My wife Claudine has officially launched Claudina's Kitchen (), her food blog, as well as her SF catering business. As our friends have known for years, Claudine is an amazing cook, focused on slow, seasonal, local, delicious and healthy foods, as well as the nutrition and health aspects of food. Plus she loves to entertain, and isn't fazed by cooking the same delicious meals for 2 or for 35 people, as she did last week for the Meez Fall event, so check it out.
I rarely blog about non-tech issues (or at all these days), but i was struck today by my lunch experience. I went with a friend to the "foodie" SF Ferry Building for lunch, and in an attempt to cut back on my Diet Coke habit, I grabbed a bottled water. However...
My first thought was that there was a high carbon tax on this choice since it was "New Zealand Water" (no local choice available), and my second thought was that I should really find a drinking fountain and a cup since this bottle was a waste of money and of resources. Of course, my friend immediately piled on, stating that he had given up getting bottled water, and was trying to get rid of it in his office as well. I joked that I needed to hide my purchase in case I received nasty comments or stares, just as folks who wear fur out in public used to receive - on the other hand, I could probably assuage my liberal guilt by buying a carbon off-set like a Terra Pass. The NYT has jumped on this similar trend recently with a series of articles such as the one here.
People can claim this is just another San Francisco over-reaction, or a yuppie trend that will soon fade, just as fur wearing has now become more acceptable. I'm not so sure - I think this is just the tip of the iceberg, and the first products which are going to get hurt on a nationwide level are going to be simple bottled water ones since there is no way in an industrialized nation to make the case that the tap water isn't a sufficient replacement. This will obviously be an issue for leading water companies like Nestle and Danone, but it will also affect Coke ($1.9B in 2006 water sales) and Pepsi ($2.1B in 2006 water sales), especially since they are looking at water to drive their growth engines as part of alternative beverages.
I originally thought that this will seriously diminish the value of the recent $4.1B Glaceau purchase by Coke, but I think it will less affected since there is a feeling that Vitamin Water users are getting something that's not easily found in water fountains or taps, whether true or not. Other bad trends for water:
This might turn out to be a passing fad, but my guess is we're just seeing the early signs, and it will significantly affect some companies, as well as open up opportunities for better solutions.
UPDATE: Nardelli is fired today (1/3/07), but is given $210M as an exit package - see post here.
(this was originally published in May 2006) I rarely comment on anything non-tech related, and I'm generally a big fan of capitalism, but as a shareholder of Home Depot (), I am sitting here in utter amazement over how CEO Bob Nardelli conducted the annual meeting this week. As a recap, Nardelli has been paid $245M by shareholders (including options) in 5 years as Home Depot's stock has gone down 12%, while its primary competitor, Lowes, has gone up 173%. BTW - this excessive pay is for a CEO who risked nothing by coming to Home Depot - it's not as if he started it out of his garage.
The meeting apparently played out like you used to see in Japan - a 30 minute long meeting, utter contempt for shareholders, physical intimidation of attendees, and no room for any debate on any issue, outside of Nardelli uttering the words "The Board Recommends You Reject This Proposal" over and over again. Amazingly, the Board didn't even bother to show up to the meeting, thus confirming their contempt for shareholders as well - simply outrageous and embarrassing.
NYT columnist Joe Nocera was actually at the shareholder meeting and has a devastating critique of it in today's paper (unfortunately behind subscription wall here, but currently available in full here), but you now appreciate the intelligence of GE's board in not selecting Nardelli as CEO. A key leadership attribute is how does a CEO handle adversity? Nardelli has an obsession with military-like terms, so we'll use a similar analogy - Cowards cut and run, while true leaders face their accusers and defend their actions. Guess which type we saw this week?
What will now happen is that the Board will terminate him over the next year or so, but will probably pay him hundreds of millions of dollars more in severance to do so, all of which is coming out of shareholder pockets. It would appear that there is no limit to the stupidity of Boards and to the greed of executives, which is especially timely coming the same week as the Enron verdict. The Home Depot BoD should be ashamed of their complicity in this entire process since at the end of the day, it's the Board's role to manage the CEO and they have totally failed.
As was predicted here last year (see post) after the disastrous shareholder meeting, highly overpaid Home Depot CEO Bob Nardelli was fired today by the Board of Directors. As a parting gift, the Board paid him an amazing $210M in severance (not to be confused with the tens of millions of dollars he has been paid so far), which would seem to be a little generous for a CEO who presided over a 9% drop in the stock price during his 6 year tenure while the overall market and Lowe's both significantly increased in value. Even funnier is that Nardelli can receive yet another $18M in "entitlements" over the next 4 years if he doesn't violate his non-compete - given his performance over the last 6 years, wouldn't you actually encourage him to go to a competitor?
