Billionaire Roku Founder Anthony Wood Has Quadrupled His Net Worth This Year
ByAmy Lamareon December 27, 2019inArticles›Billionaire News
Anthony Wood is pretty much responsible for the way we watch television programming today. He created one of the first DVRs that allowed us to fast-forward through commercials. He also worked at Netflix. He founded Roku. Now he’s backtracking. The man that taught us to hate commercials is embracing them for Roku’s next move. Oh, and, as the title of this article says, Wood has quadrupled his net worth over the past year.
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This plan to cater to advertisers is an old plan of Wood’s. And it was born out of failure. In the early 90s, he was frustrated trying to record episodes of his favorite TV show – Star Trek: The Next Generation – on VHS tapes, so he invented the DVR. ReplayTV was his brainchild. It was released in 1999 and retailed for $1,000. That was his big mistake. TiVo came out around the same time and sold its DVRs for half that amount. As a result, TiVo won the market share game.
In 2001, Wood sold ReplayTV to SonicBlue for $42 million. He stayed on to run the company. He released a version of ReplayTV with a commercial skipping feature to differentiate it from TiVo. The company was sued by pretty much every major studio. SonicBlue went bankrupt.
Woods was down but not out. He founded Roku in 2002. He called Reed Hastings at Netflix and asked him to lunch. Hastings asked Wood to come to Netflix as the vice president of internet TV in 2007 and guide the company’s streaming player project through production. Wood left Netflix 10 months later but there were no hard feelings. Netflix became an early investor in Roku.
In 2015, 84% of Roku’s $320 million in revenue came from hardware. Advertising and content was good for 16% or $50 million of its revenue. Now advertising and content is the company’s fastest-growing division. In October, Roku acquired dataxu, a tech company that allows clients to plan and buy video ad campaigns, for $150 million, showing that Woods intends to keep going down this path for Roku. Investors are responding positively to this shift in Roku’s core business. Stock is up 340% since the beginning of 2019. This has pushed Wood’s net worth up $2.6 billion to $3.3 billion since January.
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