or, you know, real-time streaming. You could go to Amazon, you could buy a film or you could buy a TV episode and it would take like three hours. to download this thing onto your laptop. And then you could then watch. And by the way, you could only watch it on your laptop because the idea, how would you connect a laptop to a TV? You know, all of this kind of, you know, things that we take for granted now in technology were kind of like, these were brand new, cutting edge things. So all of the Amazon's online video store powered by IMDb.