“Pace yourself”

“I had lost control of time.”

It’s not a sentence one would ordinarily associate with the former president of Vimeo and co-founder of Livestream. In fairness to the founder and CEO of 10doors ventures, London Business School alumnus Mark Kornfilt was describing his feelings of disbelief after becoming absorbed with playing with his children, and not checking his emails, Slack notifications, or WhatApp messages.

“Two hours had passed, and I hadn’t looked at my watch once. It had been years since that had happened. I realized I had lost control of time,” says Kornfilt, who was speaking to a packed audience of LBS students, alumni and fellow entrepreneurs at the latest TELL series event, hosted by the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital at LBS.

Acknowledging that work had “become an obsession and one which I couldn’t or didn’t want to control”, Mr Kornfilt said that the moment of time loss triggered a feeling that he needed to better manage his relationship with work and that seeking a better balance in his new business had become an important goal.

It is important to note that these observations came near the close of a tightly narrated half-hour discussion with Gary Dushnitsky, LBS Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, during which Kornfilt recounted the past 16 years of his life, a journey that vicariously escorted the audience through the seeds of an auspicious idea, through to intense periods of work and on-the-job learning, all of which almost certainly left the audience in need of seeking out their own release of recuperation and renewal.

The intensity of Kornfilt‘s journey, from 23-year-old graduate engineer, to serial entrepreneur, to company CEO captivated the TELL audience.

There was the account of the initial attraction of joining ‘Mogulus’ – “never choose a name that you can’t pronounce. I struggle with that name to this day.” The technical intrigue of ‘live casting’ – “It’s common now but before Livestream you could only watch live events and action on TV and in in venues such as sports arenas; you couldn’t experience it anywhere as you can today”. Interwoven into these key moments were points where the emerging business was in danger of going to the wall.

An innocuous-sounding breakfast at New York’s The Bowery Hotel with two of his co-founders, Max Haot and Phil Worthington, could have precipitated a move to Bangalore to save the company’s finances but instead revealed the significant store of company loyalty that had already been built up when it was decided that the better option was to offer equity to the then 50 employees in exchange for a 30 per cent pay cut. “Forty-nine employees accepted the deal. This helped us reduce our burn and gave us the time to find a solution.”

In terms of personal lessons learned at the time, for Kornfilt “it was all a bit of a blur”. “My girlfriend didn’t leave because she is my wife now. She was very supportive and that was a big enabler of being able to weather that storm. So, it was full-on, but at no time did I contemplate quitting and doing something else. This is what kept the founders together – we weren’t going to give up.”

Fast forward a few years and Kornfilt decided that it was time to return to Europe, eventually moving to London to set up the European branch of Livestream.

“I was done with New York, or so I felt. It was supposed to be a six-month stay but eventually after more than six years I wanted to come back to Europe,” recalls Kornfilt. “Also, I had been in the back office managing engineering. It was a very demanding role and we were doing very technically challenging things. I was learning on the job and I made a lot of mistakes which cost me time and quality of life, so after that period I said to the founders that I wanted to come back to Europe and they agreed that I should consider ways in which to expand commercially in Europe.”

Two transformative events took place at this time. The move to London spawned the idea of studying for an EMBA.

“I loved my time here at LBS,” says Kornfilt. “It was a zero BS experience. Remember, I was an engineer and I had just come out of a prolonged period of learning about business on the job. However, I didn’t understand much of it. At a surface level I had some grasp, but not much beyond that. I was lacking depth and being an engineer I like the foundational understanding in order to move on in my career. LBS was very timely for me: I learned a lot and met some great people along the way.” 

The other important moment helped create an all-important revenue stream in the form of online betting and the formation of the business DGE which was eventually acquired by IMG/Endeavor.

“I was able to form an important partnership with a company called IMG, now part of Endeavour. They were going to buy rights for some of the world’s biggest sports events and we were going to stream them live into the websites of betting companies. At the time, this increased people’s propensity to bet by 50 to 90 per cent. So there was a high willingness to pay for that product. In the end, IMG funded the development of a streaming service and we turned it into a profit share deal.”

DGE became a sizeable business in its own right, eventually being sold to Endeavour in 2015.

What happened next proved that one should never say never about anything in life. Kornfilt was encouraged by his co-founders to return to New York

“My co-founders were reorganising the business and wanted me back and I think the business needed me to come back. This was year eight of the business and you’ve invested so much of yourself, such that it becomes more expensive, emotionally speaking, to give it up. I was lucky with the outcome, but at the end of the day it’s not about ego, it’s about conviction.”

Back in New York, Kornfilt’s next important experience became the journey of driving Livestream to profitability and then, the biggest surprise of all, an approach by, and the eventual acquisition of, Livestream by IAC’s Vimeo.

“I found myself in a great environment,” says Kornfilt. “The team at Vimeo and also IAC were great, and I learnt a lot. It was a very entrepreneurial time for the business following the acquisition and it was going through a strategic transition – I felt like I could be helpful to this, so I stayed on.”

“The integration of 180 people from Livestream went really well. Everyone had great roles and there was a great sense of continuity which allowed me to identify with what we are trying to achieve.”

Eventually becoming company president, the IAC/Vimeo journey continued for a further five years, with Kornfilt leaving at the end of March ’23.

What lessons had been learnt along the way? “I made the transition to corporate life; the company was willing to accept my quirks and along the way I became more mature.

“Ultimately there are two sides to the corporate world. There is the operational and financial rigor, so necessary to running a company of that size. The other side of it is that people lose a little bit of their calling. It’s not us against the world anymore, and it becomes a job. That part I didn’t love although the company retained its entrepreneurial spirit and there was lots of momentum, so it still mostly felt like a start-up.”

In sum, says Kornfilt, it all takes more time than you think . “My biggest learning was that I thought it would all be very quick – from germ of an idea to making millions. That doesn’t happen in real life, and so you can set the wrong expectations for yourself. If you manage your life as if it’s a permanent sprint, you’re not going to have the same level of patience and that will ultimately lead to the wrong business decisions.”

Gary Dushnitsky, LBS Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, spoke to the former Vimeo chief, and founder and CEO of 10doors ventures, London Business School alumnus Mark Kornfilt in December 2023. The conversation was hosted by the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital (IEPC) at London Business School's TELL series, now known as The LBS Summit Series.