Gawker
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print is dead
A Bigger Kindle Makes Jeff Bezos Richer and Newspapers Poorer
Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle DX, a large-screen e-reader, today at the site of the New York Times's former headquarters in Lower Manhattan. The message: He's the future and newspapers are the past. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by stanhalen: But can you use this contraption as a blanket when you're sleeping on a park bench? The broadsheet is the classic... 2 Responses | Other threads
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real estate
Google's Larry Page Goes on Eco-Friendly Construction Rampage
To build the new, Google must tear down the old. As must its billionaire cofounder Larry Page, whose neighbors believe he's illegally tearing down houses in Palo Alto to make room for a gargantuan eco-mansion. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by QADude: Any house that size isn't eco-friendly, no matter what fancy materials are used. This is just another one of those... 1 Responses | Other threads
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jackpot
The Home That Google Built
Twitter CEO Ev Williams and his wife, Sara Morishige, are building a house. What took so long? San Francisco's most disorganized Internet boss dude has been rich since 2003, after he sold Blogger to Google. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by GrumpyMcGillicutty: Evan Williams is a tool. This article has given me hope. Obviously with enough money, anybody can find themselves a... 2 Responses | Other threads
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jackpot
Rich Ex-Google Employee Still Has Money to Spend
Dorothy McGivney joined Google in 2003, before the company went public, when employees could make fortunes, quite possibly in the millions, for tweaking the text of search ads. And now she's writing a travel newsletter. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by flossy: Recommended travel destination: San Fransisco. Wow. Keep those blinding insights coming, lady, and you might just set the... 2 Responses | Other threads
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geek love
Google Billionaire Ex-Wife's Revenge Wedding
What did the ex-wife of Google executive Omid Kordestani (net worth: $2.2 billion) do after getting dumped for a younger woman? She hooked up with a doctor and hired Julio Iglesias as her wedding singer. More » -
jackpot
Penthouse Porn IPO to Pay for Adult FriendFinder Founder's Car
Andrew Conru, a geeky mechanical engineer turned porn baron who founded one of the Web's raciest personals site, made out well when Penthouse bought Adult FriendFinder. He even unloaded a $125,000 car on the operation.
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By Owen ThomasComment by adrianscott: Andrew Conru freakin' rocks and I'd buy his next car along with his next startup. What puzzles me is why the... 2 Responses | Other threads
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gurbaksh chahal
Yahoo millionaire's reality-TV appearance
Gurbaksh "G" Chahal, enriched by Yahoo's $300 million buy of his advertising startup, has taken a star turn on The Secret Millionaire, a reality TV show.
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By Owen ThomasComment by sample032: I guess this means it's time for me to pitch my "rednecks in the castro" idea to Fox. Owen,... 1 Responses | Other threads
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jackpot
Is the great Facebook stock sale over?
Through the golden heart of every world-changing startup pulses an avaricious get-rich-quick scheme. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the billionaire-boy cofounders of Google, established this doing-well-by-doing-good myth. But Mark Zuckerberg hasn't been able to make the same magic happen for his employees. In his efforts to make good by them, he may end up quashing a nascent market in Facebook shares. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by growhappy: Facebook should be in the business of licensing their social network code to people and businesses who want to make... 2 Responses | Other threads
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jackpot
HomeAway ignores Calacanis's brilliant advice, raises $250 million
Austin-based HomeAway, which operates a network of vacation rental listings, has landed a $250 million round of funding, at a pre-money valuation of $1.15 billion. Technology Crossover Ventures led the round, which you can read about at TechCrunch. HomeAway, which seems to have acquired all its competitors over the past couple of years, didn't even have to lay off the token 20 percent of staff.
