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Technology Stocks : Internet Capital Group Inc. (ICGE) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LOGAN12 who wrote (890)	12/19/1999 10:03:00 PM
From: Islander99	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4187

Here is the Cramer piece. By the way, he has spoken publicly about being 2% up last year, but I believe he also said in a recent Yahoo chat session he is 26% up this year. =============== State of the Web: It's the People at the Top that Count By James J. Cramer 12/19/99 3:25 PM ET Sometimes I have to do everything I can to contain myself when I find the right stock. I'm on Fox News Channel a lot and am at my keyboard constantly, and I freely admit I get carried away when I find something that seems perfect for this environment. So on Friday, when I was doing some promos for Fox about the special shows we have coming up (and believe me they're rocking, so get the dish and watch, because I'm being grilled on one of them and we have a rocking panel on the other), I found myself almost unable to show even the least bit of objectivity about Internet Capital Group (ICGE:Nasdaq - news). This stock has it all for this market. It has the right people, the right companies, the right mix (unlike CMGI (CMGI:Nasdaq - news), which is a pastiche of companies, this one is all B2B) and most of all it's Matt Jacobs' biggest win in his B2B Rotisserie League. It is that league, by the way, that caused my fund to take as large a position in Internet Capital as we have. I was trying to make a joke about the symbol, but I couldn't pull it off. ICGE, I said, was really "I see G.E. (GE:NYSE - news)" -- as in, "I see the next G.E." But I decided that nobody would get that reference so I scrapped it. And it presumed that this $30 billion company would grow to $500 billion, which is quite a presumption, even for this presumptive individual. Why am I so high on this one? People. I look at the people who are running this show and I see all of the people who got the Net early. I'm talking about guys like Julian Brodsky, an important Internet Capital director, and vice chairman from Comcast (CMCSK:Nasdaq - news), who is one of those hard-nosed businessmen that don't much exist in this space. (I may be angry at Comcast for not picking up our show, but that doesn't preclude me from praising the brains behind the outfit!) Or Doug Alexander, a guy I met when he was at Reality On-Line in 1997, that I wanted desperately to recruit for TSC because he understood where the Net was going before the Net. He plays a huge role at Internet Capital and is fantastic. Or how about Tom Phillips, who is the head of Deja.com, one of Internet Capital's portfolio companies? When we were starting TSC, Tom reached out to me to encourage me to pursue this. He got it very early on. He's another winner in this space. The amazing thing is that these guys are just the tip of the iceberg. This company has more good people up top than just about any dot-com you can find. And in the end that will determine whether a company wins or loses in this space. Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq - news) and AOL (AOL:NYSE - news) had that edge. They had and have the best people running the joint. You may not think Amazon (AMZN:Nasdaq - news) can ever make money, but Bezos has a fabulous team, too. Having that team is what it's all about. That's exactly what Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq - news) has, what Sun Micro (SUNW:Nasdaq - news) has, and what Intel (INTC:Nasdaq - news) has, and, most similarly, what G.E. has. It's what all the great ones have. Usual caveat: Internet Capital is already so high that it has to have a pullback before it can get to the next level, if only to shake out the nonbelievers. I'm looking forward to buying more when it does.