He, along with Mark Cuban & potentially a few others will likely be part of the few of this era remembered many decades from now when history gets consolidated into a few figures, much like Gordon Moore of Intel & William Shockley of the Mountain View of the 1950's.
You have to give Mark credit for doing a good job of snowing and playing Yahoo that does take skill.
Look if Steve Jobs had grown up in, say, Iowa USA, had strong family ties that prevented him from even thinking about moving to Silicon Valley, where would he be today?
If Bill Gates's mother wasn't on the board of the Red Cross he'd never have the IBM connection that gave him the contract. (Forget as well that he was the right age at the right time as well).
Notoriety and wealth is always outsized relative to actual capabilities.
Was watching Bloomberg on 60 minutes. Sure Mike is a really smart guy. Worth 40 billion or whatever. But compared to a smart guy who is worth 3 million or in debt he isn't that much smarter (Edit: I mean as a percentage ..). It's always been like this.
I am not ever jealous that people have luck and great success. But I am typically annoyed at how other people (press, pundits, media, bloggers) give them accolades that essentially reduce to 'wow this guy is really smart capable' w/o acknowledging any luck at all.
How unsuccessful could someone be if they were extremely talented and hard-working, but had little luck. How far can luck push someone with no ability or desire? I suspect luck plays a greater role in our lives then we are willing to admit, even though it can be mitigated to some effect.
Homeless level bad.
> How far can luck push someone with no ability or desire?
Extremely far.
I have seen examples of both, luck is a huge factor, and it comes in many guises (timing, circumstances, meeting the right person and so on).
> How unsuccessful could someone be if they were extremely talented and hard-working, but had little luck.
Warren Buffet has a concept called the Ovarian Lottery. Why should someone's kid get gobs of money simply for being born into that family? He hates it, and for that reason isn't leaving billions for his kids, just handfuls of millions.
By being born in the US, you've already basically won, as your poverty line would be luxurious in many other countries. If he wasn't born in the US or a handful of other countries, even with the same drive and motivation he had, he wouldn't have been able to be successful like he has been because far more time would be spent seeking out food and basics of living.
I wish he would just shut up sometimes and stop being so avuncular and precocious.
He is leaving enough money to his kids to be able to have no financial issues and not having to work and be able to enjoy a nice life. And they are also getting a big halo boost just because they are his kids. Make no mistake about that. (I'd take that over $5 million in cash easily..)
Also he himself doesn't appear to see much value in all of his billions other than the fame that it gets him. He appears to enjoy it nominally and likes being well know and doing business much better. So he is making a value judgement as well based on what 'floats his boat' personally and marrying it to some concept that makes him appear to be so much like a common man.
If money is not that important to him, then why not give it away now and not just to charity?
Please get me a couple billion dollars if it's so easy. Thanks.
What is the last time you went to 'broadcast.com'?
That deal shouldn't have happened because there was no substance to what was sold (ok, fault of the buyer, a certain company whose name starts with Y).
For some more background:
Regardless of net contribution to the good of society, one deal is one deal. Cuban wouldn't have gotten rich if he didn't have stock to sell to Yahoo (one deal), Brin/Page wouldn't have gotten rich if they didn't have and continue to have stock in Google (one deal). Everything any of them did afterwards is leverage the success of the first deal.
Broadcast.com was an unprofitable sham with around half a million users. It only got bought because it was 1999 and people were acting crazy. It was shut down completely within 3 years.
Comparing the two is silly.
That's not what they said. They said that there was no substance to Broadcast.com specifically.
Are there places that track this info among VCs?
Generally speaking, the institutional limited partners (LPs; pension funds, endowments, family offices, etc.) that invest in venture and private equity incur pretty significant costs to get third-party information about actual performance by managers (i.e. VCs). From largest to smallest, LPs might generally: subscribe to Cambridge's data and use it in-house with full time staff, or hire a consultant (like Cambridge) to assess and help select their managers, or pay a fund-of-funds a fee (on the order of 1%) to do likewise.
The point of all that is: figuring out who is actually making money in VC, and guessing who is likely to continue doing so, is very non-trivial. It can't be done with publicly available, Crunchbase / Angel.co type data, much less a VC's own statements or portfolio listing page.
Don't get me wrong; Pitchbook is good and I pay $$$$ for it. But it serves a company-centric intel need, not an investment performance measurement need.
Can you please expand on this? Genuinely curious as to what the metrics are in this case.
What is staggering about that list? It looks pretty much like any list of a VC that has survived. One or two big but not tremendous plays like Dropbox and a lot of companies I haven't heard of before.
Sorry to snark, but the ability to vet opportunities isn't necessarily a skill that allows individuals to gain such a staggering list of investments. It's worth noting he improperly "vetted" Snapchat[0]. On the other hand, getting proprietary deal flow is. It would be easy to rank him at the top on that.