LAS VEGAS—Karl Bernard is not so very different from other fans of porn.
Now the president of Gamma Entertainment who oversees strategic operations, one of Canada’s most successful and respected adult companies, Bernard was able to create his empire out of a hobby he developed as a teenager.
“I was very shy and didn’t have a girlfriend,” he said of the start of his journey into the world of adult 16 years ago. “Computers were my friends.”
At the tender age of 18, Bernard hosted BBS sites, and decided to combine his love of pretty girls with the venture. He started “Teen of the Week,” where he posted one picture each week of a naked girl. Soon, his site was receiving 30,000 hits a day.
Throughout his keynote address to a packed house in Vinyl Nightclub at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino as part of Internext, Bernard not only traced his roots in adult and the rise of Gamma Entertainment, he also offered advice to colleagues based o the mistakes he made through the years.
As Teen of the Week grew in popularity, Bernard said he increased the number of updates, worried about bring charged for his bandwidth use and even asked for donations from visitors, promising to send a floppy disc of past photos published on the site.
In a short amount of time, he started more sites, found partners and recruited friends from college to start a business. In the span of 16 years, Gamma Entertainment has grown to a company that employs more than 150 people, and has partnerships with some of the biggest studios in straight and gay porn.
But it wasn’t always a smooth ride. His first partner took his original Teen of the Week site and all its resources, forcing him to start over.
“That’s when I learned to do business with people I trusted,” he said. “I also learned the importance of doing business with people who shared the same ethics I did, and how expensive lawyers can be.”
Other challenges were still ahead: In one instance, Gamma Entertainment lost their sole credit card processor, which Bernard said taught him to diversity his billing partners to minimize risks. In another case, the company los their sole hosting company, which led to Gamma developing their own hosting services.
There were times, Bernard said, he and his partners would get so focused on a new prospect of partnership that other areas of the business would go into decline. That in turn led to he and his partners putting various aspects of the company into silos that each of them would oversee. But even that presented challenges, when one silo of developers might work on a project only to find another silo was developing the same thing. But that, he said, is not something he sees as a problem.
“Be focused,” he advised the audience. “Even if other things are neglected, stay focused on what you are passionate about.”
But his other words of wisdom seemed to be taken to heart by the crowd. Among them, work with people who share the same passions and ideals as you, and try to avoid legal action at all costs.
“It’s been my experience that things tend to be settled out of court, and the costs are too much,” he said. “Even if you are convinced you are right, it’s not worth the costs.”
Internext continues through today.