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By Paul BoutinComment by Carlos: Being bought out by these guys is a laudable goal more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Rock Band creators get $300 million rock-star bonus
Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulos, the MIT-educated creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, have earned a $150 million bonus from Viacom, whose MTV unit bought the game. The pair are on track to earn an even bigger bonus in 2009. (Photo by Newsweek/John Huet)
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By Paul BoutinComment by sample032: Fuck this shit. Some of us can actually play a guitar. 4 Responses | Other threads
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mine is greener
Jay Adelson pimps his ride
Will the CEO of Digg make up his mind on who he wants to be? I once asked him what car he drove, and he took pains to let me know he had a suburban-dad Honda minivan and an environmentalist-standard-issue Toyota Prius. Just a regular guy! But he later complained when I suggested he wasn't a "rock star." I'm thinking Adelson — who commutes from his actual suburban-dad life in upstate New York to his CEO gig in san Francisco — is working on sexing up his image. A tipster says Adelson has just gotten a $109,000 all-electric, obsidian black Tesla Roadster. Which, if you think about it, is exactly the racy kind of vehicle most suburban dads his age might want to buy, if only they could afford it.
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By Owen ThomasComment by HarcourtMed?n: Commutes from upstate NY to SF?! WTF? nice carbon footprint there buddy. You could own 65 Priuses and that wouldn't... more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Next up, Kaspersky will work on antidivorce software
Antivirus software company Kaspersky Lab plans to sell 20 percent of the company for $100 million to investors in a private placement next year, according to Russian newspaper Kommersant. Oh, this is juicy: Founder Eugene Kaspersky owns 50 percent of the company. His ex-wife, Natalya Kaspersky, owns 30 percent. [Quintura] -
jackpot
Facebook stock sales scheduled for November 1
The great Facebook cashout now has a date: November 1. Former and current employees recently received an email from Facebook's stock administrator updating them on plans to let employees sell some of their shares, even though the company is still private. Details of the plan are expected in mid-October; one ex-employee characterized it as a "buyback." That suggests that the company itself is going to buy shares from employees, and then sell them to an outside buyer. The limits previously outlined by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an email to employees — 20 percent of an employee's vested shares, or $900,000, whichever is less — remain unchanged. The plan has an advantage over letting employees make ad hoc sales to wealthy investors, in that Facebook gets to choose who it has a shareholder. One thing's not clear: How will Facebook force employees, especially ex-employees, to stick with the plan? More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by Widget Economist: Second California gold rush is the widget economy. Gotta pop on that stuff' I totally made $32.39 last month. Heh... more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Did Kevin Rose cash out?
The whispers have started: How much money did Kevin Rose make personally by selling shares in Digg's latest round of VC funding? The talk that Rose has sold shares is driven by equal parts envy and admiration. To understand the reaction, it helps to realize that the notion of an entrepreneur selling his own shares directly to investors before a public offering — getting out of the company just as other investors were getting in — used to be taboo in Silicon Valley. But that was before Wall Street's IPO machine broke down, and before merger activity dried up. Rose is at the vanguard of a seismic shift in how the Valley pays off its entrepreneurs. More » -
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Craigslist's "nerd values" don't include $16 million payday from eBay
We need more gushy "Internet rich dudes, they're just like us!" star profiles, don't we? The problem is, in the Valley, too few are willing to flaunt their success. Take this piece of fiction about Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist's CEO, in the Times of London: "He lives in a modest, rented apartment not far from the company’s global headquarters, a rickety 19th century house tucked between a pizza restaurant and a junk shop in San Francisco." If a "modest apartment" is a freestanding house — a rarity in San Francisco — which can accommodate 40 people for Thanksgiving, then sure. The article also repeats an old canard about how Newmark doesn't have a place to park his car — when he's had parking behind the house he owns for years. More »
