Before Ynon Kreiz was running one of Hollywood’s most storied media companies, he was ordering coffee and spotting talent. According to a Fortune profile published October 1, Kreiz once hired a barista he met at a café — no resume, no formal interview process, just a conversation and a gut call. That story isn’t a quirky footnote. It’s a window into how Kreiz operates, and it helps explain why billionaire David Ellison just handed him the co-CEO seat at Paramount Global. For anyone tracking the side career disruption in a world increasingly dominated by credentials and algorithms, Kreiz’s philosophy lands differently.
Kreiz is best known for his run at Mattel, where he became chairman and CEO in 2018 and oversaw one of the most remarkable brand resurrections in consumer entertainment history. The Barbie movie — produced in partnership with Warner Bros. and released in July 2023 — grossed over $1.4 billion worldwide at the box office, making it the highest-grossing film of that year and one of the top-earning movies ever helmed by a female director. Kreiz bet on the franchise when the brand was still rebuilding its cultural credibility, and that instinct paid off at a scale that reshaped how Hollywood values IP-driven properties.
Ellison’s Bet on a Builder, Not a Bureaucrat
Ellison’s decision to bring Kreiz aboard wasn’t made in a vacuum. As Business Insider reported, Ellison sent an internal memo to Paramount employees announcing the hire and framing Kreiz as exactly the kind of operator the company needs at this stage — someone who has rebuilt a legacy brand from the inside out and proven he can turn cultural nostalgia into genuine revenue. Paramount is navigating a brutal stretch: streaming competition from Netflix, Disney+, and Apple TV+ continues to intensify, and the linear TV business that once underwrote the whole industry is contracting faster than most projections anticipated.
Kreiz steps into the co-CEO role alongside an existing leadership structure that Ellison has been reshaping since Skydance Media completed its merger with Paramount. The dual-CEO arrangement signals that Ellison wants both operational muscle and creative instinct at the top — not just a cost-cutter, but someone who understands how to build things audiences actually want. Kreiz’s Mattel track record, anchored by the Barbie blockbuster but extending across a broader toy and media franchise strategy, suggests he fits that profile more than most executives working in traditional media right now.
Put Down the Phone. Look Up. Make Eye Contact.
The barista story is good. But Kreiz’s advice to Gen Z professionals might be what sticks longest. His guidance, as reported by Fortune, is almost aggressively simple: look up from your screen and make eye contact. In an era when networking has largely migrated to LinkedIn DMs and cold emails, Kreiz is arguing that analog presence — the ability to hold a real conversation with a stranger in a physical space — is an undervalued differentiator. He hired a barista because that barista made an impression in person, in real time, without a polished PDF to hide behind.
It’s a message that cuts against the grain of how many early-career professionals have been coached to operate — optimize your profile, build your personal brand online, automate your outreach. Kreiz isn’t dismissing digital tools, but he’s pointing at something real: the executives who make high-stakes hiring decisions are still, largely, people who respond to presence and personality. A compelling in-person moment can outperform a spotless resume. That’s not nostalgia. For a generation entering a job market increasingly shaped by AI screening tools and automated rejection emails, it might actually be competitive strategy.
Kreiz now takes that philosophy into one of the most high-stakes media turnaround jobs in the industry. Whether Paramount can execute a credible streaming pivot while managing its legacy assets will define the next chapter — and it turns out, the person Ellison chose to help lead that effort once made a consequential decision over a cup of coffee without asking for references first.
