The Founder Files: Col Needham
The boss of IMDb talks about how he became “the most powerful Brit in Hollywood” from a bedroom in Bristol
Creative Entrepreneurs recently brought Col Needham, the founder of IMDb, to Second Home for the first of their Founder Files series. Needham, a self confessed movie geek, sold his site – the defintive film resource on the internet – to Amazon in 1998, but stayed on as CEO. According to some he’s the ‘most powerful Brit in Hollywood’, although he’s lost none of his trademark Northern humour. “People used to say, ‘Where on Wilshire Boulevard are your offices?’, and I’d be like, ‘Well, we’re actually in a bedroom in Bristol’.” From meeting Spielberg to his dealings with Jeff Bezos, this is the story of how one man’s passion for film became a global tech phenomenon.
Creative Entrepreneurs: Let’s go back to the very beginning, to Manchester as a teenager. What are your earliest movie memories?
Col Needham: I’m a lifelong film fan, all my earliest memories are in cinemas in Manchester. My first film memory is going to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I won a colouring competition in my local newspaper — which I later discovered my grandma cheated for me and she did most of the colouring and I won the tickets [laughs]. My mother took me to see Jaws when I was way too young, but what can you do when your 10-year-old insists to go see this great movie they’ve heard about. I then saw Star Wars and was inspired by what you could do in film by Star Wars — it changed my view on film.
In the early 1980s I was watching so many films I couldn’t keep track of which ones I’d seen and which ones I hadn’t. So the film geek thing to do was to get a diary from WHSmith and start writing them down. Then I was like, ‘Why am I bothering with a paper diary when I could create a database?’. So that’s what I did, I typed everything into a database, I rewound VHS tapes every time I saw a new film — I’d rewind and type the main credits in, a ridiculously geeky thing to do, but it worked out alright in the end, as I’m proud of saying. So that’s how it started.
Creative Entrepreneurs: The advent of VHS film was a big part — you’ve been parallel with tech revolutions through your whole life.
Col Needham: I feel really privileged to have been born at the time I was, to have caught the home computer revolution, I built my first computer as a 12-year-old in 1979. Nowadays you’re all thinking, ‘You built a computer?’, but it had, like, eight chips in it and a calculator display. So this was like somebody bought me a LEGO set for Christmas in today’s technology world.
So I was at the right time for the home computer revolution, the right time for the whole home video revolution, and the right time for the internet — I got my first email address in 1985, so I’ve been online for 31 years. So I feel very fortunate to have hit those things. We’re all products of the things that are available. One of the things that fascinates me in terms of entrepreneurship today is how you can build on what’s come immediately before you and take it in a direction that you wouldn’t have thought of.
Creative Entrepreneurs: What’s different is that you didn’t start with a business idea, you just had a passion that you had to pursue.
Col Needham: The first IMDb software was published on 17th October 1990 and there was no commercial use of the internet at that time, it was actually forbidden to use the internet for commercial purposes. It was connecting a series of essentially academic institutions and the occasional company together. So there was no, ‘Oh my goodness, we should take the film diary and make a business’, because there wasn’t even a business opportunity. The web had not been invented — there was no world wide web.
“The first IMDb software was published on 17th October 1990 and there was no commercial use of the internet at that time. It was actually forbidden to use the internet for commercial purposes. There wasn’t even a business opportunity. The web had not been invented — there was no world wide web.”
Creative Entrepreneurs: How did you gather your movie information without the internet?
Col Needham: It’s crazy, this kind of information used to be top-secret. How many films has Alfred Hitchcock directed? What are those movies? You could maybe get a printed guidebook that was updated once a year with that information in. If you’re looking to cast a film and thinking, ‘Who’s an up-and-coming actor/actress?’, they wouldn’t be anywhere unless you subscribed to a professional business information system that would charge you $80 to look per page of film credits. So this wasn’t commonplace information.
Creative Entrepreneurs: So you identified a hole in the market and were driven to set out to provide it.
Col Needham: Yeah, we were sharing our passion for film and television with the audience that was online back in the early 1990s.
Creative Entrepreneurs: What was your day-job?
