"When you work at a huge media company, you spend most of the day protecting what you've got, and the other part talking about how to move forward," said Jonathan Miller, former CEO of AOL, who has
since launched, Velocity Interactive Group, a VC firm dedicated to helping new media firms grow.
"It's not easy to accept the shift toward digital. Look at the music industry. If you
make $1 selling an actual CD, but only 10-cents for selling one on the Web, you're going to try to figure out how to hold on to the dollar and move on the 10 cents at the same time," Miller said.
Miller said that he and Ross Levinsohn, former CEO of Fox Interactive Media (who helped broker the MySpace/News Corp. deal) jumped their respective ships because they got tired of having one foot
stuck in the old world and the other trying to move forward with new media.