The Antisocial Network Facebook can’t seem to help itself from getting in the news at every turn. It has achieved what I’m sure many people would have declared as unlikely and that is to get just about everyone against them. Watching the 2010 Jesse Eisenberg rendition of Mark Zuckerberg as he spawnsThe Facebook from his Harvard dorm room out of spite for the woman who spurned his affections, you do get a prescient view of…
New Age Finance I am teaching a course this semester in Advanced Corporate Finance. The traditional topics of such a course are the weighted average cost of capital (WACC), capital structure, debt and equity, risk management, projections and valuations. While those fundamentals still have value as a baseline, the truth is that with only that skill set it is unlikely that any person in the class would be able to make the necessary decisions to…
Easy Come, Easy Go I put in a bunch of expert witness work in August and September. In fact, I put in a total of 180 hours. In addition to that, I was preparing for and launching my course in Advanced Corporate Finance. I suppose that was another 40 hours of work. In the tradition of the 40-hour work week, those nine weeks would produce a time card of 360 hours. My math tells me…
The Rug Merchant A few days ago, I got a call from a guy who called himself Tobin. He asked if I remembered him from when we were in Turkey and had bought rugs from him. It seems he is here in Southern California with a truck full of rugs (actually, I have learned that it’s three containers full from which he refills his rugs). He wanted to come over and show us his wares…
A Valuation of Old Town We just had a quick visit from NYC friends Steven and Leslie. I know both from my Bankers Trust days of yore. Steven was a colleague who was a controller and then a CFO of several businesses I ran. Leslie was a central Human Resources professional. We have stayed in touch over the years and, indeed, Steven and I have worked together on other private company ventures. We go back…
To Listen Is To Be Strong My youngest granddaughter Evelyn just started Kindergarten. She did well in her science-oriented nursery school (her father is a bit of science buff), but as the younger of two sisters, we don’t tend to think of her as the brilliant sister. She has the image more of the spunky sister. But truth be told, Evelyn is actually very smart. I’m glad I said it that way since the word…
Feelin’ Prickly No, I am not in a bad mood and I am not annoyed with someone or something…at least not at the moment. It’s just that when I have stuff to do, I have such performance anxiety as a natural part of who I am that I get that prickly feeling in my backside. I imagine that the feeling itself is somewhat primordial and comes out of the cerebral cortex rather than the cerebellum.…
Hip to be Square Huey Lewis is four years older than me but, as it turns out, he did follow an early path very similar to mine. He entered Cornell as an engineering student as Hugh Anthony Cregg III, having gotten an 800 on the SAT math test. That bests my score by fifty points. The rest of his career was quite a bit different from mine, but presumably at the age of 71 now…
Networking for the Networked Network We’ve all learned about the importance of networking. Mark Zuckerberg taught us about the social network and its value by making $130+ Billion just for himself as well as spawning another seven billionaires (not including the venture capital funds that made….billions). Those others include, Eduardo Saverin ($5B), Dustin Moskovitz ($8B), Sean Parker ($3B), Jeff Rothschild ($1.5B), Sheryl Sandberg ($1B) and Chris Hughes ($1B). And lets not forget the Winklevoss Twins…
Back Up the Truck For the forty-five years of my Wall Street career the expression to “back up the truck” refers to something a guy by the name of Tom Pope said to me. Tom had grown up in the International Department of our bank in the first half of the 1970’s. That was when the domestic banking market was in its decline due to large loan losses on loans to REITs that had gone…