Col Needham: I was working in software research for Hewlett Packard in Bristol and IMDb was just a hobby. Crazy though it is to think now, when my daughters were born I took a month off having anything to do with updating IMDb — so no actor or actress credits went live for an entire month — and now we update them continuously.
One of the privileges of the role now — and this was never my intention — is I get to meet people who inspired me, my heroes and heroines. The first time we went to the Oscars it was the year that Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln was heavily nominated. I met somebody at the after party and I was like, ‘Gosh, that’s Steven Spielberg over there’, and he’s like, ‘Would you like to meet him?’, and I’m like, ‘I would love to meet Steven Spielberg’.
So I joined this line with my wife to meet Steven Spielberg, and I’m thinking what do I say? I get to the front and my new friend whispers in Steven’s ear, ‘Steven, this is Col Needham, he’s the founder and CEO of IMDb’, and Steven Spielberg grabs my hand and goes, ‘I love IMDb! I use it all the time, thank you, it’s so useful, it’s changed the way I work, it’s changed the business. I’m so pleased to meet you! I’ve got the app for IMDb, I’ve been using it during the ceremony’, and I was like, excuse me, I want to get my bit in here if you don’t mind! ‘Mr Spielberg it’s really nice to meet you!’ [laughs].
“The first time I went to the Oscars, Steven Spielberg grabbed my hand and goes, ‘I love IMDb! I use it all the time, thank you, it’s so useful, it’s changed the way I work, it’s changed the business. I’m so pleased to meet you! I’ve got the app and have been using it during the ceremony’”
So I literally do pinch myself every now and again. It’s a little corny but there’s a great line in Titanic. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Jack’s got into the first-class dining room on the Titanic and they’re trying to embarrass him and he says, ‘Look, two days ago I was sleeping rough under a bridge in Paris, and here I am with you fine folks on the grandest ship on the world’. It’s constantly like that. I should really be sitting at home in Bristol watching a DVD, and look, I’ve got a roomful of people here to listen.
Creative Entrepreneurs: How did you take that leap from it being a hobby to a business?
Col Needham: Every case is different, but mine’s really different. We didn’t create IMDb as a business, it was sharing passion for film and TV, so it sort of happened around us.
It began as my film diary, but then I started recruiting other people around the world — they’d mail in and go, ‘I love this database but it’d be really good if you had composers’, and I’d be like, ‘That’s a really good idea if you want to be the manager of the composers’ information’. So we recruited all of these people who had never met each other. Today that’s not so strange, but back in the early 1990s it was a little bit weird.
There’s a key trigger event — the internet was growing massively, so all of a sudden we found ourselves in this situation where our traffic was doubling every two weeks. So that was going on around us, and then one day I got home from work and my wife said, ‘The New York Times have called’… She said, ‘They want to talk to you about IMDb’. So I rang this number in New York. I remember I nearly passed out when the phone bill arrived!
The guy I spoke to was like, ‘Everyone in the film industry uses IMDb, I’d like to do a piece on it’, and I was like, ‘I can’t believe it’. So [we were like], ‘The media is interested in what we’re doing, the traffic is growing’, and it became a necessity to incorporate as a business — it wasn’t a choice, it was a necessity because we couldn’t keep up with the volume of data, the work, the usage and the expectations of what we were supposed to be doing were going up and up all the time. And this was just a hobby.
Creative Entrepreneurs: You had to incorporate because you had to start hiring people
Col Needham: We had two choices: we could close it all down and go, ‘That was a fun five years, but we can’t keep up anymore’. Quite a lot of services in that mid-‘90s period took that route, they just couldn’t cope with the growth. Or, you could see if you could incorporate — I know this sounds crazy now — but, ‘Maybe we could sell some advertising and maybe one or two of us could work part-time on this thing we’ve created and that would enable us to serve our customers better’. So we took that route. We agonised over how people would react.
Creative Entrepreneurs: Because they would see it as being commercialised?
Col Needham: Yeah, it was taking this wonderful thing and maybe spoiling it. But we decided it was either that or closing it down. People hate change, mostly. Every change we make to IMDb, there’s always someone willing to say it’s the worst thing we’ve ever done. I feel like I’ve had 26 years of, ‘That’s the worst thing you’ve ever done’. Back then the worst thing we could do would be to close it down, and that kind of gave us the strength.
