They’re Lying To You About Media… Here’s How To Get Rich | Lynnwood Bibbens

Lynnwood Bibbens built ReachTV after a career spanning technology, commerce, finance, media and entertainment. The hosts said he had done roughly $2 billion in business across earlier ventures before ReachTV; later, Bibbens said he had moved from CEO to founder and executive chair.

Bibbens says the business principle that has remained constant throughout his career is to “serve your customer” — and preferably overserve them. His broader version is to identify everyone in the ecosystem being served, keep improving the service, and make the system more efficient without losing sight of the customer.

His first serious sales experience came from selling Cutco knives in college, where he says he sold about $25,000 worth. The company eventually let him open an office, giving him early experience with leases, hiring and managing people, including fellow students.

After college, Bibbens joined friends in a mail-order computer business, initially to help organize the operation. Within about eight months he became its top salesperson; his commissions became expensive enough that the founders instead made him a partner.

The early computer company grew to roughly $38 million in annual revenue while earning only about $1 million in profit. Bibbens says the company employed roughly 30 people from his college circle, with the team often working around 90 hours a week and spending weekends at computer shows.

Despite reaching $38 million in revenue, the young founders did not understand how unusually valuable their company might be. Bibbens asked a former college professor for an outside assessment because the founders were focused on improving profitability rather than understanding their market value.

The professor consulted several people and told Bibbens the company might be worth roughly one to two times revenue. He also told him that few comparable small companies were exceeding $5 million to $10 million in revenue, making their scale unusually significant.

A simple test revealed that the company was highly valuable to its suppliers. Acting on the professor's advice, Bibbens told two major suppliers — one in North Jersey and one in Boston — that the company might be sold; within roughly half an hour both wanted meetings, and by that Friday a deal was on the table.

That experience taught Bibbens that a company may be creating major value for parties its founders are barely considering. He had thought primarily about customers buying computers, but realized the business was also serving suppliers and helping technology brands reach consumers.

His lesson from the sale was to examine the entire supply and delivery chain, not merely the end customer. He recommends asking for outside advice, remaining humble, and determining where others in the ecosystem are receiving value before assuming where the business's real value lies.

The partners ultimately chose the North Jersey company as the acquirer. Bibbens says they rebuilt the business inside that organization over roughly two years, sold again, and he then started another company of his own.

In the mid-1990s, Bibbens began developing an early online commerce business that launched around 1997. His son was born in 1998, meaning he was launching another company at roughly the same time he was becoming a father.

The online company's central idea was to replace enormous product catalogs with just six recommended deals each day. At a time when many websites largely replicated printed magazines or thick electronics catalogs online, Bibbens believed the internet should move from delivering information to enabling transactions.

The six daily offers centered on computers and consumer electronics and were packaged around customer needs. A back-to-school offer, for example, might combine a Toshiba laptop, carrying case and other accessories; other bundles were aimed at business users.

Bibbens deliberately used stories and humor around these bundles instead of merely listing products. His larger argument is that customers come to a specialist for recommendations: if the seller is supposedly the expert, making the customer navigate a giant catalog transfers the seller's job back to the buyer.

Bibbens treats relationships as long-term assets rather than immediate transactions. A phrase he and his friend “Biggs” use is “relationships over transactions” — deals may come and go, while genuine relationships can produce opportunities decades later.

He warns against building relationships simply to extract introductions, information or access. Before making an ask, he says he considers whether he has invested enough in the relationship and provided enough value to deserve making that request.

Bibbens particularly dislikes unsolicited introductions that expose someone's personal contact information or drop them into a group conversation without care. He says his own friends accept his introductions because they know he treats access seriously and only connects people when he believes there is a meaningful fit.

He sometimes makes introductions whose value may not be immediately obvious to either party. In those situations, he explains privately what he sees connecting the two people, even if the opportunity may not materialize for a year or longer.

Bibbens says relationships formed in the late 1990s and early 2000s sometimes did not produce business until 2015 or later. He uses this as evidence that expecting every relationship to generate a deal within six months misunderstands the time horizon of business networks.

