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Strategies & Market Trends : Market Gems:Stocks w/Strong Earnings and High Tech. Rank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SMALL FRY who wrote (71260)	11/12/1999 9:33:00 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 120523

Mr. Niche Guy. His platters on this digital smorgasbord include Metricom's wireless modems; the Go2Net portal and the Priceline and Mercata shopping sites; Steven Spielberg's films at DreamWorks, Barry Diller's cable channels and Geraldine Laybourne's Oxygen Media for digital femmes. At last count, Allen had stakes in 125 firms. Each year their top brass gathers for a confab of cross-pollination. The vehicle for these investments is Vulcan Ventures, founded by Allen in 1990 and based in Bellevue, Wash. It is headed by William Savoy, 35, who went to work for Allen as a young pup in 1988 and rose to the top job at Vulcan within a few years. "Vulcan provides just what venture capital funds once promised and no longer deliver: abundant and patient capital," says William McKiernan, founder of two Weblets that landed Allen's backing. Allen let him keep 30% of each site, the Beyond.com sales site and back-office processor CyberSource. Nor did McKiernan ever feel pressured for quick returns. Venture capitalists must worry about limited partners, but Paul Allen has to please only himself. In the pantheon of latter-day J.P. Morgans, Paul Allen stands apart from, say, cable king John Malone or Web-bettor Masayoshi Son. Malone has built a far bigger empire aimed at broad audiences. But Malone is fueled by the art of the deal, swapping and shifting and sheltering assets to get investors to ratchet up their value; rarely does he think about the consumer. Masayoshi Son is all-Web, all the time, with stakes in scores of sites and related ventures. Owning bandwidth is not a big part of his game. Paul Allen's portfolio is quirkier and more personal. It should be: He has invested more than $5 billion in Charter entities; he raises cash by selling some Microsoft stock but more often pledges the stock as collateral for loans. But at times it seems his moves aren't about money at all--they are about illuminating the world and enriching life at home; they are about fun. How else to explain putting up $130 million to help build a $430-million stadium for his Seattle Seahawks?