Now it's time for the entire Board of Directors to resign, although I'm sure it will never happen since they would have to admit to effectively giving away huge sums of shareholder money. To reiterate, CEO's are like my children - they always want dessert and junk food, and it's up to the parents (in this case, the Board of Home Depot) to actually act like adults and not give in to CEO demands for these remarkably huge and risk-free pay packages for CEO's who create zero value.
With the new Meez site launched, large distribution partners coming online (e.g. try Meez on the Sportsline forums), and a real avatar/identity market emerging in the US, it's time to go raise money for the 3rd and hopefully, final time. Raising money can be an exhausting and sometimes frustrating process, but we're in a good position, and you actually can learn a lot about your business from investors who ask questions or offer suggestions you had never thought of when you're deep in the weeds.
To no one's surprise, HP General Counsel Baskins resigned today, continuing the utterly predictable saga at HP (as I have laid out for weeks), similar to watching a train wreck in slow motion - you just know you'll see the caboose anytime smashing into the rest of the cars.
Outside counsel Sonsini will drop away next, and the Board and company will declare itself "clean", apologize profusely one more time, and move on with Hurd as combined CEO/Chairman. And we'll never figure out how CEO Hurd could "forget" to read the critical report commissioned by the Board which detailed the illegal and unethical activities commissioned by HP.
The ever-amusing and increasingly bizarre HP soap opera continues to play out in a predictable manner (see earlier post) with Chairwoman Patricia Dunn now immediately resigning from the Board today (versus wandering out the door in January), although passing the buck on the way out by blaming her underlings for the disaster. CEO Hurd took over the Chair seat, which is not exactly a step forward in corporate governance, especially since he approving some of the allegedly illegal activities, but then said he didn't read the actual report that was created about the activities - huh? In addition to that foolishness, why does the "independent" investigator HP has appointed to look into the issue end up reporting to Hurd? How does that make any sense, although I suppose there is almost no one credible left on the board since neither the General Counsel nor outside counsel are clean in this episode. This sounds like it's going to get worse, not better, before we're done.
My father and I were discussing the saga today, and he made the astute observation that it just points out how out of touch with reality these corporate boards and executives often are. To think that there were actual conversations about planting covert operatives in newsroom cleaning staffs, sifting through peopl's trash, attempts to implant spyware on journalist machines, and the shadowing of suspected leakers around Silicon Valley - it's just staggering how a group of supposedly intelligent people could just drive the truck off the cliff.
As I have said before, I have no idea how the other HP players in this saga realistically survive this episode - it wasn't as if Dunn contacted the investigators herself. But I assume those players will be drummed out as the parade of law suits, congressional panels, and criminal investigations takes place. Plus, as an experienced tech executive told me yesterday, once a company really screws over a set of reporters, there won't be a positive article written on that company for a long time. HP could invent cold fusion this weekend, and still get shelled next week for other gaffes.
The downside to this episode is that it's not going to make it easier to recruit board members now that these guys have been dragged in the mud. The good news is that it finally pushed the option back-dating scandal off the headlines for a while - oh wait, Cablevision just admitted backdating stock options for a corpse - I guess it's back...
As I outlined in an earlier post, there was no way Hewlett Packard Chairman Patricia Dunn would survive the "pretexting" scandal. That having been said, the HP board totally wimped out and let her retain her board seat while having her step down at some arbitrarily decided time in the future, being Jan 1, 2007.
To the shock of all involved, it now looks like the stupidity involved in the drive to ferret out the leaks was far greater than anyone imagined outside of most people with IQ's below 10 who somehow believed the first explanation, kind of like the US drive to find WMD's in Iraq. The NYT is now reporting that it looks like HP-employed investigators attempted to install spyware software on reporters' computers and may have even followed them around to track down their sources, in addition to the general idiocy involved in the investigation. I assume this type of information will continue to expand as we hear more about it, as it always does.
Let's be blunt - Chairwoman Dunn should (and will) fully resign unlike this first attempt at gradual resignation, and most probably, the General Counsel who managed the investigation will do so as well. This is unfortunate since Silicon Valley doesn't have enough senior female executives, but you can't do these types of things and continue to be involved with public companies, especially those with formerly stellar reputations. There is a larger debate about the role of HP outside counsel Larry Sonsini (of Brocade stock option backdating fame), but that will not end up being relevant since my assumption is that he will be off the board shortly as well. It's unfortunate since we have lost track of the core issue that a board member was allegedly leaking information, but given the illegal behavior involved here, it's not a big surprise.
Apparently following the Bush administration's lead on ignoring the law, common sense, and basic ethics in search of leaked information, HP's "pre-texting" scandal continues to widen as more facts come to light (see NYT article here). It now appears that not only did HP search personal phone records of its own board members, but that it also allegedly illegally obtained phone records of up to 9 journalists who write about HP - maybe if that doesn't work, they should try "rendition" as their next option now that the CIA prisons have officially been revealed.