A decades-long relationship eventually helped ReachTV secure its NFL relationship. Bibbens says that when his son was young, he regularly watched NFL games at a Mount Laurel facility through a friend named Rob who worked for NFL Films; people he met there roughly 20 years earlier later became involved in the NFL licensing arrangement for ReachTV.

Dick Parsons became an important example and informal mentor for Bibbens after they met around 1997 or 1998. Bibbens was struck by seeing Parsons, a Black executive who looked like him, managing the enormous Time Warner/AOL organization with what he describes as humility, grace and firmness.

A business deal initially brought Bibbens into Parsons's orbit, but Bibbens decided learning from him mattered more than the transaction. He asked to spend time observing him and understanding his career; Parsons challenged Bibbens's assumption that he should follow the same path, suggesting his strength might instead be building companies that could sell to executives like Parsons.

Bibbens credits his grandfather with giving him his earliest model of entrepreneurship and resilience. His grandfather moved from North Carolina to New Jersey, worked for a garbage company, created his own garbage route and eventually operated about eight trucks.

His grandfather's garbage business was severely disrupted when someone put sugar into the trucks' gas tanks. He eventually sold the company, worked for the buyer, and later started a smaller operation he could manage, while maintaining the optimism Bibbens says he inherited from him.

The grandfather also taught Bibbens to frame difficulties through gratitude. Bibbens says his grandfather would keep asking how someone was doing until the answer became “good,” emphasizing that other people were often facing worse circumstances.

Bibbens originally imagined becoming an accountant because he enjoyed numbers. Selling Cutco changed his direction by exposing him to sales, entrepreneurship and the power of building relationships face-to-face.

He says Cutco gave him confidence more than technical sales knowledge. Many presentations to friends' parents became lasting relationships, and he concluded that the personal connection often mattered more than the knives themselves.

One lesson Bibbens repeatedly emphasizes is that people should assume they belong in important rooms once they have earned their way into them. In his view, opportunity is often determined less by some enormous intelligence gap than by who does the work, pays attention and remains humble enough to learn what they do not know.

When evaluating markets, Bibbens says he begins with large markets and studies how they are currently served. He then looks for an underserved, scalable piece of that market rather than trying to invent demand from nothing, and describes himself as unusually research-heavy before entering a business.

One technology business exploited an overlooked problem around excess inventory from major manufacturers such as Toshiba, HP and Acer. Bibbens bought product connected to large manufacturers and distributors and structured transactions that helped manufacturers, retailers and end customers while giving his business better purchasing opportunities.

He says this company grew from essentially zero to about $100 million in four years beginning around 2001, then eventually reached approximately $250 million. The opportunity was large enough that he estimated hundreds of millions of dollars in inventory or transactions were moving through the relevant warehouses each month.

A conversation with a comparatively small customer exposed another major growth constraint: customers had contracts they could not afford to fulfill. One woman told Bibbens she had roughly a $22 million AT&T contract but could finance only about $4 million of the work.

Bibbens tested whether that financing problem was widespread rather than treating it as one customer's issue. At CES/Comdex meetings, he asked customers how much business they were doing, how much contracted business they had available, and whether financing would allow them to fulfill it.

About 30 companies reported roughly $195 million in contracted opportunity that financing constraints were preventing them from serving. Bibbens concluded that his next growth opportunity was not acquiring new customers but financing more business for customers he already had.

He says the resulting model grew the company from approximately $87 million to $130 million, then $180 million and ultimately $250 million. He emphasizes that this expansion came from unlocking existing customers' demand rather than adding new customers.

The company initially had only about a $10 million credit line, so Bibbens asked its Citizens Bank banker for a different financing structure. The solution was for the bank to finance transactions where strong “tier-one” companies were on both ends of a purchase, using a lockbox arrangement so the bank was repaid directly when customer payments arrived.

Bibbens then created joint ventures with smaller companies so contracts involving large end customers such as AT&T could fit that financing structure. He says this allowed the company to finance much larger transaction volumes without consuming its ordinary credit facility.

After selling his interest in another business, Bibbens spent roughly seven years working in film finance. A friend working at DreamWorks approached him about financing; Bibbens initially flew out simply to understand how the industry worked and concluded that his experience structuring transactions could be useful there.

