Hi Ray, what I though was most interesting was the connection to our jet-setter TJ (bolding is mine).
Jermoluk--or TJ, as he is known--a protege of Clark's, became a star in his own mind(and COO) at Silicon Graphics and then went on to ru i n Excite@Home. Recently Jermoluk stepped aside Ha! to avoid being squashed! to become chairman of that company and spend more time investing with Clark. The two men have an informal investing partnership called Helix (named after the patterns of smoke trails that they blow.
At that point, Helix had invested in only a handful of companies, including Shutterfly, a Web-based photo-finishing business, and Kibu, a Web portal for teenage girlswon't even comment. That Helix had invested in so few companies was not for a lack of potential deals. "I'm literally getting five to ten pitches a day now," says Jermoluk. "Most of them are just copycats or get-rich-quick deals."
As Bell began his pitch, he wondered whether the project would appeal to Jermoluk. After all, Jermoluk has a reputation as one of the smartest engineers in the Valley. If he didn't bite, that might call into question the whole model. "It took TJ about five minutes," said Bell. "He understood the kinds of problems we are trying to solve from wiring together cable networks at Excite@Home."
By meeting's end Jermoluk had agreed to invest. And he would bring the idea to Clark. "To me SmartPipes is the real thing," says Jermoluk. "A unique idea based on creating a superior engineering team. The risk here is execution, and I'll take that risk every time if the rest looks good." this is the funniest line of all considering @home under his leadership was such a dismal execution failure but had such potential--squandered. Now we can see why. Seems his focus is on entirely different things.
I loved this paragraph too:
How does SmartPipes intend to make this happen? The company's secret sauce is a package of extremely complex software containing zillions of instructions that facilitate communication between all manner of software and hardware.
Isn't that detailed descrition enough to get all your investment dough, Ray? Wonder if those were TJ's words. |