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Comment by Internetguy2008: While I don't know all the details, pretty sure Craig didn't "broker" the deal. Another investor sold their shares to... 1 Responses | Other threads
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jackpot
Management fees keep VCs rolling in it — for now
Total compensation for venture capitalists and other private-equity managers was up 32.3 percent in 2007 over 2006, a new study reports. How can this be? Private equity is just as bogged down as the public markets by the credit crunch. For the Sand Hill Road contingent, there wasn't a single tech IPO in the second quarter. Acquisitions were down too. If VCs don't unload their companies on someone — public investors, or larger companies — their limited-partner investors don't see returns. So why the raises? More »
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Comment by ScalaWag: Q: What is the difference between a VC and a fish?A: One is a bottom-dwelling scum-sucking lowlife and the other... 2 Responses | Other threads
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commenter of the day
Lawrence
If the Valley was like Hollywood, Hansup Yoon's story would have been the feel-good coming-of-age movie during Oscar season. Seriously, the kid makes a web forum and is able to make more money off Zune than Microsoft? Where's Sorkin on this? Lawrence, today's featured commenter, explains to those drinking the hatorade: More »
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Comment by dingdongditch: ok.. but how does Huey Lewis fit in? Does he want "a new drug"? + Watch video 2 Responses | Other threads
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jackpot
Teenager pays for college with Zune chat site
Turning a profit with your startup can't be all that hard. Just ask 15-year-old Hansup Yoon. He created a community discussion site called ZuneBoards in 2006 using free MyBBoard software, got 60,000 users, earned $1,000 a month from Google ads for a couple years, and then sold it for $62,000 this summer. "It is so easy to make money on the Internet," Yoon told the Boston Herald. "I only spent 30 minutes online a day on ZuneBoards."
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Comment by Lawrence: good story. pure and simple at heart. forums, adsense, and the rest is history - all done by a 15yr old for... 1 Responses | Other threads
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jackpot
Barely legal billionaires insist there's tons more money to be made
21-year-old billionaires in the making? To tell the truth, the youngest Forbes has come up with in the past decade was Elon Musk at 27. That was back in 1998, with only $22 million. Musk's face is more lined, but he still isn't a billionaire, even after cashing out from PayPal's sale to eBay. Forbes at least has some standards — only reason I can imagine Zuckerberg isn't in the piece is because his share of Facebook's valuation is still mostly theoretical. As for Bebo's Michael and Xochi Birch? They're back to their birthday announcement and e-card concern BirthdayAlarm.com, not content with a cabin in the hills at all. (Photo by Ryan Anson/Bloomberg News/Landov)
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By Jackson WestComment by Carlos: @Arlo_G: Too true, two of the wealthiest guys I know in SV are so inconspicuous it's hilarious. They just... more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Millions of reasons why Google's glad to have Ben Ling back
Don't feel too sorry for Ben Ling, the star product marketer who leapt from Google to Facebook back to Google in less than a year. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — herself a Google alum — has threatened not to let Ling keep the shares he earned to date. It was a petty move that goes against Valley standards of on how to treat departing employees, not to mention Facebook's own practice in such matters. But it's not like the loss will sting Ling. Google SVP Jonathan Rosenberg, who's said to be a big fan of Ling and recruited him heavily to come back to the search engine, is taking care of Ling with a "multimillion-dollar signing bonus," according to one tipster.
