IMHO, both companies have stellar management teams.
Both companies have stellar teams and excellent financial backing. It is not worth getting into a pissing contest over nuances of the management teams issue (although I think I could possibly justify a position different from yours on the matter).
Before you conclude that PlanetRx has a meaningful edge here, please cough up $2.95 and read the October 1998 Fortune article about just how powerful the Kleiner Perkins keiretsu really is. Here is a teaser, but it is a long and copyrighted article, so I have included a link to the whole thing.
<<For more than three years, Scott Kauffman fended off phone calls from recruiters. This was in the mid-1990s, when Kauffman was known as one of the few executives in the media business who could make sense of this new thing called the World Wide Web. Non-tech companies wanted him as their Internet guru. Media conglomerates wanted him to help figure out how the hell to turn old media into new media. Kauffman, the vice president of online services at CompuServe, wasn't interested.
Then one day came a different kind of call. Kauffman remembers it this way: "This guy on the phone sounded like a radio announcer, and it was like his voice was coming through the fog. He said he'd been hired by Kleiner Perkins to recruit me as CEO of one of their companies." Kauffman hung up, turned to his wife, and announced, "Honey, this is it. That was Kleiner Perkins."
For people looking to hit it big in the exploding world of high tech, the name Kleiner Perkins can have that effect. Kauffman quit his job, sold the house, packed up the family,and moved to Palo Alto to become chief of AdKnowledge, an Internet advertising startup funded by KP.
Silicon Valley is rich with top-tier venture capital firms like New Enterprise Associates,Sequoia, Mayfield, Institutional Venture Partners, and Accel. But none has the same let's-pull-up-stakes-and- head-for-California magnetism as KP. By the magic of its name, Kleiner Perkins gets to see many of the Valley's most promising companies before they seek funding from rival investors, a golden edge in a market where too much money is chasing too few deals. KP's name helps attract skilled executives to its ventures in Silicon Valley, where such talent is both desperately scarce and widely thought of as the No. 1 factor in determining whether a company sinks or swims. It figures that America's most famous VC firm would have the industry's only celebrity venture capitalist, John Doerr.
Founded in 1972, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers got famous in a hurry by funding pioneering businesses that today are familiar names- -Genentech, which almost single-handedly launched the modern biotech industry; Sun Microsystems, which spearheaded the world's shift from mainframe to client-server computing; Compaq Computer, the PC maker that rose to unseat IBM; and Lotus, the king of the PC spreadsheet.
Only recently has KP hit jackpots that have given it cachet beyond any other VC firm. Beginning in 1994 with Netscape, KP has funded some of the most important and richly valued companies to have emerged from the Internet-- Amazon .com, @Home, AOL, and Excite, to name a few. It's done so with a strategy almost perfectly suited to the Web boom: nurturing alliances and partnerships among the companies it creates, weaving a web of relationships so dense you need a map to find your way (which is why we've provided one on the opposite page). Other VCs talk of building "networks" or "families" of companies, but KP speaks of a keiretsu, a metaphor Doerr came up with in the 1980s,when everyone thought Japanese conglomerates would eat American tech companies for lunch.
Despite the buzz, few people not directly associated with Kleiner Perkins know much about how it works. Only after lots of digging, for example, will you uncover the extensive synergy and communication among companies in the KP keiretsu--far more than exists, say, among divisions at many large companies...>>
library.northernlight.com
In aggregate, I suspect the keiretsu may be larger and more powerful than MSFT.
IMHO, the defining difference between the two may actually turn out to be that PlanetRx is cozying up to Big Pharma advertising. Big Pharma has lots of money, but this may taint the site in the eyes of physicians and managed care organizations. Both of the latter despise DTCA. It is unclear what Drugstore.com's philosophy in regard to DTCA will be.
PlanetRx also still needs to do some sort of deal with a major land-based drugstore chain.
Best Regards,
Tom
P.S. Do you really think it is wise to have separate threads for PlanetRx, Soma, Drugstore.com, YourPharmacy, etc? Even though I am leaning towards investing in Drugstore.com, I still need to know what is going on with the others. It will be a pain to have to cover four different SI threads. Why not keep it all here? |
