Harvard couldn’t hold him
The gig: Head of Ascent Media Group and best known for helping Sony and other studios adapt to the digital revolution by building massive digital archives and making their movies and TV shows available for distribution on iPhones, broadband services and high-definition TV.
The job: As chief executive of Ascent, he runs the Santa Monica post-production and digital media services firm, which employs about 3,000 worldwide. The firm is one of Hollywood’s leading suppliers of digital media services, with clients that include News Corp., Sony Pictures and Paramount Pictures.
Background: Raised in Madrid, where his father worked as an executive at IBM and instilled an early interest in computer programming, Royo, 43, moved to the U.S. as a foreign exchange student at a high school outside of Indianapolis.
Family: He lives in Venice with wife Sue, a physical therapist at UCLA, and daughters Zoe, 8, and McKenzie, 5.
Education: Master’s, PhD, and MBA degrees from Harvard University. Royo specialized in Japanese literature and began his career as an adjunct professor of East Asian studies at Harvard.
Internet calling: “Back in 1997 and 1998, there was an enormous sense of excitement about this new thing called the Internet and about how it was going to transform our lives. I felt if I could somehow be a part of that, I could have a more profound effect on the lives of people than a more narrowly defined career in Asian studies.”
Lessons from academia: Royo says he learned lifelong lessons about management when he helped run an undergraduate department at Harvard. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re in academia or business; at the end of the day it’s about who you want to be, building the right team and giving everybody clear roles and responsibilities.”
Lessons from the dot-com bust: Royo moved to Los Angeles 11 years ago to become chief technology officer of an Internet start-up called Broadband Sports. The company had big ambitions but closed in 2001, he said. (A separate company with the same name was launched in 2005.) The experience taught Royo important lessons about running a business. “We were all focused on revenue growth instead of ‘When are you going to turn a profit?’ and ‘What’s the long-term business model?’. . . . We were not adapting to market conditions out there.”
Building Ascent: Royo was tapped by Ascent to launch a products and services division from scratch a few years after the company was launched by John Malone’s Liberty Media. Among other things, his group developed more-efficient and consumer-friendly video-on-demand services for such companies as Charter Communications and Time Warner.
He also helped studios build massive digital archives. “Nobody had done it on the scale and scope of what we were doing at the time,” said Royo, who over the next five years would build a $40-million division. His track record landed him the top job at Ascent 19 months ago.
Best advice: “When you’re hiring someone, ask yourself, ‘Is this someone you’d want to be with in a bunker?’ My philosophy is: Hire smarter people than me, give them well-defined jobs and empower them to succeed.”
