***** OT *****
LK,
Did you write this? The stock that never goes down, Heyidiot.com, specializing in BUZZ:
Idiot Savants
By Larry Ellison, Mitchell Kertzman and David Roux
Maybe you've noticed: Internet stocks are trading at
all-time highs. Your colleagues are doubling their
salaries trading stocks online. Startup valuations are denominated in billions, and the
money is flowing like
wine down the palm-shaded streets of Silicon Valley.
Welcome to the wonder that is the World Wide Web.
We are concerned that you might not completely
understand this puzzling phenomenon, so we want to
share with you our thinking about a new venture we are
founding. This is the real skinny on Internet company
creation. It's all here: What the pros are doing, where the
smart money is going and the surprising shape of the
Internet Economy. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Our idea: Create a designer startup, carefully crafted to
combine the most popular Internet product categories
into one fetching investment vehicle. The company is a
Web software, e-commerce and online-trading business
rolled into one. The sole purpose of this endeavor is to
siphon vast sums of money from a trusting public to the
shareholders and employees of our new enterprise,
HeyIdiot.com. We call it a cash portal.
We've studied the complicated dynamics of successful
Web companies and applied the best practices to our
new business. HeyIdiot.com is tightly focused on
selling just one product: shares of HeyIdiot.com, which
will be offered for sale at our Web site of the same name.
This highly efficient, direct business model should
enable us to dramatically lower costs, speed time to
market and increase returns to shareholders.
By focusing solely on increasing our stock price, we can
avoid many management distractions and costs
associated with traditional businesses where employees
are required to design and build products, find
prospects, sell services and provide customer support.
We are eliminating product development,
manufacturing, sales, marketing, support and most G&A
functions, along with their associated expenses. We
hope these savings will let us more credibly argue that
our Internet business could, eventually, be profitable.
Our investment bankers are very excited about this
unique positioning.
Great companies innovate, and so will ours. We have
focused our business-planning efforts on product
pricing. Our breakthrough strategy is to introduce a
stock whose price can only go up. This startling
innovation is made possible by the unique
characteristics of the Internet business model – in which
no known metric can be used to gauge value. Because
history and comparables don't matter, we are free to
price our stock any way we want.
Let's give the people what they want – an Internet stock
that goes straight up and can't go down, because we
won't let it. The plan is simple. Customers can buy as
much stock as they want, but only at successively
higher prices. The bidding is fully automated, totally
online and conducted solely on our new state-of-the-art
HeyIdiot.com Web site. People can purchase shares so
long as they are willing to pay more for them than the
last person who bought some. The rapid growth and
bright prospects for all Internet businesses make this a
low-risk investment.
Our marketing program is devoted to generating buzz.
We plan to seed inane opinions about Internet-related
activities, repeated endlessly online, around sushi bars
and at industry trade shows by growing numbers of
increasingly less-informed people. At its peak, monster
buzz takes the form of mass hysteria. In a well-run
business, this should closely correspond to the timing
for a major secondary stock offering. In more traditional
businesses, marketing executives work to generate
product awareness, encourage repeat purchases and
build customer loyalty. Since we are only out for a quick
buck and not anxious to explain this scheme too
carefully to anyone involved, we are focusing instead
on buzz creation, buzz building and buzz management.
Our goal is to raise our overall share of buzz in the target
audience: ignorant but affluent online investors and
retail day traders.
Concerned about liquidity? Don't be. Whenever buyers
outnumber sellers, we founders have volunteered to sell
some of our own highly valued securities. Although a
great personal sacrifice, this should ensure orderly
trading, even as the stock price, buying interest and
trading volumes soar with creative buzz building.
We are hopeful that this orgy of greed will continue long enough for some large media
company executive to panic about his firm's anemic Internet strategy. In our vision, Big
Media Company then offers cash for all our shares and acquires a valuable online
brand,
our entire inventory of buzz and the empty shell of a business we are calling
HeyIdiot.com. The founders then retire from doing real work and become professional
venture capitalists.
Larry Ellison is chairman of Oracle. Mitchell Kertzman is CEO of Network Computers
Inc. David Roux is a partner at Silver Lake Partners, a technology buyout firm. Reach
them at sendmoney@heyidiot.com.
Mentioned in this article
PEOPLE
Larry Ellison Chaiman and CEO, Oracle
Mitchell Kertzman President and CEO, Network Computer
David Roux Chairman of the Board, Network Computer
COMPANIES
Oracle Redwood City, CA
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