What I Learned From Jon Miller

I’ve been in LA for a week, working with our remarkable associate Jamie Gutfreund. We’ve met a lot of people and created a lot of work. Powerful signs of optimism in an environment that will be difficult until well into 2010, and evidence of why entrepreneurs are such drivers of the economy.

We’ve met with business owners, venture capitalists, professional service providers, lenders, and corporate leaders.

The best known of these was Jonathan Miller, the CEO of Digital Media for News Corp which owns Fox, Sky, the Wall Street Journal and MySpace, among others.

Jon talked about the explosion of mobile web access. In China, 350 million people will be on the web in two years. More than the entire population of the U.S. Most will access it exclusively through a mobile device.

As he said, it’s not the next big thing. It’s the big thing.

He talked about the difference between My Space and Facebook, and thinks the reason the former is struggling and the latter exploding is that MySpace was built for the short term, and Facebook for the long haul.

And he talked about Rupert Murdoch’s relentless energy to figure out what’s next. Of everything he discussed, this struck me as the most enduring.

Entrepreneurs big and small share Mr Murdoch’s limitless curiosity.

The thing that separates the successes from the failures is not money or hard-work.

It’s a plan that makes every action meaningful.

Not successful. Because even the best business owners only get it right slightly more than half the time.

But until you know what you’re trying to achieve, there’s no way to measure whether you are.