Ed Breen likes to be where the action is. The Philadelphia native graduated from Grove City College in three-and-a-half years with two job offers to consider: one from IBM; the other from the much smaller Jerrold Electronics, a subsidiary of General Instrument.
When he interviewed at Jerrold, Breen recalls, “it was just like a beehive in the building.” That sense of excitement inspired him. “I took the unknown company with less money, and it’s still the best decision I ever made.” He began in 1978 as a marketing assistant in a new group selling set-top converter boxes. Two years later, at 23, he moved into sales.
“General Instrument had a winning culture,” Breen recalls. “It was just go, go, go. We were building an industry together. The cable operators were my friends. You were their technical partner. It wasn’t a one-off sale – you were going to be with them your whole career.”
Breen became GI’s VP of sales, learning from industry leaders including Frank Drendel, Jerry Lenfest, Ralph and Brian Roberts, and John Malone. “Watching them grow their businesses, some of it wore off on me,” he says. “They weren’t afraid to make big decisions.”
The transition from analog to digital in the early ‘90s was the most enjoyable experience of Breen’s career. GI had the lion’s share of the analog set-top business, but companies including Sony, Cisco, and Microsoft expected to take the lead in digital. Instead, Breen worked out a deal with TCI and Malone, and parlayed that into contracts for digital set-tops with all the other major operators, offering them warrants in GI as part of the deal.
In his 2017 Cable Center oral history Breen told interviewer Stewart Schley that the size of the order – 15 million units — allowed GI to produce the new boxes at a reasonable price. To meet SEC requirements, “you had to sign every cable operator up on the same day, so the warrants were done right. Everyone knew [Malone] would have the best deal… and we said, we’ll just give everyone the same deal. Frank Drendel and I visited every cable operator.”
Breen became president and CEO of GI, overseeing its sale to Motorola. In 2002, he took on the challenge of leading scandal-plagued conglomerate Tyco International, quickly overhauling the management team and board. “It was a tough, lonely six months,” he recalls. “What I had learned from the cable industry was to move fast, be bold, and make the tough decisions.”
After turning Tyco around, Breen joined DuPont in 2015 as chairman and CEO, and led its transformation through a series of acquisitions and divestitures. As a board member of Comcast Corporation, he says he maintains an “umbilical cord” into the industry that gave him his start. His advice to his three children when they were teenagers and the MBA students he now teaches is the same: “Do what you’re passionate about or don’t do it. I almost immediately loved the cable industry. It didn’t feel like a job to me.”
