BET CEO Debra Lee '76: success is about risk-taking
Abe Lubetkin
Issue date: 2/26/07 Section: Campus News
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Lee encouraged a standing room-only crowd in Leung Gallery to "take risks, learn from them, grow with them and reinvent yourself if necessary."
"I fundamentally believe that you either are or are not an entrepreneur. I really don't think you can aspire to be an entrepreneur," she said - though she said it may be possible to "learn to do it better along the way."
Drawing largely from events in her own life, Lee discussed how ambition and open-mindedness propelled her from her racially segregated hometown of Greensboro, N.C. - where she grew up in the 1960s - to Brown and Harvard Law School, then on to a corporate law firm in Washington, D.C., and ultimately BET.
The former sixth-grade class president said she developed "a firm sense of self" growing up in a segregated but "proud" middle-class black community.
"We were so proud of our segregated high school that when integration looked like it was inevitable, we held 'Save the Black School' rallies," she said, adding later that she had led some of those rallies. "We didn't need others to tell us we were smart … or articulate," she said.
Lee described her years at Brown as "some of the happiest moments of my life" and said she fostered her entrepreneurial spirit studying abroad in Southeast Asia her junior year.
After five years with the "white shoe" Washington law firm Steptoe & Johnson, where Lee worked on the BET account, she left to join the cable network "no one thought would last" as its first full-time in-house lawyer. Given cable television's then-murky future, the career move was risky.
"You get to a point in life where you have to really make decisions for yourself and you have to figure out what you really want to do," she said. "I took a step back and said 'this is something that I want to do, even though I don't know whether it will be successful.' "
Twenty years later, as chairman and CEO of BET Networks, which she said reaches more than 100 million households through various media outlets, Lee said the company is at a crossroads again. As viewers rely increasingly on new technologies for entertainment, Lee said BET is pursuing fresh sources of revenue - for example, making the network's content available through iTunes and Verizon VCast.