The site was launched in January 2008 with nearly 100,000 videos already categorized and editorialized to optimize each entry’s search-engine placement. Today Chao’s company operates with a staff of 7. All revenues are derived from banner ads placed on pages that provide descriptions and navigation to embedded videos created by tens of thousands of amateur how-to videographers.
WonderHowTo isn’t even close to being successful enough for an IPO, says Chao. He’s happy with the status quo. He enjoys watching videos and unveiling wellsprings of creativity from little-known enthusiast communities. Some of the ones hand-picked for WonderHowTo homepage exposure, possibly by Chao himself, include “How to Make Homemade Breast Milk Ice Cream”, “Brilliant Business Idea: Sell Cookies Like a Crack Dealer” and “How to Hack a Snack Vending Machine”. Videos with sex appeal or other sensational angles are well represented, as are clever ways to turn junk into childish fun. Some titles echo the tabloid sensibility with which Chao helped build Fox into a network power.
But Chao claims not to miss TV at all. In fact, he’s been so far removed from TV for so many years that he doesn’t even know the names of TV shows, much less set his DVR to record any. The only thing he watches are NFL games for which he voices surprising enthusiasm. No, says Chao, after twenty years serving TV he’s found a media niche he finds far more satisfying.
Stephen Chao is interviewed via internet video-conferencing from the Santa Monica offices of WonderHowTo.com in 2008.
Stephen Chao was born on November 25, 1955 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His parents had come to the U.S. from China to “flee all the civil wars in China.” His father had obtained a PhD from MIT and was working as a Bell Labs aerospace engineer helping to create retro rockets for the X-1 and X-15 projects. He later became a physics professor at MIT. His mother was a student at Wellesley. She later became an English literature professor at Bennington.
Stephen was a good enough student to win a coveted scholarship to elite, old-line Phillips Exeter Academy in southeastern New Hampshire. Starting in his sophomore year he left home to become a boarding student there. His bachelors in classics from Harvard landed him a reporting job at the National Enquirer. He spent two years learning how to fight for sensational scoops involving celebrities, UFOs, fad diets and other topics that titillated American mass-market audiences.
Chao’s tabloid experience failed to impress editors at The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Unable to shift his journalism career upmarket, Chao decided to “waste time” at Harvard Business school. He formed a desire to go into the movie business. Multiple rejections by the big studios led him to New York where he found a job working for private bankers seeking investors to finance movie for the likes of producer Dino De Laurentis.
A year and a half of investment banking was enough for Chao. For about two years he “bummed around, co-wrote a Fodors tour book of Turkey,” Chao recalls. He tried again to get a job with a Hollywood studio without success until he wrote Rupert Murdoch a personal letter in late 1983 or early 1984. “Much to my surprise, after seven rejections from the big studios, he personally answered my letter,” Chao told Transpacific/Goldsea in 1993. Chao interviewed with Murdoch at News Corp’s New York offices.
“He’s a very fast, intuitive person,” Chao recalled of that first meeting. “He semi-glanced at my resume but he was aware of a couple of factors, that I had graduated from Harvard and had worked for the National Enquirer, which is a good training ground. He thought it was interesting, and I wasn’t the most important hire of the day, so he said, ‘OK, let’s get started.’”
“In the first interview, I had told Rupert that I’d really like to be in the movie business,” he recalled. Murdoch’s response was music to Chao’s ears: “Well, first we have to buy a movie company and then we’ll see what happens.”
It was the closest thing to an answer to Chao’s long and fervent prayers for a shot at the movie business.
That was the beginning of what Chao calls “a long run with News Corp.” Murdoch started Chao off as vice president of acquisitions. “I worked on buying companies. With an MBA background, that’s the kind of thing you do. I worked on buying Fox and Metromedia.”
When Murdoch completed News Corp’s acquisition of Fox Studios in 1986, he placed Chao directly under Fox President Barry Diller to leverage the studio’s assets to create a fourth TV network. The fireworks that resulted when the two mercurial executives clashed led to breathless media accounts that — coupled with Chao’s programming coups — made Chao a whiz-kid-badboy of legendary proportions. He is said to have called Diller a liar to his face, provoking him to throw a three-quarter-inch video cassette at Chao’s head, then framed the resulting dent in the wall and got Diller eventually to autograph it. He is said to have come late to meetings and simply walked out when Diller complained. He is said to have turned his back on pitch meetings, even falling asleep at some of them.
“Some of these urban myths are fun,” Chao laughed. “I just find them fascinating.” Next