It's simply outrageous, even if HP will maintain that they didn't condone or approve of the actual illegal investigative tactic - it's simply hard to believe that HP/Dunn didn't specifically order the investigation into the journalists themselves, which is the really outrageous part of this entire disaster. The only rational thing to do is for Chairperson Dunn to resign since it was clear that she was the driving force behind this aggressive stance. There was a time when HP stood for ethical conduct, both externally and internally - it's time to return to that standard.
We have had a big couple of weeks at Meez.
The first launch was Dancing. We started introducing dance moves about 2 weeks ago, and it's been such a big hit that we've now launched a set of them (Moonwalk, Electric Slide, Booty Dance, Brush the Shoulder, BreakDance etc) since they really show off the power of an animated Meez, as well as provoke peals of laughter, as you can see from the ones below if you click on the images. If anyone has suggestions of more moves, please send them in - yes, the "Vogue" is coming...
The second announcement was the launch of our CAUZ brand of virtual clothing, which is our way to partner with non-profits to help them market to a younger, more wired audience. You can read the press release here, but the key win for us was getting so many well known brands (Outward Bound, Youth Noise, Music for America, etc) to agree to have their brands translated into virtual clothing and backgrounds. In addition to the CAUZ line, we also launched our first 2 indie band t-shirts for the bands Stroke 9 and the Pinder Brothers - we'll be doing a lot more of these items since it's a great way for fans to show their appreciation for a band by wearing a Meez-created band t-shirt on MySpace, Tagged or Live Journal. Finally, we added another Premium Collection partner with Blik (www.whatisblik.com), which is providing us with our first 3rd party backgrounds (see the colorful one below), some for free and others as premium items. For Blik, which is an incredibly cool provider of funky wall decals, this is another way to reach their college and twenty-something audience online where many of them are spending increasing amounts of time. Look for more to come as brands continue to look for ways to reach users online, and Meez is a great vehicle!
Gretchen Morgenson of the NYT today (unfortunately behind subscription wall here) has a pointed critique of the recently released Business Roundtable report on Executive Pay (download it here). With key data produced by so-called executive compensation "expert" Frederic Cook, the study states that growth in median total CEO compensation over the last 11 years was right in line with growth in company's capitalizations and in total shareholder returns - it is breathlessly reported on the Business Roundtable site as "Setting the Record Straight on Executive Compensation".
Seeing as this conclusion flies in the face of all common sense based on every trend in the last 10 years, Morgenson points out the obvious flaws in the reports conclusion, primarily that the report's definition of executive compensation does NOT include the following:
BTW: in many cases, those excluded categories make up over 50% of a CEO's compensation, so these are not minor exclusions.
When Cook is asked by Morgenson about these seemingly large holes in the report's conclusions, he apparently admitted that their exclusion made for an Apples to Oranges comparison, but that since he couldn't find that information in all cases, he decided not to include it, or because the information didn't fit neatly into the years studied, such as the stock option part - Huh?
This report is a joke, so I hope Cook was well paid by the Business Roundtable to produce it. It's too easy to point out the obvious conflict of interest in the organization which funded the report, with key members such as current Home Depot CEO excessive compensation poster boy Robert Nardelli (see earlier blog here about the breakdown of his stupendous pay package, which would appear much lower if we excluded over half of the pay categories, as Cook does).
I would feel better if the CEO's and their equally complicit Boards would actually be real men and just come out and say they deserved that much money, and if shareholders don't like it, they can sell the stock (a VC friend of mine is in favor of such a disclosure-based approach). But none of them have the cajones to actually do that since there really is no good way to defend such piggish pay packages, so they end up funding disingenuous reports so they can hide behind them.
It's embarrassing, and there is a growing possibility of an actual public backlash against the compensation excesses of this generation, which would be bad for business in general since it might limit the ability of true risk takers, such as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, to get fairly paid for their risk in starting companies.
Joshua Kennon writes a regular column for About.com titled Investing for Beginners and he recently penned a note entitled "Why Home Depot Shareholders Have Lost Their Mind" (link here). Mr Kennon is a self-styled value investor in the vein of Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffet, so it's interesting to see his defense of what I will politely call the "lavish" compensation scheme of Home Depot CEO Bob Nardelli. One should note that even Kennon doesn't defend the utterly idiotic shareholder meeting performance by Nardelli or the HD Board of Directors, as I had discussed here.
