Meg Whitman, the former eBay chief executive and now Republican candidate for governor of California, has repeatedly told Californians how tough she is. Apparently, at least once during her decade-long tenure at the auction powerhouse, she showed it, shoving an employee in an executive conference room at eBay’s headquarters. Brad Stone of the New York Times has the story this morning, writing:
1 min read · 15 June 2010
3 min read · 14 June 2010
This is a useful tool for putting into perspective just how enormous a disaster BP's oil spill really is. According to the site, the data used to create the image -- which is refreshed once daily -- comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The NOAA relies on a variety of sources, including satellite images and reports by trained observers who've flown above the spill in an ongoing effort to size it. That information is then entered into computer models by NOAA oceanographers, who add other details, including about wind-driven currents.
1 min read · 12 June 2010
Earlier this week, Seattle entrepreneur and investor Andy Sack debuted his newest startup, a revenue-based financing company called Revenue Loan, which will lend startups money in return for a 3x-5x repayment whenever feasible. Sack isn’t the first person to try out the model. Rather, Boston-based entrepreneur-investor Arthur Fox says that he’s “kind of the godfather” of the methodology, and that he’s been applying it -- successfully -- for nearly 20 years. Fox co-founded several companies in the ‘80s -- Octek Computer Technology, Lexidata Corp. and Medicel -- before starting Royalty Capital Fund in 1992, whose “royalty-based” approach entailed buying the right to a percentage of a company’s receipts, and whose two funds' IRRs, says Fox, were both north of 50 percent. Now he's partnering with a Dallas-based group, Cypress Growth Capital, to create a new fund and preparing to raise another Boston-based vehicle, next year. We talked yesterday about his approach, and why more people haven't embraced it thus far. Q&A after the jump...
5 min read · 11 June 2010
I'm not quite sure why Michael Arrington of "Technical Crunch" sat down with Tom Cruise impersonator Evan Ferrente, but I've just spent the last few minutes laughing at this interview, so if you missed this:
1 min read · 10 June 2010
In December 2008, we reported on what appeared to be the end of Doubledown Media, publisher of a handful of magazines aimed at rich Wall Street executives, including Dealmaker, Trader Monthly, and Cigar Report. Two months later, the business officially folded after losing its credit line, but its president, Randall Lane, is still reliving his surreal experience at Doubledown -- and that’s good for all of us. This month’s Vanity Fair excerpts Lane’s new memoir, The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane, and the feature, focused on Lane’s encounter with Pop artist Peter Max, is delicious reading...
3 min read · 10 June 2010
If you've been reading over the past day, you know that I yesterday wrote a piece wondering if the reportedly stretched finances of entrepreneur Elon Musk are of interest not only to Tesla Motors, the pre-IPO electric car company where he is CEO, but also of the space exploration company SpaceX, which Musk founded and where he is both CEO and CTO. (Musk, who made his fortune as a PayPal cofounder, has since invested all of his liquid assets in both companies.) My interest was piqued after reading a WSJ piece reporting that SpaceX “needs a cash infusion of more than $1 billion in the next year or two to reach its goal of transporting astronauts to the international space station later this decade." The story went on to suggest that, given the Obama administration's plans to turn space travel over to private companies, "U.S. taxpayers are the most likely source of future assistance.” SpaceX board member (and fellow PayPal cofounder) Luke Nosek, told me today that Musk's personal financial picture is irrelevant. The reason, he said, is that SpaceX is expected to be profitable this year, as it has been for the past several years, owing to some very rich contracts. One is with Loral Space & Communications. A much bigger contract, valued at $1.6 billion, is with NASA, which is counting on SpaceX, as well as one of its competitor, Orbital Sciences, to transport cargo to the International Space Station once it retires its last shuttle in November. Tonight, Musk writes in with some more data points that are worth publishing.
3 min read · 09 June 2010
2 min read · 08 June 2010
Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal published a compelling story about SpaceX, the space exploration company that hyperentrepreneur Elon Musk is running concurrently with Tesla Motors and that successfully launched a rocket -- called the Falcon 9 -- into a 155-mile orbit last Friday. The piece provides a detailed overview of SpaceX's past woes as evidence that privatizing space travel is a risky proposition, but it doesn’t ask a key question: whether SpaceX can continue competing for the U.S. government's business in light of Musk’s stretched personal finances. It was just a couple of weeks ago that Musk confirmed to VentureBeat that he has been living off the fast-dwindling personal loans of friends. The admission came after Musk revealed -- in a February court filing relating to his divorce from science fiction novelist Justine Musk -- that he ran out of his own money last November.
3 min read · 08 June 2010
1 min read · 07 June 2010
