Kilar at Hulu. He
insisted on a clean,
simple look for the
company’s logo and
a lack of clutter on
its website.
Kilar still talks about
a trip to Walt Disney
World when he was
10. What he noticed
most about the
Happiest Place on
Earth was that
“there wasn’t a gum
wrapper anyplace.”
In adolescence,
when other
boys were
still watching
Walt Disney
— but the
biographies
of the man,
more than
his company’s
stories.
‘He read and
read Disney,’
his mother says.
She remembers
him saying
in eighth grade
that he
wanted to be
then-Disney
CEO Michael
Eisner’s boss.
man, more than his company’s stories.
“He read and read Disney,” Mo says.
She remembers him saying in eighth grade
that he wanted to be then-Disney CEO
Michael Eisner’s boss.
In 1987, when Jason was in his junior
year in high school, his father accepted a job
in Boca Raton, Fla., and the whole family
had to move. It was a difficult time, except
for Jason.
“He came down and within three weeks
ran for vice president of the class,” says Mo.
That turns out to be a slight exaggeration,
according to Jason: It took him two
months. In an interview in the plain white
board room of Hulu’s low-key office building in Santa Monica, Calif. — a conversation interrupted only by a call from Kenny,
who lives in Pasadena and with whom
Jason has stayed close — Kilar talked about
what should have been a traumatic move.
“I did move at a suboptimal time for a
kid. It turned out in ways that I could
never have anticipated. In that 18 months I
developed friendships that were far deeper
and more lifelong than relationships that I
had developed in the first 17 years of my
life in Pittsburgh.
“I think a lot of life is allowing yourself
and in some ways nudging yourself to
enter into uncomfortable situations.”
Kilar graduated as salutatorian of the
class of ’ 89 at Spanish River High School
in Boca Raton. He was set on attending a
public university — partly because that was
all his family could afford and partly in
honor of his maternal grandfather, who
rose out of poverty in New York through
public education, earning his high school
diploma at age 22 and becoming an elec-
trical engineer.
Kilar chose UNC after considering
Berkeley, Michigan and Virginia.
“I’m such a believer in the manner in
which Carolina goes about its business, in
terms of its values and its high-integrity
approach to education and the community
and its role in the world,” he says, comparing it to the “hardscrabble” Pittsburgh of
his youth.
“We’re going to go out and do great
things even though we don’t come from this
privileged background. That is a culture that
I admire and I respect and I’m inspired by.”
Kilar wound up in a four-person suite
in Hinton James dorm — “not the nicest
place in the world,” remembers suitemate
CAROLINA ALUMNI REVIEW
