The predictable demise of Jeff Skoll's Participant Media

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/29/hollywood-participant-media-jeff-skoll/

The news earlier this month that technology billionaire Jeff Skoll was shutting down Participant Media, his do-gooder entertainment studio that produced a string of hit films, struck me as sadly inevitable. Hollywood will be a poorer place without Participant’s feature films and documentaries. At the same time, that the money-losing passion project of an accidental media mogul lasted as long as it did — 20 years — is a triumph of entrepreneurial hope over Tinseltown cynicism.

I first met Skoll nearly 15 years ago, when I wrote a profile in Fortune magazine about him and his unusual mogul habits. A native of Canada, Skoll was a Stanford University business school grad who had the good fortune to sign on as the first full-time employee of eBay, which got its start as a kind of online flea market. Skoll became eBay’s president and, in short order, a multibillionaire.

Having left eBay after only five years, he set out to pursue two dreams. One was to make movies that had a social impact, which became Participant. The other was his passion for social entrepreneurship, the notion that companies seeking to do good while navigating markets can be more effective than charities at curing the world’s ills. Around the same time he started Participant — its name evoking a call to action — Skoll stood up a foundation that awarded annual prizes to exemplary social entrepreneurs.

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