Budapest has many joys: hanging out with old friends, drinking great wine, philosophizing, candlelit dinners in gorgeous homes. Saturday night, I got to enjoy all these with Tom and Annabel high in the Buda hills. We talked about “the well,” TTT, inflation, Hungary, guide books, humidors, obsessive letter writers, batteries, Twitter, Marai, infantalized dialogue, Halo3, currency levels. Here’s a Winkball snapshot of the evening:
We crowdsourced the fourth panelist, pulling submissions from Facebook and then running balloting through Surveymonkey. Smith got the biggest chunk of the 2,059 votes cast.
To prime your water cannons for our Saturday morning panel in Austin, here’s the panel description:
Bring popcorn and rotten tomatoes! Braving hate-mail from last year’s “winners,” the Suxorz ’09 panel returns to dissect the ten worst social media and web 2.0 ad campaigns of the year. Together, we’ll shame the marketers who abuse people-powered media.
See any social media marketing horror shows recently? Head over to our Facebook group to nominate.
After turning down a $100 million buyout offer, Federated Media Publishing has opted instead to raise $50 million in a C round led by Oak Investment Partners. As was reported two weeks ago, the rumored valuation is $200 million. While the company is not confirming that number, publisher Chas Edwards quips, “We have to be worth at least $101 million.”
Sometime in the next hour or so, John will announce on the FM blog what we’re telling the staff right now: A small number of employees are leaving FM today. We’re sad about losing good people who have made valuable contributions to FM. We honor their service, we wish them well, and we’ll do everything we can to help ease their transition.
Federated has fewer than 75 staff, so they can’t have spent $50 million in just nine months, even with San Francisco’s inflated salaries. (Right?) Surely that small number of employees could be retrained if Federated was on a decent trajectory, right?
Federated appears to have gotten caught by the classic VC squeeze: first, agree a huge price tag. That’s fun for both the VC and the investee to brag about publicly. Then dole out the money in a series of chunks (called “tranches” by VCs) that are released only after the investee hits certain benchmarks.
Why does this happen? Well, at the end of lots of boastful presentations in the money-raising process, the investee is caught in a logical bind when the VC says, “You’ve made big promises and since you’re so sure of your story, let’s just add a small clause that covers our investment in the event you don’t live up to those promises.”
Having made this bargain/bet, the company starts spends madly trying to hit its benchmarks. Then when that scramble fails, the company has to pare back quickly to get to profitability.
It’s a nasty gambit, but greedy folks fall for it all the time.
Nine months after Edwards said “we have to be worth at least $101 million,” I wonder what the right number is today?
For those of you who’ve forgotten, Suxorz is the panel I’m moderating at SXSW Interactive ’09. Here’s the description SXSW’s site (tweaked):
Bring popcorn and rotten tomatoes! Braving hate-mail from last year’s “winners,” the Suxorz ’09 panel returns to dissect the ten worst social media and web 2.0 ad campaigns of the year. Together, we’ll shame the marketers who abuse people-powered media.
Everyone on the ballot was nominated through the Suxorz Facebook page and has affirmed their willingness to participate.
Write a blog post, call grandma, twitter your kids, or tell your neighbor to vote & and we’ll release results Friday!
Bloomberg reports: “The hedge-fund industry shrank by about a fifth to $1.5 trillion at the end of the year from a peak of $1.9 trillion, Eurekahedge said.”
Since most hedge funds charge 2% of assets under management and 20% of profits, that amounts to at least a $10 billion decline in hedge fund fees.
That’s $10 billion a year less for yachts, Dalton/Spence/Chapin tuitions, fourth homes in Telluride, donations to eccentric causes, Greenwich McMansions, Lear Jets, trips to Venice. Gosh, where did it all go?
To put $10 billion in perspective, that’s roughly half the total online advertising market in ’07… money that went to pay thousands of journalists, bloggers, webmasters, hosts, programmers, ad mongers, server manufacturers, and, yes, a few media moguls who live in Greenwich.
Wonderful to see Sarah Palin, protesting that she reads lots more “publications” than Couric and everybody else gives her credit for, still ducks and dodges before she finally chokes out USA Today and NYT. Fast forward to 3.30 if you can’t stomach the rest.
And wonderful to see that male and female mosquitoes harmonize at 400 and 600 hertz (a perfect fifth) before tossing in a harmonic at 1200 hertz. Here’s the full NPR story, including a guest appearance by Barry Manilo.