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By Owen ThomasComment by WillaEnyo: There was no multimillion dollar sign-on bonus. This was just one of the many silicon rumors that spread through the... more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Chris De Wolfe's gain is Fox execs' loss
News Corp.'s online arm, Fox Interactive Media, has struggled to attract online talent while paying them like a startup would. (News Corp. shares just don't cut it.) The solution for the unit, which includes MySpace and a passel of lesser-known websites: a long-term incentive plan, or LTIP, which offers a sort of phantom equity to executives in the division. In the last few weeks, the numbers for the most recent fiscal year which ended June 30 were distributed, and they were "disastrously low," says a tipster. "Most executives were already looking to leave," he says. "They hated FIM and the only reason they were staying was because of promises made about the LTIP." True, FIM hasn't quite made its aggressively optimistic numbers. But executives believe the real reason their bonuses are so low is MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe's fat contract. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by Furious George: @transparency: It looks like one of those circa-mid-1990s knit sweatshirts, a.k.a., a drug rug. more » | Other threads
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jackpot
As ConnectU founders prepare for Olympic semis, Facebook takes over their company
ConnectU cofounders and Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss beat out Croatia to win their second heat yesterday, advancing to Wednesday's semifinals. Meanwhile, back on the home front, U.S. District Judge James Ware said Monday that ConnectU has until Tuesday to transfer all its stock to Facebook and comply with a settlement to the ConnectU founders' suit alleging that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea. More » -
jackpot
Facebook stock sales won't make anyone a millionaire
The prospect of Facebook minting new Valley millionaires is too delicious a story to check the facts. For example: Has Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, actually sold shares? Sarah Lacy wrote that Zuckerberg sold $1 million in shares early in the company's history. BusinessWeek repeated the notion. Too bad it's not true, as Zuckerberg himself told the company in an email last Friday announcing a plan to let employees sell some of their Facebook shares. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by imacademic: Owencidently, Last week was a first for me as I realized gain and loss at the same time. Just when... more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Intel executives inside company's pension fund
Intel is one of several companies which have quietly converted their pension plans into vehicles for financing wealthy execs' deferred compensation. The majority of the tax-advantaged assets in Intel's pension plan are now dedicated not to providing pensions for the rank and file, but to paying IOUs issued to the chipmaker's most highly paid employees. The financial sleight-of-hand reportedly saved Intel $65 million in taxes in one year alone. Intel maintains that its practices — which in effect get taxpayers to help finance Intel's executive compensation — "feel consistent" with both the spirit and letter of the law that gives tax benefits for providing pensions. Our reaction: There's a Valley company which still offers a pension plan?
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By theodpComment by Troll_2.0: They must have been taking notes on how JimbHo takes lunch money from kids to finance his lifestyle of the... more » | Other threads
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jackpot
LinkedIn employees also allowed to sell some stock
At a recent company meeting, management told LinkedIn employees they would soon be allowed to sell as much as 20 percent of their vested options at a $500 million valuation. Word leaked yesterday that Facebook plans to allow its employees to do the same. Both LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg want to take their companies public — and thereby get their employees paid — but it won't happen soon. LinkedIn expects to earn about $100 million in 2008, but VentureBeat reports that bankers want to see that number hit $200 million before bothering to file papers. The public markets aren't hungry enough for anything less. In July, only 56 companies went public, raising $5.6 billion in their IPOs. During the same month last year, 190 companies raised $31.7 billion on their initial foray into the public markets.
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Comment by Shadowlayer: @DanLar75: I was just going to mention that. On an equivalent scale, FB should be making at least $1 billion (1/5... more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Shawn Fanning's company sold for $15 million, not $30 million
Napster founder Shawn Fanning never got a payday for his greatest creation. His latest, videogame social network Rupture, sold earlier this year — but for less than rumored. The actual price Electronic Arts paid, an SEC filing reveals, was $15 million, not $30 million. [Silicon Alley Insider]
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By Owen ThomasComment by Passerby: Well its amazing what you can accomplish when you play an online game with a VC. I think WOW's new expansion... more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Facebook to sanction employee stock sales
Stock options are meant to encourage employees to stay. But Facebook's skyrocketing valuation has created a perverse incentive: It actually encourages employees to quit. That's because ex-employees can sell their shares at any time, while employees have had to seek permission directly from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who frowns on insiders cashing out. (Never mind that he sold $1 million in shares early in the company's history.) Facebook has created a program that lets employees sell up to 20 percent of their vested shares. A Twitter by Facebook employee Eston Bond asking for advice on selling restricted shares suggests it's already in effect.
