Split Between Silicon Investor
And Analyst Spurs Acrimony
March 12, 1999
By JASON ANDERS
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION
Silicon Investor and its frequently quoted market analyst abruptly severed ties this week, in an acrimonious split between the financial discussion forum and the man who generated significant publicity for the site.
Tom Taulli says he was fired late Monday
from his job as a writer and market analyst
for the Web site. A spokesman for
Go2Net, Silicon Investor's parent company,
would say only that Mr. Taulli no longer works for Go2Net, but declines to say whether he was fired.
What's more, Mr. Taulli says the company on Monday also canceled stock options on 34,000 shares, after accounting for a stock split, that could have been worth $2.5 million based on Go2Net's closing stock price of $84 Thursday. The Go2Net spokesman declines to comment on Mr. Taulli's compensation. Mr. Taulli says he plans to fight to have the options reinstated.
Mr. Taulli says he was told he was being let go because of a dispute over a vacation he took in Hawaii last week. Company officials contend Mr. Taulli left town without warning them he would be away, he says.
Mr. Taulli wrote a daily column for Silicon Investor and a weekly column for StockSite, another Go2Net unit. He says part of his role as a Silicon Investor columnist-and a significant reason the site wanted to hire him- was to act as a market analyst for media inquiries. Indeed, Mr. Taulli has been quoted in scores of stories-mostly about initial public offerings-since he began writing for Silicon Investor in July 1998, giving the site valuable publicity.
For its part, Go2Net says Mr. Taulli wasn't an official employee, but rather a free-lancer with the title of "market analyst for Silicon Investor."
Mr. Taulli says he was shocked to learn about his termination. "Up until Monday night, there was no complaint, no warning," Mr. Taulli says. "We had a real good relationship."
Mr. Taulli, 30 years old, has become something of a celebrity in the IPO market, often popping up in newspaper stories and on television to talk about hot new offerings. But he acknowledges his rise to fame originally had more to do with media interest than with his talents as an analyst. He says he hasn't had much formal training in investment banking, except for an undergraduate degree in finance, and says he learned most of what he knows just by poking around the Internet.
After college, Mr. Taulli worked briefly as a
broker for Baraban Securities, which was
acquired in 1997 by InterFirst Capital, of Los
Angeles. He bounced around between a few
jobs before going back to school, and during
his second year of law school he started a
Web site where he occasionally published his
thoughts on IPOs. His writing drew the
attention of some financial sites, and in 1997
he began working as a spokesman for IPO Monitor, a Calabasas, Calif., firm.
"It started slow, but late last year it really took off and I was getting a ton of calls" from reporters, Mr. Taulli says. "Soon I was on CNN."
The media attention is what got him the job with Silicon Investor, he says, but his complex relationship with Go2Net started earlier.
He began working as a regular columnist for Go2Net's StockSite in October 1997. At the time, he was writing a market analysis column for TechWeb (www.techweb.com), a job he still holds. TechWeb is owned by CMP Media, a Manhasset, N.Y., publisher.
Mr. Taulli says that as compensation for that work he was given options to buy, adjusting for a stock split, 1,500 shares of Go2Net stock at $1.50 a share (the stock was trading around $4 at the time). He says he exercised those options on Tuesday and sold the stock-his first opportunity after learning he had been fired-for a net profit of $121,500.
"I didn't want to waste any time, given what had happened with my other options," he says.
Mr. Taulli sold his remaining Go2Net stock -- 6,300 shares-later in the week for about $531,000. The stock was part of compensation he received for his work with yet another Web site, HyperMart, which Go2Net bought in August 1998. HyperMart provides free Web pages to businesses.
Mr. Taulli says the only compensation he has received from Go2Net for his work at Silicon Investor is about $1,000 in cash, which was part of a $500-a-month salary agreement that went into effect at the beginning of the year, and severance pay of $200.
Going forward, Mr. Taulli says he will continue to write for TechWeb and has started a new part-time writing job for a Ziff-Davis Web site. Meanwhile, a book he has written, "Investing in IPOs," was recently published by Bloomberg Personal Bookshelf.
He says he also plans on concentrating more of his energy on a company he recently founded, Examweb.com, which makes test-preparation software for bar exams.
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