Seth Gilbert, 03-5-2008
Things have gone from bad to worse for publishing house Ziff Davis Media and its Private Equity owner Willis Stein. Bankruptcy is now official.
Under mounting debt, things have been bad for some time. Last year the troubled company sold off their enterprise division ($160m in June). In August, they announced they’d be unable to make interest payments on their mounting debt. Today’s news that the company will seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to try and sort out the mess was a foregone conclusion.
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Seth Gilbert, 03-4-2008
Peter Lynch used to say, “the person that turns over the most rocks wins the game.” The revolving door of executive management changes sometimes seems to fit that sentiment. New strategies and new people come and go as individual and company both seek new challenges and new perspectives in the pursuit of their goals. Over the past couple of weeks, from Warner Music to Atari to NBCU/GE to Facebook, even Sony’s Crackle, there have been a handful of high profile leadership changes.
FACEBOOK
Facebook recently lost chief revenue officer and COO Owen Van Natta. His departure left a void in the experienced leadership column for the high profile social network. To fill the gap and add a figurehead with the balance of brains, expertise and managerial skill, they’ve lured away Google’s VP of Global Online Sales and Operations Sheryl Sandberg.
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Seth Gilbert, 03-3-2008
Hollywood studios fight and follow each other in the search for their next blockbuster movies so it probably should come as no surprise that the same “follow the leader” “anything you can do I can do better,” mentality applies to the talent agencies representing those in the films. And that’s exactly what’s happening. Like one shotgun wedding after another, or the line waiting outside the Elvis Wedding chapel in Vegas, pairs keep forming between venture capitalists and talent managers.
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Seth Gilbert, 02-27-2008
Wednesday at Jeffries annual Internet Conference, Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy delivered the most unusual of things for this earnings season: a positive announcement. On the back of a $100m stock buyout program, and decreasing competition from Blockbuster, Netflix raised their prior earnings guidance.
In his report, McCarthy said the company is now expecting first quarter earnings of 15 to 22 cents a share, up from prior forecasts that fell in the 13 to 21 cent range. Click to Read More
Seth Gilbert, 02-25-2008
In less than two years, San Francisco private equity firm Hellman Friedman turned a $1.1b investment in advertising network DoubleClick into a $3.1b windfall. Now they will set out to try and wring a similar result out of the struggling financials but solid intellectual property of stock photo and content licensor Getty Images.
The $2.1b buyout deal ($2.4b with the assumption of debt) was announced Monday. It effectively closes a month long auction process in which Getty, beaten and battered in the markets, was seeking bailout assistance from a deep pocketed suitor.
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Seth Gilbert,
Thanks to popular websites like Digg, Propeller (rebranded from Netscape in September) and Reddit, the idea of crowd-sourced, user submitted, news sites have become a staple of the “Web 2.0” Internet-era. Mixx, a later entrant to the market that launched in October, has reportedly just closed a $2m financing led by prior investor Intersouth Partners.
It’s unclear if the round is formally a Series B or an extension of their prior A round financing.
Mixx is based out of Maclean, Virginia. It was founded by Chris McGill, the former General Manager of Yahoo News and former VP of Strategy for USA Today. They initially raised $1.5m from Intersouth. A small equity investment was also sold to the LA Times as part of a larger syndication and partnership struck in early December.
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Seth Gilbert, 02-24-2008
About a week ago, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello acknowledged many of EA’s past merger efforts proved disappointments. The post merger integration process, and EA’s style at the time, simply didn’t accommodate the needs of incoming creative talent. Effectively, the company ended up buying existing game titles but doing a poor job of leveraging the human capital behind them to build for the future. Now, about 7 months after restructuring the company and creating an organizational hierarchy designed to better balance creative development and fiscal accountability, EA is setting out to prove they can acquire assets without stiffling (and losing) their creative game development talent.
The first test of the new approach began several months ago with the acquisition of Bioware and Pandemic. The second test began to take shape today.
In a press release, EA made public a proposal to buy struggling game developer Take Two Interactive for approximately $2b in cash. Click to Read More