His film-finance experience convinced him that “content is king” was incomplete; his formulation became “content is king, but distribution is emperor.” He saw talented creators struggle because gatekeepers controlled access to audiences.

Bibbens experimented with unconventional film-financing structures involving brands, financing arrangements and tax credits. In one example, he proposed that a state buy back tax credits it had issued, reasoning that the structure could create value for both the state and filmmakers.

Netflix indirectly influenced Bibbens years before ReachTV. Netflix had previously purchased excess gaming DVDs from one of his businesses, and he later saw the company create what amounted to a new streaming rights window between established digital and television rights.

The fact that Netflix could create a new distribution window inside a century-old entertainment industry became a model for ReachTV. Bibbens did not immediately know how to apply the idea, but kept it in mind until he found another distribution environment where a new rights category could be created.

Around 2014, Bibbens began investing in and serving on boards of digital-signage companies. He concluded that the industry was fragmented among people who understood hardware, software or content, while very few understood all three together.

He became frustrated that signage companies treated additional advertising as “programming.” A friend eventually told him that if he understood the opportunity better than the existing operators, he should build the business himself.

Bibbens writes a full business plan for every company he starts, primarily for his own benefit rather than investors. He says the research prepares him for objections and failure scenarios so criticism such as “this will never work” carries less weight because he has already examined the underlying assumptions.

ReachTV was built around the idea that travelers were a valuable audience nobody was serving as one connected group at scale. Rather than treating airport screens simply as places to insert generic programming, Bibbens wanted the programming, commerce and advertising to be designed specifically for travelers.

He viewed travelers as especially attractive to advertisers because many are business travelers or consumers able to afford leisure travel. His previous experience with retail and co-op marketing also taught him to connect media directly with products being purchased nearby.

The commercial insight behind ReachTV was that airports contain enormous transaction volume but historically had little media capable of influencing those purchases in real time. Bibbens describes the opportunity as changing a traveler's purchase decision close to the point of sale.

ReachTV was designed to serve not only viewers but an entire airport ecosystem. Bibbens identifies travelers, concessionaires, airports, airlines, content owners and advertisers as interconnected customers or partners whose interests have to work together.

His research suggested that a relatively small number of concession companies controlled access to much of the airport market. CNN Airport was then present in roughly 55 airports, while the largest concessionaire Bibbens targeted operated in about 68, meaning one partnership could potentially give ReachTV broader airport reach than CNN Airport.

ReachTV deliberately avoided relying on continuous internet streaming in airports when it launched around 2016–2017. Connectivity was unreliable and expensive, so the company used a local set-top device it called a “puck,” which stored programming onsite and played it locally while allowing ReachTV to update the content remotely.

Bibbens says a similar technical approach had worked for him on a Budweiser-related project in Delaware around 2004. Reusing a proven idea helped ReachTV avoid the black screens and disconnections common with satellite or continuously connected television feeds inside airports.

He describes this technical restraint as an example of avoiding an “ego play.” A more impressive-sounding solution would have streamed everything live, but Bibbens says another company had already attempted that approach, spent heavily on television rights and failed because the economics and connectivity did not fit the market.

ReachTV's pitch to HMSHost demonstrated the product instead of merely describing it. Bibbens recalls three ReachTV representatives meeting roughly 27 people from HMSHost while a screen beside him continuously played customized, HMSHost-branded programming without an internet connection; the audience spent much of the meeting watching the screen.

ReachTV also created a new content-rights strategy rather than competing directly for expensive conventional streaming rights. Working with law firm DLA Piper, Bibbens says the company developed a closed-circuit rights window covering settings such as retail, airports, inflight environments and hotels.

Bibbens says these closed-circuit rights could cost roughly one-thousandth as much as ordinary digital rights. ReachTV's structure also contemplated viewers scanning content they discovered on a ReachTV screen and continuing to watch it digitally for a limited period — roughly up to 10 days — without undermining the main digital rights package.

ReachTV began purchasing content for this new rights window before it even had a full network, partly to establish the market itself. By the time competitors understood the strategy, Bibbens says ReachTV had become the leading buyer in that particular rights category.