There were 20 of us spread throughout the world, we figured out a way to divide the shares of the company depending upon how long you’d been involved and how much work you were doing. So somebody who had joined recently who was maybe doing loads of things would get a certain amount, and somebody who had joined forever ago but was only updating one section every now and again, they’d get a certain amount. Somehow we got 20 people who’d mostly never met to agree what those percentages were. The only thing I can think is that everybody thought it was never going to be worth anything anyway so why haggle over [the] percentages. The funny thing is, from the 20 in 1990, six when we incorporated, five of us still work at IMDb now. So we figured out a way to do that. We didn’t take any venture capital funding; we didn’t take any funding at all.
Creative Entrepreneurs: Were you offered it?
Col Needham: Following that New York Times article, we started to receive emails from people every now and again and they’d say, ‘I love IMDb, I represent a team of investors, we’d like to buy it from you or invest in it’. And I would just write back and go, ‘We’re not even incorporated, there’s nothing to buy’. Occasionally they’d go, ‘Let us help you incorporate and then we’ll buy you’, and it was like, ‘No, no, no’, because we didn’t need to. So kind of, yes, but not directly so.
Sometimes the only path forward is to bring somebody external in and let them not only bring their capital but bring their experience, but sometimes that’s the wrong thing. Probably for every company that goes one way and turns into a disaster, there’s a company that goes the other way and turns into a success.
“Sometimes the only path forward is to bring somebody external in and let them not only bring their capital but bring their experience, but sometimes that’s the wrong thing. Probably for every company that goes one way and turns into a disaster, there’s a company that goes the other way and turns into a success.”
So because we were trying aggressively not to be commercial, we really didn’t want to go that kind of route. So we did the following: we bought our first web server on a credit card. We found one of our guys was based in the US and he had a relationship with his local internet service provider, so we sent him along to them to say, ‘Have you heard of IMDb? We’re about to turn professional, could we put our web server in your machine room in exchange for some advertising and promotion?’, and they said yes.
So we sent our guy in Wisconsin to the local computer store with one of our UK credit card numbers and he bought a computer, and then over in the UK our system manager put all the IMDb software and all of the data and everything we had on a 4GB drive — which was the biggest hard disk you could buy in 1996 — and we sent it out there. Luckily, within two weeks, I’d sold our first piece of advertising. The people I was selling to had never bought any online advertising before, and I’d never sold any.
Creative Entrepreneurs: How did they find you?
Col Needham: On the IMDb website we put a banner ad saying, ‘Your ad here’ [laughs]. Our first ad was an ad for advertising on our website. They’re like, ‘How much to advertise for a month?’, and I pull a figure out of the air and they say yes. I was so excited to have sold some advertising but I was playing it cool at the time.
So we were able to pay off the credit card debt before it was due, and thus became the world’s first profitable internet company. Then we were off and underway. I was like, ‘When do I hand my notice in at my day-job?’, and the trigger was we sold our first piece of advertising to 21st Century Fox for Independence Day, the Will Smith movie, and that was my cue to give my notice in at work. Luckily, one of the other people involved in IMDb at the time, his father was a retired merchant banker and he, very generously, said, ‘I’ll cover any losses in the first year in exchange for a small number of shares in the company’. It was good to have that kind of safety net.
“I was like, ‘When do I hand my notice in at my day-job?’, and the trigger was we sold our first piece of advertising to 21st Century Fox for Independence Day, the Will Smith movie, and that was my cue to give my notice in at work.”
The reason I was able to convince my wife that I was able to do this was I said, ‘Look, in the worst case I can always go back to HP, hopefully, I could find another job. But at least my salary would be guaranteed, he would guarantee the company’s overdraft’. But of course, we sold our first piece of advertising before we had to pay for the machines, and then we sold our next piece of advertising before we had any other expense, and then we sold our next piece, so we never touched the overdraft. The bank account was always in credit.
So the day that we sold to Amazon, Ian, my friend’s father, said it was the best investment he’d made in his entire life. He paid, like, £50 to organise an overdraft that was never used and that we never defaulted on anyway, but he would guarantee it if we did default. In all his years working in finance it was the single best thing he did — £50 into his share of the proceeds to Amazon.
