Changing the subject.......how many people were aware that our very own Softbank tried to woo the brother/owners of Silicon Investors recently?? Maybe this is old news, but, I was not aware of it til tonite. This is taken from the "front page" of SI:
QUOTE:
But Silicon Investor is winning critical acclaim, with
Internet World magazine dubbing it the "best financial
market site" on the Web and Barron's weekly rating it
among the top 20.
"If technology is your game, you won't find better discussion on the subject anywhere on the Internet," Barron's wrote. So who's behind this Web phenom? Well, like the scientist working the gears behind a black curtain in the Wizard of Oz, a pretty modest group of people.
Only three people work at Silicon Investor, the Dryer brothers, and a 26 year-old former administrative assistant named Jill McKinney, who the Dryers met through the Internet and hired as their Webmaster and pr spokesperson. Brad, who got a computer engineering degree from
Rice University in 1992, did the programming work for the site, and Jeff, 30, who got a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Missouri, designed the look of the site, and put together background information on tech companies. Within a year, their tech stocks site had gotten so much traffic and buzz that they had meetings with several major venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. The Dryers claim - and knowledgeable sources confirm - that at least two venture capital firms, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Softbank Ventures, were willing to back the Dryers with millions of dollars of financing in deals valuing their company at more than $4
million. Furthermore, in 1996, the Dryers said they had a letter of intent to sell the company to Web navigation guide Excite Inc. for 900,000 shares of Excite stock, valued at more than $5 million. (An Excite spokeswoman declined to
Any one of those deals could have set the Dryers up to be millionaires, or even better. Another Internet start-up, Hotmail, took on its first venture financing at the time the Dryers were first getting offers, and at the end of December Hotmail was purchased by Microsoft Corp. in an all stock deal reportedly worth at least $300 million. But the Dryers turned down the venture financing and
takeover offers because they thought better deals would come later and because they didn't want to lose control.
Indeed, late in 1997, they moved from San Jose to Overland Park, Kan., to be closer to their family, and get away from all the deal inquires flowing in from venture capitalists and other Internet companies. In a testament to their meager means, Brad Dryer said he had to get his mother to co-sign his lease on a new apartment because the
landlord didn't believe he had any income. "We just really have decided we don't want to be acquired at this point," Jeff Dryer said.
The snubs have left bad feelings with some influential investors, who wonder if S.I. can make it without bigger backing.
"We had a great deal of interest in Silicon Investor and were ready to make an investment," said Charley Lax, managing director of Softbank Technology Ventures, an investment arm of Japan's Softbank Corp. Lax explained that Softbank's goal was to link Silicon Investor to its other popular Web sites, including online technology news from Ziff Davis, a Softbank subsidiary; the Yahoo! navigation guide, in which Softbank was an investor; and INVESTools, a highly rated investment newsletter site that Softbank backs. (Technology trade
magazine publisher Ziff Davis supplies content to MSNBC.) But Lax says that Silicon Investor "did not see its way to deal with us clearly."
Since the deal collapsed more than a year ago, Lax says he hasn't talked to the Dryers, considering them "unfundable." Furthermore, Lax and others said that Silicon Investor could get hammered if it doesn't raise money and beef up marketing as other big players move more aggressively into stock discussion boards. Chief among the new rivals is the Motley Fool, a popular investment discussion area on America Online,which last year beefed up its formerly tepid Web site, and
Yahoo!, operator of the Web's most popular site, which three months ago launched discussion boards for more than 8,000 stocks. "I think they've created a great asset," Lax said. "But without partners, I don't think these guys will be able to make it happen," he added.
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