New York Times board member's claim to fame: e-commerce failure RedEnvelope

Owen Thomas — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:40:00 EDT

Scott Galloway of Firebrand Partners scored a coup recently: The New York Times Co. agreed to nominate him and a fellow activist investor for a seat on its board. Did the Times do any due diligence on him? Galloway's chief accomplishment online is cofounding RedEnvelope, a San Francisco-based online retailer.

An online retailer whose CEO just quit. An online retailer whose credit line was just revoked by Wells Fargo. An online retailer whose stock fell more than 50 percent today, heading towards penny territory. Actually, Galloway seems uniquely well qualified to serve on the Times board.

Silicon Valley launches a takeover of the New York Times

Owen Thomas — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:06:30 EST

The digital barbarians are at the gate. Harbinger Capital Partners, a private-equity fund which owns 4.9 percent of the New York Times, has written a letter to the newspaper's management suggesting that it buy more "digital assets." Scott Galloway of Firebrand Partners, an affiliated investment firm, is proposing an alternate slate of directors for the next board election. The newcomers include Galloway himself, a founder of RedEnvelope and aprofessor at NYU who graduated with an MBA from UC-Berkeley; Gregory Shove, a former AOL executive; and Allen Morgan, a venture capitalist at the Mayfield Fund. Since the Sulzberger family controls the Times through a two-class stock structure, it's unlikely that Harbinger's efforts will succeed. But even the notion of the Times having its Internet strategy dictated to it by technocractic outsiders has to be galling.

Gawker: valleywag, scott galloway

New York Times board member's claim to fame: e-commerce failure RedEnvelope

Silicon Valley launches a takeover of the New York Times