Creative Entrepreneurs: Where did you get your business advice?
Col Needham: He was very, very helpful, he volunteered to be our company secretary. He was like a dream come true and anyone would’ve been lucky to have him involved in their company because he was like, ‘I’ll help you with the Companies House filings, I’ll do the accounts for you in the early days’ and things like that. So choose well-connected co-founders [laughs]. He was willing to lose a lot of money, but he lost nothing and it cost him £50.
Creative Entrepreneurs: What was your darkest hour?
Col Needham: I’m not really a dark hours kind of person — I don’t do dark hours [laughs] — but I have no memory, virtually, of 1996. It was insane, I was our only employee to start with because we could only afford the one salary to start with, and so I barely left the house. My wife and I had this tradition of watching a film and buying a Chinese takeaway every Saturday night — we still do that now. So I would leave the house to go and pick up the takeaway and that was it, that was the time I was outside.
It was get up at six and work through until midnight. By the time 1997 came around it was kind of like that was a crazy blur. I wouldn’t recommend that to anybody, it’s not good for you, and sometimes it was like, ‘I can’t cope with this anymore’. So my wife said — she’s very practical — ‘Why don’t you take the kids to nursery?’, so that meant I got to walk the kids to nursery every day. It is important not to lose sight of your family life and things like that. It was hard work, but when you’re doing everything there’s nobody to hand anything to. Don’t start a company on your own [laughs]. We only hired somebody when we could afford to pay the next salary. Not everyone’s in that position. It’s passion, hard work and luck.
Creative Entrepreneurs: A lot of entrepreneurs get used to that lonliness.
Col Needham: You can get lonely, even when you’re living in a house with three other people — and my wife was the helpdesk as well. Our time to talk was while she was doing that. She would work for free, it was great [laughs].
Creative Entrepreneurs: So that was all going really well, and then you got a message from Jeff Bezos
Col Needham: Yes, so I got an email from a guy called Alan Caplan, who at the time was Amazon.com’s general counsel. Alan’s email went something like this, ‘Hi Col, Jeff Bezos and I were talking about movie websites the other day and naturally IMDb came up in the conversation. We are coming over to the UK next month and would love to meet to talk over some business ideas’. So it’s kind of like, ‘Ooh!’.
Now, this is December 1997, so you have to remember that Amazon.com had never bought a company before, they were an online bookseller only, and they’d only been a publicly traded company for seven months. So we just thought, ‘Since Amazon are advertising with us, Jeff just wants to negotiate a better rate on the advertising or hopefully they want to buy more advertising’.
So we calmly went along for our meeting with Jeff and Alan, two of us from IMDb, two from Amazon, Jeff heard the IMDb founding story, I heard the Amazon founding story, and then Jeff said, ‘So, I expect you want to know why we called the meeting?’, and it’s like, ‘To talk about our advertising deal?’, and Jeff looks at Alan and he goes, ‘Are we advertising with these guys?’ and then gave a lovely trademark Jeff laugh.
So Jeff said, ‘Amazon’s going from selling books to music and we’d like to open a video store later in 1998. We’d love to work with you on that, we think an Amazon video store powered by IMDb data would make a really compelling customer experience’, he said, ‘Anything from a bis-dev [business development] licensing deal, but what would be much more interesting to Amazon would be an acquisition’.
So we found ourselves by the end of the afternoon talking very broad acquisition deal points. Jeff explained how IMDb would be a separate brand and a separate website where the information would be optimised for discovery and search and contribution, and Amazon would take the IMDb data and create an experience optimised for ecommerce and the two would sit happily together. We didn’t want or need to sell IMDb, we just saw the benefits for IMDb and for IMDb’s customers of Amazon being involved. I know it’s a bit corny, but it genuinely was a match made in heaven. Here I am, 18 and a half years in, and I’m the CEO and founder of IMDb. That company that we incorporated in the UK in January in ’96, I’m still a director of that same company, I don’t own any shares it, and we have a board meeting every year for this company, still, 20 years later. I love that board meeting. It gives me a lot of pleasure.
