Skeptics, they look at each other. In the mid-2000s, life smiles for executives at Time Warner Cable, a cable television company dependent on the Time Warner entertainment group. In 2006, the company has profits worth more than 5 billion euros, more than double what it had achieved the previous year. Much of the blame for this success lies precisely in the successful pay TV business, a wave that they had known how to ride before many and that was providing them with huge profits.
And yet, there they are, seeing those ominous graphics that did nothing but predict precisely the fall of that business. The person in charge of the presentation is a certain Peter Stern, whose position at that time was executive vice president and head of product. It wouldn’t take long for him to assume responsibilities even from the human resources department. “He did analysis over and over again to convince us that cable TV was not the place where we should invest. “I foresaw what was happening,” a source close to the manager himself told Stern a couple of years ago. Business Insider. “He was very focused on making decisions based on facts,” consultant Maura Fox, who worked at Time Warner Cable with Stern before he joined Apple in 2016, recalled to the same medium.
As the years went by, his name began to resonate strongly among the rumor mills of Silicon Valley as a potential truly strong man of Apple. It was even suspected that, over the years, he could become CEO. But the future is not always what it was going to be. , a company that supplies equipment for exercising at home, especially treadmills and, above all, stationary bicycles. He will take office in January.
Peloton has recently been a victim of unrealistic plans. After a triumphant pandemic for them, which raised their stock price above 44,000 million euros, their determined commitment to high-end stationary bicycles and subscription plans at a time when what many least wanted was to remain At home he threw them on the canvas. In a matter of four years, the company lost 98% of its stock market value. Today, its price stands at a mere 3,000 million euros. In February they also announced that their sales would be below expectations. “One initiative that has not worked has been our approach to the University of Michigan. “We have sold many fewer bicycles to students and their entourage than we expected,” Barry McCarthy, the then CEO, declared then, trying to explain the company’s fall from grace.
In recent months, Peloton has cut the bleed, but it won’t start. Its results for the first quarter of the fiscal year, published this week, show that the company lost just 850,000 euros, a figure that can be compared with the more than 140 million euros it lost in the same period of the previous year. However, its sales fell to 540 million euros, 1.6% less than the previous year.
To change its fate, Peloton has chosen a man with a reputation as a brilliant analyst and, above all, for having his feet on the ground. Originally from the Brooklyn district of New York (USA), and at 52 years of age, Stern is now head of Ford’s integrated digital services. He graduated in Music and English Language and Literature from Harvard University, and later received a PhD in Law from Yale University. He is fond of programming, a technology in which he ventured back in the eighties thanks to some of the first Apple models; It is known that it is not unusual for him to spend the weekend preparing the projects that he will try to promote from the following Monday.
The new CEO of Peloton began his professional career at the consulting firm McKinsey, where he soon specialized in everything that had to do with the digital world. That earned him the jump to Time Warner in the early 2000s, where he came to lead the strategy department of the entire company.
In 2016, he fulfilled his dream: joining Apple. First, as head of the company’s cloud services, and later as leader of all subscription services. “If there is one person I have worked with who should work for Apple, it is Peter. He is very versatile, but what really stimulates him is the product,” he commented at that time to Business Insider Dinni Jain, a former chief operating officer of Time Warner Cable who is now the CEO of Google Fiber.
Now, after a brief stint at Ford and finally away from the spotlight of the technological aristocracy, Stern faces the mission of getting Peloton’s exercise bikes back to work. Those who know him think that he certainly does not lack qualities: “He is a visionary leader with the ability to articulate, with ease and clarity, the objectives and direction of the company,” says Alix Cottrell, director of Apple’s video business, on Linkedin. . One thing is clear: Peloton will try to start with its feet on the ground.
An outstanding student
Regarding his training in different areas, Stern commented in an interview published on the website of the Syndeo Institute training center: “I did a double degree because I was interested in many different things, and I could almost have done a triple because I also took a lot of economics classes, although they didn’t allow it then.”