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By Owen ThomasComment by Shadowlayer: Well I'm sure I'll be beaten for saying this, so here it goes: I hope FB gets a great IPO. Why? Economy-wise... more » | Other threads
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real estate
Larry Page's $7 million manse
Eager to expose Google's threats to our privacy, the National Legal & Policy Center proved so inept at technology that it ended up exposing Google cofounder Larry Page's street address in a publicity stunt. Hidden in plain sight within the NLPC's PDF document: Waverley Oaks Court, the Palo Alto street on which Page lives. (Last year, Valleywag published a Google Maps view of Page's home, but not the address.) It only took a little digging through publicly available records to turn up the actual house number — 100 Waverley Oaks Court, Palo Alto, Calif. So how much is it worth? More »
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By Jackson WestComment by sample032: @the_gdude: A comment that short could only come from someone close to a search engine with a homepage that short. Don't... more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Kevin Johnson's multimillion-dollar consolation prize for losing Yahoo
How much does one get for bungling an acquisition of Yahoo and leading a huge investment in Facebook at a questionable valuation? For former Microsoft VP and new Juniper Networks CEO Kevin Johnson, it's at least $8.2 million in salary and signing bonus, plus 1.6 million stock options and a shot at 350,000 shares in performance-tied stock grants over the course of four years. More »
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By Jackson WestComment by TheChris2.0: @Jackson West: Not a jab at the photo I assure you. Isiah Thomas ran the Knicks into the ground by wildly... more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Sold! 0.1 percent of Facebook employees' stock goes for $6 million or more
If a company's worth what someone will pay for it, than new rumors put Facebook's value at more than $6 billion. An investment banker told Silicon Alley Insider he sold employees' shares representing 0.1 percent of the company for a valuation "north of $6 billion" at a price in the "mid- to upper-seven figures," which SAI takes to mean $6 million or more. Earlier reports suggested private bankers were trying to move Facebook stock at a $4 billion valuation, so this may be a good deal for the sellers. What happened to Facebook's $15 billion valuation? That was set by a sale of preferred shares to Microsoft, whose purchase of $240 million in preferred shares came with some downside protection and a global ad deal. (Photo by CJ Sorg)
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Comment by Shadowlayer: 6 billions is still pretty impressive for a faddish friendster clone... more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Susan Wojcicki's children set for life
Some folks are just lucky. Susan Wojcicki, for example, rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and thereby got a job working at Google before its IPO, where she went on to take undeserved credit for one of Google's key products. And then there are Wojcicki's four children, fortunate in their own right. Not only did they get lavish Reggio Emilia childcare designed by their mom, on her employer's dime — now it turns out they're getting a trust fund, too. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by drury: ValleyWag has stooped to a new low. Attacking kids. She has the right to have a trust fund for... more » | Other threads
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crash this bash
You're invited to Michael and Xochi Birch's Bebo farewell party
Bebo founders Michael and Xochi Birch cashed out in the nine figures with the social network's $850 million purchase by AOL. According to the invite for their farewell party, they'll be retiring to a humble, quiet cabin (which, in the Bay Area housing market, should set them back a million or two). What they aren't spending their windfall on? More »
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By Jackson WestComment by Big John: not reinvesting the windfall in another startup? more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Millionaire Mark Zuckerberg needs to hire a decorator
How did we miss this at D6? Mark Zuckerberg said he'd had Google cofounder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt over for dinner recently; his digs were so Spartan, Zuckerberg said, that Page got a chair, and Schmidt wound up on the floor. Zuckerberg likes to point to his one-bedroom apartment as proof that he hasn't profited from Facebook. But according to Sarah Lacy in Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Zuckerberg cashed out $1 million in Facebook shares in an early financing round. He can afford some nice furniture, in other words; he's just too busy, or lazy, to hire an interior decorator.
