quid.pro

Driving through a metaphor

It's raining on Sand Hill Road, blue skies everywhere else.

My worlds collide

From the best damn baseball blog ever, MLB Trade Rumors:

MLB.com's Brian McTaggart reports that Houston Astros owner Drayton McLane has entered into negotiations to sell the team. McLane says he's in no hurry to sell the team, but has entered into an exclusive 30-day negiotiating window with an unnamed New York investment banking company.

The only thing that would make this better is if the unnamed bank is using TARP funds to purchase them.

Saab to shut down

Such a bummer, my family has had Saabs on and off since about 1980 (I owned two myself). Of course, wouldn't have even considered buying one for the last ten years, which I guess was the problem.

Saab, with a narrow following focused in Sweden, Britain and the United States Northeast, proved too small to lure the world’s big automakers, many of which are seeking tie-ups to increase economies of scale.

Saab’s last hope proved to be Spyker Cars, a tiny Dutch maker of high-end sports cars, but problems that could not be overcome cropped up as G.M. examined whether Spyker would be a viable partner.

via www.nytimes.com

Here's a lot of money, now shut up

The New York Times has a piece on a recent Goldman Sachs partner reunion and discussion about how the firm has changed since the late 90's when it went public. All sorts of sniping and nostalgising about how things used to be. Interesting article if you're into the inside baseball of investment banking.

But the best line was buried deep into page one.

None of these people were willing to speak out publicly about Goldman, which, for most of them, has been the source of sizable fortunes.

And the second best was buried deep into page two.

But even people close to Goldman acknowledge that as long as the bank is making a lot of money, public opinion does not matter all that much.

Life is so simple in banking. Very clear priorities.

More evidence of the destruction of the magazine industry in progress

Michael Wolff on Comcast and NBC

If you're at all interested in media, I highly recommend that you subscribe to Michael Wolff's newsletter. It's short, sweet and almost always right.

So how come it’s happening again? How come a big media merger can happen even at this point, when the evidence of failure is so explicit and so expertly chronicled, when so many of even the most deluded media executives are now, to say the least, sheepish and chastened? How come those geniuses at Comcast and GE (which will still be stuck with 49% of this pig in a poke) aren’t being carted off?

via www.newser.com

Louis on HotWired's anniversary

Great to read Louis Rossetto's memories of HotWired. I'd forgotten about a lot of the machinations that led up to its creation. We were essentially starting a start-up from within a start-up and risking both:

Even internally, people were skeptical – our first business wasn't profitable yet and here we were starting another? In effect, we were taking the money that Condé Nast had given us for growing Wired circulation and investing it a completely unknown, untried, potentially dangerous project to invent Web media.

Still can't believe it's been 15 years.

Happy birthday, HotWired!

Fifteen years ago today, HotWired (my second start-up) was launched, introducing the banner ad onto the internet. It's very hard to imagine it has been that long and quite frankly that anyone on the internet even remembers although it was wonderful to see AdAge magazine commemorate the anniversary with a very sweet piece by Frank D'Angelo, whose agency (Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer) ended up buying 4 of our first 14 advertisements. Frank writes:

Has any one item in our industry been encased with so much debate -- at times even disdain -- as to its true value, role and contribution to marketing communications from its inception in 1994 to this day? Yet the display banner is the impetus to the creation of the online advertising category that will reach beyond $24 billion in 2009, according to eMarketer. Perhaps more important, no other development since has advanced advertising measurement, effectiveness and accountability than the display banner.

Given the amount of time gone by and how fast things change on the internet, one article in AdAge is probably the right amount of celebration (although we are throwing a small party later tonight to get as much of the gang back together again). And I will say that probably 80% of what you read about that time period (I'm looking at you Wikipedia) is somewhere between incomplete and the intentional rewriting of history. But hey, I'm still too young to be an old bitter man, I'll write that post on the 25th anniversary.

Love them or hate them, advertisements on the internet have funded a lot of great content, applications and services that we all use for free every day. If we hadn't launched HotWired with ads on October 27, 1994, no question someone else would have brought the model online soon thereafter, so we don't claim any genius on the idea. But someone had to do it first, in scale and with a lot of original content behind it to support the model and that ended up being a group of us at Wired magazine. Yay us!

I hope you'll join me in the celebration!

Bruce Wasserstein Dies at 61

I never met Bruce Wasserstein but he had a strong influence on my early career as an investment banker and I had a huge admiration for him from afar. Sadly, he died yesterday at 61. He helped turn First Boston into the investment bank of the 1980's (famously one year, a third of Yale Business School applied for a job at First Boston) and a huge M&A powerhouse.

Alas, they wouldn't hire me out of Columbia so I ended up joining PaineWebber instead. But less than a year after I joined, Wasserstein took a whole bunch of folks out of First Boston and started a new bank, Wasserstein Perella (he wanted more control than anyone would give him at First Boston). First Boston responded by hiring whole groups out of other investment banks to help rebuild its practice.  My four person group at PaineWebber was one of those groups and in February 1988, I found myself working for the storied firm (and in M&A, no less).

The legend of Bruce permeated every thing I did for the three years I was there. I learned a lot about deal making from him without ever once meeting him.

To Mr. Wasserstein, deal-making was a chess game, one ripe for unusual strategies — that often came at high cost. Never one to easily lose a deal, he often urged clients to reach deep into their pocketbooks to win, often stroking their egos with what became known as his “Dare to be Great” speech. Critics bestowed upon him a sobriquet he detested: Bid-’em-Up Bruce.

via The New York Times

The Atlantic redefines brave thinking

I would wager if you added it up, the blogging industry (however you want to define it) lost a lot less money last year than the net loss of the New York Times alone. Would love to be proved wrong, but I think we in the blogging world just aren't brave enough.

The Times employs 11 people to moderate online comments, more than twice the number of reporters on the masthead at The Huffington Post. One might mistake such quality control for timidity, or for an anachronistic journalistic indulgence. But even as Sulzberger has aggressively led The Times onto the Web, he is betting that his paper’s dedication to high-quality journalism is its most valuable asset, however costly it now seems.

via www.theatlantic.com