The new rights window allowed ReachTV to treat large media companies as suppliers and partners rather than competitors it had to defeat. Bibbens knew a startup could not outbid YouTube, Netflix, CBS, NBC and other giants in their core markets, but those companies had content ReachTV could distribute in places they did not directly control.

During the pandemic, ReachTV acquired the opportunity left by CNN Airport's closure and significantly expanded its airport infrastructure. Bibbens says ReachTV owns or controls physical components such as screens, wiring and fiber and therefore operates in some ways like an old-fashioned cable company with technicians physically installing and servicing equipment.

Bibbens had tried to acquire CNN Airport on earlier occasions, but the eventual opportunity emerged from CNN's broader corporate circumstances. He says CNN Airport became a noncore asset as the parent organization was being sold in the transaction involving Discovery, and the existing airport network was scheduled to shut down.

ReachTV was given an extraordinarily short window to replace CNN Airport. Bibbens recalls being told on January 5 that the company had about 65 days to persuade the individual airport authorities to move to ReachTV and had to be operating by March 31, when the former screens would otherwise go dark.

Bibbens says the team visited every relevant airport authority, secured the necessary agreements and went live by March 31. He describes the episode as validating because it showed that ReachTV's commitment to travel during the pandemic was real rather than rhetorical.

The strategic decision during COVID was explicitly framed around whether the team still believed in travel and travelers. Once the answer was yes, Bibbens believed acquiring or replacing CNN Airport's footprint was a logical consequence of that conviction.

ReachTV pays for access to parts of its distribution environment but tries to own and operate the infrastructure that follows. Bibbens's goal was to avoid becoming dependent on another operator dictating the network's daily operations; advertising was initially the commercial engine used to establish that infrastructure.

Bibbens describes the original airport television network as a “Trojan horse” into a much larger travel economy. Once ReachTV had the screens, infrastructure and relationships, it could add data, commerce, programming and services around travelers rather than remaining only an advertising network.

He cited travel and tourism as roughly 10% of U.S. GDP and employment, while arguing that travelers themselves influence a much larger share of economic activity. Bibbens offered his own estimate that people who travel may account for 40–50% of GDP when their wider economic roles are considered; this was presented as his theory rather than a measured statistic.

Bibbens also cited roughly $1.8 billion in monthly transactions occurring inside airport walls as evidence of the commercial value of ReachTV's physical position. His strategy is to connect media exposure to purchases occurring only feet away from its screens.

ReachTV is expanding beyond advertising into original content, syndication, data and travel services. Bibbens says original programs can be distributed both through ReachTV and other retail-media networks, while the company's data can help understand where travelers came from and what they may want next.

One example of the broader product vision is helping travelers arrange something such as an airport restaurant before arriving. The goal is to participate throughout the traveler's journey, rather than interacting with the person only while they are standing near an airport screen.

Bibbens ultimately wants ReachTV to become a “traveler network,” not merely an airport TV network. That means maintaining a relationship with travelers across platforms before, during and after the airport experience.

ReachTV has accumulated first-party travel-related data for roughly a decade, according to Bibbens. He says the company has spent years acquiring and organizing it without fully exploiting it yet, and expects the company five years from now to look substantially different because of what that data enables.

He describes travelers as sharing a broad “connection culture.” Business, entrepreneurship, family, leisure, music, golf, wellness and vacations may look like different categories, but Bibbens sees them as different reasons people move physically in order to connect with other people and experiences.

Bibbens believes media and commerce are rapidly merging from “awareness to performance in real time.” Media creates awareness and emotional connection, which can immediately produce consideration and then a transaction through a nearby point-of-sale system or the consumer's phone.

He argues that retailers increasingly need content expertise because product listings and QR codes alone cannot create demand. In his framework, content supplies the emotional and awareness layer at the top of the funnel that makes later conversion mechanisms work.

Bibbens sees format changes — such as podcasts evolving from audio into video — as evidence that media continually changes while fundamental human motivations remain relatively stable. The enduring function of media, in his view, is to establish connection that can eventually influence behavior.

One personal media preference illustrates his emphasis on individual interpretation: Bibbens dislikes music videos despite being passionate about music. He says music creates a personal mental picture for him and he does not want someone else's visual interpretation replacing it.

