Marion Hammer keeps a replica Charleville musket mounted above the desk in her Tallahassee (Fla.) office. Hanging nearby: a bullet-riddled target, the “First Ever Award for Ass Kicking” given her by a police group, and her concealed weapon permit, License No. 0000001. Hammer is no ordinary gun lover: As the National Rifle Association’s top lobbyist in Florida, she’s the driving force behind some of the country’s most permissive firearm laws. Photograph courtesy Office of the GovernorHammer and Florida Governor Rick Scott in 2011 Hammer authored a landmark concealed-carry law in Florida that by her last count had been passed by 40 other states. She persuaded lawmakers in Tallahassee to pass a bill restricting the questions doctors can ask kids about guns in their home, legislation ... Continue reading →
Elon Musk leads a life worthy of Dos Equis’s “Most Interesting Man in the World” ad campaign. His tweets are about rockets he just launched. Action heroes model themselves on him. His warm-up was founding PayPal. Stanford held his interest for two days. His other job is reinventing the car. Making $2 billion is what he calls an afterthought. Musk is clearly a man of gargantuan ambitions and abilities. And his ventures make great stories. But do they also make good investments? Two years ago, Ironfire Capital founder Eric Jackson didn’t think so, at least regarding Tesla. In August 2010 he announced on TheStreet.com that he was shorting Musk’s electric car company, which he dubbed “the next Webvan.” Jackson cited both Musk’s perceived narcissism and ... Continue reading →
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win… John F. Kennedy, September 1962 InnovationI teach entrepreneurship for ~50 student teams a year from engineering schools at Stanford, Berkeley, and Columbia. For the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps this year I’ll also teach ~150 teams led by professors who want to commercialize their inventions. Our extended teaching team includes venture capitalists with decades of experience. The irony is that ... Continue reading →
Last August, Google (GOOG) Chief Executive Officer Larry Page fulfilled a pledge made to one of his senior executives, a square-jawed former attorney named Dennis Woodside. Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook had been trying to poach Woodside to make him Apple’s head of sales, but Google had convinced Woodside to stay, in part by promising him greater responsibility at the search company, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be named because the discussions were private. Now it was time to make good. Woodside says he was speaking with board member Ram Shriram when Page asked him to run Motorola Mobility, the company Google had just acquired for $12.5 billion. “He said, ‘I know you’ve been looking for a ... Continue reading →
Michael Moritz, the prominent Silicon Valley investor who has backed companies such as Google (GOOG), LinkedIn, PayPal, and Yahoo (YHOO), is stepping back from some of his responsibilities at his firm, Sequoia Capital, and has disclosed to the firm’s investors that he has a rare medical condition. Moritz did not specify the nature of his illness. In a letter to limited partners sent on Monday morning and provided to Bloomberg Businessweek, Moritz wrote, “I have been diagnosed with a rare medical condition which can be managed but is incurable. I’ve been told that in the next five to ten years the quality of my life is quite likely to decline. Right now I feel fitter than ever and I hope that I’ll be one of ... Continue reading →
Published: May 17, 2012 The Facebook Offering: How It Compares Company value In billions Year of I.P.O. Continue reading →
In 2006, when he was 22, Mark Zuckerberg gave up writing computer code to focus on managing his rapidly growing startup. Like Jim Brown retiring from football at 29 or E.M. Forster abandoning the novel in his forties, the prodigy who programmed the very first version of Facebook was walking away from his transcendent talent. Or so it seemed. A few years later, Zuckerberg began setting annual tests of discipline for himself, vowing to wear a tie to work every day in 2009, learn Mandarin in 2010, and personally kill any animal he ate in 2011. Earlier this year, unbeknown to all but a few friends and co-workers, he gave himself a new challenge with unknown ramifications for what is soon to be Silicon Valley’s ... Continue reading →