“Here I am, 18 and a half years in, and I’m the CEO and founder of IMDb. That company that we incorporated in the UK in January in ’96, I’m still a director of that same company, I don’t own any shares it, and we have a board meeting every year for this company, still, 20 years later. I love that board meeting. It gives me a lot of pleasure.”
So we were acquired by Amazon in April 1998. We had 20 people spread throughout the world, seven of them at the time had made it to the top of that list and we had enough money to hire them — so they were already working for Internet Movie Database Limited, the other 13, part of the deal was that they would get a job offer from Amazon.
So you think, ‘Wow, this is great, you’ve sold to Amazon and you’re getting a job offer’. Some of them were like, ‘I don’t know about that, I’m not sure. Bookseller in Seattle? I’m not sure that’s going to work out very well’. So we had some people keep their regular day-job and just carry and just do the stuff for IMDb at the weekend. Gradually they saw the sense in coming on board fully in almost all cases [laughs].
Creative Entrepreneurs: I would like to know some of the numbers, especially at that five-year-in mark — how much money were you spending at that stage? How many visitors did you have? How much was that first ad sale for?
Col Needham: We weren’t really recording a lot of that… Genuinely. When our traffic was on university websites, which is what it was, we had no idea how many people were using the website other than they would tell us, ‘Oh you’ve doubled this week again’. So we had a rough idea but we didn’t have anything that generated a daily page view report because we had no advertising.
The only thing that the number of page views would tell you was a sort of popularity contest, but we were more concerned about how much data we were getting in, not how many page views we had. When you don’t have a business, the number of page views isn’t a business metric, whereas obviously now it is.
Relatively speaking, it felt like it was huge, but the number of people that were online in 1995 wasn’t that big a number. We’ve been fortunate [as] we’ve tried to reinvent IMDb along the way — less than six years ago 100% of our traffic was on the website, and now, less than 50% is because more than 50% is on mobile devices.
“We’ve tried to reinvent IMDb along the way — less than six years ago 100% of our traffic was on the website, and now, less than 50% is because more than 50% is on mobile devices.”
My important point is that you may end up building something that you say, ‘I wish I’d kept that’, I wish I’d kept a photo of every version of the IMDb homepage, I wish I’d kept a photo of the first Independence Day ad.
Creative Entrepreneurs: When did all 20 of you actually meet?
Col Needham: A couple had kind of fallen off by [the time we met], but we said, ‘We’ve sold to Amazon, we should have a team meeting and we should get everyone together for the first time’. I was lucky because I’d kind of met quite a few people one-on-one because whenever they came to the UK they’d be like, ‘Well, I’m in the UK I’ve got to go to Bristol and see Col’.
So we held an IMDb get-together, first time we were all in the same place, Memorial Day weekend, which is Spring Bank Holiday as we’d call it in the UK. That weekend in 1999 — it took us more than a year to get everybody organised to meet — we flew to LA and had this amazing weekend in LA altogether, most people meeting each other for the first time.
Digital photography wasn’t something that was around at that point, so people didn’t even have an idea what somebody else even looked like, but they knew their tone in email.
We did a day in Universal Studios, and at the very end of our weekend we went to the Universal CityWalk and we watched The Phantom Menace together.
Creative Entrepreneurs: What excites you most about the digital disruption of 2016?
Col Needham: Part of the thing that keeps it exciting for me is, if anything, this disruption is just getting vaster, and I almost every day wake up with this kind of like, ‘What’s going to be new and what’s going to be exciting today?’.
So we’ve tried with IMDb to stay true, the vision is essentially that wherever people engage in entertainment content, IMDb is there to help people make more from that content. That began as a clunky web browser — well, it began as downloadable software — experience, now it’s on mobile phones.
So things that are exciting for me at the moment: Amazon have a product of which I am genuinely a big fan, the Amazon Echo and the Alexa Voice Service which is behind it. It’s a device that you solely interact with by voice.
The other thing is X-Ray for Movies & TV, powered by IMDb. Picture the scene, you are watching a brilliant film or TV show on a large-screen device, maybe you’re beaming it from your small-screen device, and you think, ‘Who is that person that’s just walked into the scene?’. With X-Ray you can simply tap the device or the remote and up on the screen will pop the headshots of everybody in the current scene. If you click again, up will pop what the actor/actress is known for, all their other films and you can add them to your watch list.