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By Owen ThomasComment by MrMedia: Larry Page made more money during that dinner than Zuckerberg has made while at Facebook more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Carl Icahn has already made $120 million from Microsoft-Yahoo, and you haven't
Right after Microsoft withdrew its offer, Yahoo shares dropped to $20 and Carl Icahn snapped up 15 million shares. The next day, while Yahoo traded at $24 to $25, Icahn purchased another 15 million. He bought another 29 million or as Yahoo shares hovered around $25 to $26 per share. Icahn purchased the shares using options, so it wasn't obvious right away that a raid was in progress. Prices jumped $2, immediately putting Icahn in the black by at least $120 million. (Photo by AP/ho) -
jackpot
CNET CEO Neil Ashe made $1.6 milllion selling to CBS yesterday, and you didn't
Under the wing of CBS, CNET CEO Neil Ashe will continue to earn his $700,000 salary. He'll also get a 100 percent bonus and, in the next 10 days, a long-term stock award of "not less than $1,625,000 per year," according to a 8-K CNET filed with the SEC yesterday. CNET CFO Zander Lurie will get such a stock award worth "not less than $1,000,000 per year."
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Comment by EugeneDelacroix: Asshole. How's that 15%-off employee purchase plan treating the rank and file? Or those bonuses? Oh wait, there aren't any. more » | Other threads
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jackpot
Shawn Fanning might never have to pitch Volkswagens again
Finally, Napster creator Shawn Fanning will make a little bank. After Napster went bankrupt and he sold Snocap to Imeem for not much at all, Fanning and cofounder Jon Baudanza have sold social network startup Rupture to Electronic Arts for $30 million. The best part: Fanning and Baudanza did it without launching a product out of beta. All Rupture ever built was a still-in-beta network for World of Warcraft gamers. Investors cashing in on the Volkswagen pitchman's payday (see video) include Ron Conway, Joi Ito, Reid Hoffman, and Baseline Ventures. -
jackpot
How Jeff Bezos makes ends meet on an $82,000 salary
Less than a week after Forbes sang the praises of his "modest $82,000 annual base salary," Jeff Bezos cashed in another 2.15 million shares of his Amazon.com stock, adding another $168 million to an earlier $135 million sale to boost his take for the last three months to a cool $300 million-plus. Not forgetting those less fortunate, Jeff also set aside 252 Amazon shares, or about .01 percent of last week's sales, for donation to a nonprofit. More »
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By Jackson WestComment by boomzilla: @sggrf - Jeff is one of the most likable people I've ever met. Down to earth, humble and dedicated to... more » | Other threads
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larry ellison
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the greediest of them all?
By adding up salary, bonuses and vested or sold equity, Forbes came up with a list of the top 12 richest tech CEOs. And taking over the No. 1 slot from Steve Jobs, who slipped to 11th, is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison — who also topped the list of all American CEOs with $192.9 million in compensation in just one year. Still, not enough to bump him up to 13th place on the world billionaire chart. But surely enough to help a whole lot of cash-strapped school districts. (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma) -
jackpot
Microsoft owes Jerry Yang $3,000
The California State Controller's Office shows that Microsoft owes Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang $3,008.46 in unclaimed dividend checks. The software giant has apparently been mailing the checks to Santa Cruz instead of a Yahoo office in Santa Clara. Is that why Yahoo hasn't yet responded to Microsoft's bid? [Forbes] -
anti-jackpot
Terry Semel lost $6.2 million working for Yahoo in 2007, but Sue Decker made almost $15 million
Any Yahoo can tell you that working at the troubled Web giant doesn't pay. But for former CEO Terry Semel, it really didn't. Last year, he made negative $6.2 million, Docu-Drama notes. The accounting oddity, uncovered in an SEC filing, has to do with stock awards he forfeited when he left the company last year. Don't weep for Semel: He still owns half a billion dollars in Yahoo stock, and has sold plenty, too. What shareholders may find more upsetting are the left-and-right raises Yahoo's board handed out to top Yahoo execs in 2007, a year whose horrible performance set up Yahoo for Microsoft's hostile bid. Here are the lowlights: More »
valleywag
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Fri Jul 3
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Transformers blows up this weekend. Need to know more? io9 gets down and dirty with the superbots.
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Gizmodo's just reviewed two great smartphones, the Palm Pre and the iPhone 3GS. Here's a guide to help you decide which is better for you.
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The Life of Steve Jobs - So far.
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