He argues that traditional cable and media companies allowed streaming competitors to become powerful through complacency rather than technological impossibility. His example is that a company such as Comcast already had internet-connected hardware in millions of homes and, in his view, could have integrated or acquired a service such as Netflix much earlier.

Bibbens believes established media companies dismissed streaming for too long and responded only after Netflix had amassed enormous scale. He cited Netflix reaching roughly 130 million subscribers as the point by which incumbents had allowed the competitive structure to become much harder to reverse.

He argues incumbents then concentrated on controlling broadband rather than redesigning the viewing experience itself. His larger lesson is that established companies can lose markets by defending the existing business model instead of seriously investigating a new one.

Bibbens does not regard today's fragmented streaming experience as an unqualified improvement over cable. He dislikes having to decide what to play every time he turns on a television and says streaming services effectively force the viewer to become the programmer.

The hosts and Bibbens noted that households once paying roughly $100–$150 for cable can now spend a comparable amount across multiple subscriptions. Services such as HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Prime and Spotify may provide more choice while recreating much of the aggregate subscription cost.

During the pandemic, ReachTV created internal “dream sessions” specifically to imagine businesses beyond its existing operations. Participants were forbidden from discussing what the company already did; anyone who returned to current operations was muted so the group would remain focused on possibilities rather than incremental improvements.

One dream-session question was whether ReachTV could become a live-sports network. The team believed sports would remain unusually durable because technological change can alter distribution but cannot eliminate the value of a live sporting event.

Bibbens says ReachTV subsequently became a year-round live-sports network. He characterized the transformation as something only one other major company, Amazon, had achieved on a comparable scale, while emphasizing that ReachTV accomplished it without Amazon's financial resources.

Bibbens says ReachTV's NFL agreement is unusually broad. He described the company as “one of one” with access to every game, the playoffs and the Super Bowl, referring to a period covering the previous five years and the next five years.

ReachTV has also undergone a leadership transition intended to support its next stage of scale. A woman Bibbens has known for roughly 30 years, dating back to high school and who later worked at the NBA, became CEO; Bibbens moved to founder and executive chair so he could spend more time with people while she focuses on scaling the company.

Bibbens sees ReachTV's closed-circuit rights model as an early form of what is now called retail media. He argues that “retail media” is largely a new label for money that previously existed as co-op marketing dollars, now increasingly managed through advertising agencies.

He believes retail media is growing because it sits close to measurable sales performance. Advertising tied directly to products moving through a retailer is easier to justify as spending rises with demonstrated sales.

ReachTV's long-term opportunity, in Bibbens's view, is to connect media awareness directly to measurable purchasing behavior. Airport screens sit near point-of-sale systems, while viewers also carry payment-capable phones, creating two immediate routes from viewing something to acting on it.

His core advice to younger entrepreneurs is simply: “Do it” — including the mistakes — but do it with humility. He regards action, learning and adjustment as more useful than waiting for certainty.

Bibbens says he wants his legacy to be helping other people build themselves up. He described being proud of the people in his professional “tree” and said that developing others matters more to him than being remembered solely for the companies he created.

He does not treat unsuccessful outcomes as permanent failures. Even painful experiences become useful once he can identify what they taught him, and he encourages entrepreneurs to treat “no” as “not yet” rather than a final judgment.

His interpretation of rejection is that either the argument is not yet compelling enough or the solution has not yet been found. This attitude lets him treat a rejection as information rather than as a reason to stop.

Bibbens says his Cutco closing rate was about 93%, which shaped his attitude toward rejection. Because most prospects eventually said yes, he learned to interpret each no as statistically bringing him closer to the next run of successful sales rather than as evidence that selling itself was failing.

Another sales principle he uses is that “nobody wants to be the first and nobody wants to be the last.” He uses existing adoption as social proof while also creating urgency that the opportunity will not remain open indefinitely.

Bibbens is working on a book titled The Internal Voice. The book is intended to examine the person people speak with more than anyone else — themselves — and how that internal dialogue can be trained to move someone toward their goals; no publication date was given.