Let's Be Frank: A Daughter's Tribute to Her Father, The Media Mogul You've Never Heard of
Integrity. Kindness. Hard work. Substance and value. Are these the words that describe a media mogul? They are when it's the late Frank Biondi, the former CEO of HBO, Universal Studios, and Viacom, who leaves a legacy far beyond the movies and TV you love. Through Frank's example, we can learn how to make good relationships alongside great deals, earn respect while earning multi-million dollar returns, and maintain character even when surrounded by an industry full of characters.
Let's Be Frank began in the final years of Frank Biondi's life as he recorded the story of his career while fighting stage-four cancer, a battle he sadly lost in 2019. His daughter, Jane Biondi Munna, compiled his words-along with recollections from media industry luminaries Peter Chernin, Tom Freston, Alan Horn, Sherry Lansing, Alan Schwartz, and more -so that we can all draw inspiration from Frank Biondi's remarkable business acumen and management style and channel our inner Frank as we navigate life's challenges and opportunities.
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Name a company in the entertainment business and there’s a good chance Frank Biondi ran it: HBO. Viacom. Universal. The full list goes on for a while, and it includes overseeing channels and assets that are household names like MTV, Nickelodeon, Showtime, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy!.
Over a remarkable forty-year career spanning from the late 1960s into the 2000s, Biondi served—quietly, and rarely in the spotlight—as one of the most prolific CEOs in all of media. As the head of HBO, Biondi doubled the company’s subscribers from eight million to sixteen million. When he arrived, it was losing money; when he left, it made an annual $180 million.
He led Viacom and MTV through their ’90s glory years. A glowing, thirteen-thousand-word New Yorker profile described Biondi as “Sumner Redstone’s secret weapon,” concluding that “Redstone bought Viacom, but Biondi is the one who has built it.” Under Biondi’s watch, Viacom’s profits surged from $300 million to $2 billion, and Fortune named it the second-most-admired media company in the United States.
As the CEO of Universal, Biondi ran a movie business, a theme park, and a TV studio that grew Law & Order into a juggernaut.
He served on over twenty corporate boards, including Amgen, Hasbro, Madison Square Garden, Maybelline, StubHub, Vail Resorts, Viacom, Yahoo!, and the Bank of New York Mellon. He also served on the board of trustees of Princeton University, from which he graduated in 1966. In addition, he earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Jane Biondi Munna is an executive at one of the nation’s largest financial institutions. She has served for over a decade in roles across marketing, finance, strategy, and communications, including as the executive communications partner to the co-president and COO of the firm.
Her career has spanned finance, media, and sports. Jane can talk corporate “inside baseball,” and she can also talk baseball baseball. Her twenty years of experience—which, like her father, also began with investment banking—included a few years in marketing and special events for the Los Angeles Dodgers where she booked celebrities to throw out the ceremonial first pitch or sing the national anthem, and coordinated pregame and in-game entertainment for corporate sponsorship partners. On Opening Day in 2007, Jane and her team delighted Dodger fans with a surprise appearance by a young (and, at the time up-and-coming) talent named Taylor Swift. Jane is a behind-the-scenes doer and connector of people and ideas. In other words . . . her father’s daughter.
She earned an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a BA from Princeton.