“With X-Ray you can simply tap the device or the remote and up on the screen will pop the headshots of everybody in the current scene. If you click again, up will pop what [the actor/actress] is known for, all their other films and you can add them to your watch list.”
Technology’s changing all the time, and it gives you opportunities to create new experiences for customers that you just couldn’t think of just a few years before.
Creative Entrepreneurs: Looking ahead to the future, how do you keep your enthusiasm going 18 years in?
Col Needham: Some of it, I think, is kind of a natural personality thing. But in terms of repeatable and learnable skills is — because IMDb grew from my passion for film, that has engaged me more and made me more passionate about film, more passionate about technology, and so everything I do reinforces and builds on that.
From an entrepreneurial perspective it’s better to start with something inside that you’re passionate about. When people say to me, ‘You have a really interesting job’, to me it’s not a job, I describe it as a lifestyle. I’m very privileged and very honoured that somebody is crazy enough to give me a salary for something that I love and something that I was fortunate enough to sell a company to somebody who understands that company and wants to help us build it further.
Creative Entrepreneurs: Have you ever thought about directing your own films?
Col Needham: I’m a huge admirer of anybody who has the tenacity to get a film made. It’s still magic to me and I admire people who can do it. It’s not my thing. Know your limitations is an important lesson — just because you’ve founded a company and you’ve sold it to somebody else, it might be more luck than you thought.
Creative Entrepreneurs: Are there instances where people have tried to get you to suppress information?
Col Needham: We remain committed to having complete and accurate information on IMDb, it’s a customer trust thing for us. People come to IMDb, they expect to be able to get a full cast list, a full crew list, full information, and that’s what we aim to do. That’s our commitment to our customers.
We regularly get people asking to get information removed, but we do not remove accurate information. We have a policy on that.
Creative Entrepreneurs: I heard that the Twilight Saga, the producers used your website to find all the actors?
Col Needham: There’s an element of truth in your question [laughs]. When they were casting the Twilight movies, the producers were having trouble finding the right actor for the part of Edward. The story they shared in an interview is that they were sitting around a table, about to go for lunch, and they said, ‘Someone go to IMDb Pro, do a search, maybe some Harry Potter actors, and see who’s available’.
So one of the assistants did the searches and printed out all of the IMDb Pro pages for various different actors. They were looking through them and found Robert Pattinson, thought he looked interesting and saw he was Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter. The rest is kind of history.
Creative Entrepreneurs: What is your favourite film?
Col Needham: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which I first saw in November 1989 and it changed my life, it changed my view of film. I’ve seen it more than 50 times.
Creative Entrepreneurs: Assuming there were no limitations, if you were to start again today, given the current digital environment, what would you launch? And who do you admire as a founder?
Col Needham: Not only do I admire him as a founder, I admire him in everything he does, Jeff Bezos is my inspiration, he is genuinely inspiring. He is my mentor, my inspiration and one of my favourite people on the planet.
“Jeff Bezos is my inspiration, he is genuinely inspiring. He is my mentor, my inspiration and one of my favourite people on the planet.”
Creative Entrepreneurs: And what might you launch?
Col Needham: It would be film, so if we assume that IMDb was already invented by somebody else, it would be something building upon what you could do with data and film and technology. Maybe it would be an IMDb-like voice assistant or maybe like an IMDb glasses feature. It would be using film, data and new technology.
Audience member: Have IMDb ratings ever influenced whether you watch a movie or not?
Col Needham: All the time, oh my goodness! All of my film watching is driven, one way or another, by IMDb. I’m my own service’s biggest fan [laughs]. I have my watch list, I have my entire Blu-ray and DVD collection as IMDb lists, I have my entire vote history — every film I’ve seen since 1st January 1980, which is 10,128 unique films.
Because of that, I do things like for example this morning I watched the film from the 1930s that had the most votes that I hadn’t yet seen. I get notifications when things are playing near me that are top of my watch list, whenever I go to a film festival I build a watch list of things that played that film festival and use that list to follow those films afterwards.
I use IMDb all the time, and I’m not just saying that.
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