With just one week to go before she is scheduled to step down as chief executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Meg Whitman has lined up her next professional venture.
But, unlike her previous stops at HPE and eBay, Whitman’s new job is with a place that is just getting off the ground. And instead of being in Silicon Valley, Whitman is heading to Hollywood.
Whitman has been named CEO of NewTV, a new mobile content company backed by movie-industry bigwig Jeffrey Katzenberg, and will start her new job on March 1. She announced her plans to leave HPE’s top job back in November, but is remaining on the tech giant’s board of directors.
While Whitman, who in addition to serving as CEO of HPE, spent a decade as CEO of eBay and ran for governor in 2010, might not seem like the type of executive to run a company that is light on details, her job at NewTV shows how old ties in the business world can lead to a job years later. Whitman and Katzenberg worked together at the Walt Disney Company back in the early 1990s, and Whitman was on the board of directors of Katzenberg’s DreamWorks Animation SKG. Katzenberg sold that animation studio to Comcast in 2016 for $3.8 billion.
Just what is NewTV?
It’s possible that, as of now, Whitman and Katzenberg are NewTV. Not much is known about the company other than this: it’s name is considered to be tentative, it’s part of Katzenberg’s holding company, WndrCo, which has about $600 million in investments behind it, and it is located in Los Angeles.
But it has some pretty ambitious thoughts on the video industry, the type you’d would expect to hear from a start-up backed by industry bigwigs who are used to getting things done their way.
According to a report from Variety, Whitman will lead a company that “aims to revolutionize entertainment with short-form premium content customized for mobile consumption.” The basic idea behind NewTV is to create video programming like 10-minute shows that are produced with the techniques, and money, that usually go into traditional broadcast programs.
How NewTV will do this, and with what kinds of partners, remains to be seen. Whitman is said to be planning on getting into more fundraising efforts for the company. According to Variety, Whitman said, “We’re going to be recruiting the very best talent, and in a few more months we’ll have to more to say on this.”