Nardelli has been awarded an incredible $250M in compensation ($125M of it in cash) since he joined Home Depot 5 years ago. During that time period, HD stock has dropped almost 50%, to $37 from $70. Kennon's seemingly rational defense is that it's the stock market's fault since it doesn't recognize that HD is actually a much better company now (see performance graphs ), with a tripling of net income on a lower number of shares & higher dividend, and that he'd be thrilled to see the CEO receive a package twice as large if Nardelli could continue to deliver on those results, stock price movement be damned.
Let's take a look at the pay package to see what motivates Nardelli. In the old days, Fortune 500 CEO's got reasonably large salaries, bonuses and perks, but the criticism was that their compensation didn't align with shareholders. So, following the lead of Silicon Valley, they added a large dose of equity-based compensation to "align shareholder interests" - however, they didn't reduce the base compensation at all, which defeats the entire point. This leads to the current Nardelli package, which is a "Heads, I win, Tails, You Lose" scenario for HD shareholders. If HD stock goes down, Nardelli does incredibly well ($25M a year) - if HD stock goes up, Nardelli makes an even larger sum of money ($50M+)- so where is the performance risk and the resulting shareholder alignment?
Mr Kennon makes the point that shareholders need to focus on long term results, not the short term stock moves and financial results (which is I suppose why Home Depot no longer publishes same store sales as they drop each month), and quotes the guru Graham in backing it up, making the point that now that the stock has plunged, the company is a great deal for value investors, which may be cold comfort for those HD shareholders without $25M pay packages. I generally agree - so as a shareholder, why are we compensating Nardelli at such a furious rate on an short term basis when his stock position (5,000,00 shares already owned) is going to be worth so much in the long run? Shouldn't his interests already be aligned with ours from a stock position? Doesn't $25M in cash on top of those stock awards seem a little bit excessive, even to the Gordon Gecko Greed is Good crowd? Let's remember that it's not as if Nardelli started the company, working out of his garage for years - he was awarded all of this by the Board in the last 5 years.
So I don't think HD shareholders "have lost their mind" when they criticize the Nardelli's insane pay package - I think that any self-titled value investor like Kennon "has lost his mind" to believe that companies must pay their CEO's at stupidly high levels for both short term AND long term performance. And I hold out the companies Kennon mentions, such as Washington Post and Wal-Mart, as prime examples of companies that pay competitive wages without simply pillaging shareholders, as the Board of Directors at HD has decided to do while shamefully refusing to actually meet with them at the Shareholders meeting.
Nardelli 2005 Compensation
Salary - $2.164M
Bonus - $7.0M
Restricted Stock Award - $14.6M
Long Term Incentive Payout - $2.4M
Other Comp - $539K
590,000 stock options - Black-Scholes value - $8.1M
Nardelli's Original Big Pay Outs (outside of his "usual" $25M in salary, bonus, stock, etc. each year)
$10M loan, 20% forgiven every year
3,500,000 options - Black-Scholes value - roughly $50M
Retirement Benefits - $4.5M a year
If terminated - $20M cash plus everything vests, etc.
When we first started Donnerwood in March of 2005, I bought our first set of wireless phones from Wirefly.com, the consumer site for Inphonic Seemed to me that the web was an efficient way to sell phones, and that their prices were better than almost anywhere else, even after understanding the low prices were due to rebates that could only be sent in during a certain 30-day window six months into your service. We bought 4 phones from them, but then gave up buying more after they wanted me to confirm some information before activating the last phone, but put me on hold for 65 minutes first - an amazing exercise in customer service. But I dutifully saved the earlier receipts and marked the dates in Outlook so that we could get the rebates from the first phones.
August rolls around, and we send in the rebates, with all of the necessary supporting documents - and we wait...and wait...and wait...5 months later, all we have received are some emails indicating that our rebates are in process and have even been approved, but we still don't have the money. Now how is this not an Eliot Spitzer-style issue? How long can it take to fill a rebate in the age of the Internet, especially when all of the supporting information is there and when we actually bought the phones directly from them, as opposed to another retailer? 1 month, 2? But 5 months and counting??
If I go to Costco or to Best Buy, they have gone out of their way to make rebates easier to file, but not at InPhonic. Oh yes, I forgot - Inphonic actually profits when consumers forget to send in rebates, don't have the proper docs, etc, so it's actually in their best interest, external pressure notwithstanding, not to go out of their way to make the rebate process more efficient.
So, like all examples of horrible customer service, do not buy product from them. It's simply not worth the pain, either trying to contact customer service, or in trying to get the rebates.
Since the new year has passed, the top tier Silicon Valley law firms have handed down their annual rate increases (similar to cable bills and private school tuition, they always seem to exceed inflation), which now means that many partners at these firms appear to be charging $550-$600+ an hour. I had to pull out the calculator for this one since there were so many zeros, but the resulting annual payment for a 40 hour work week would be almost $1.2M! For some reason, $400 an hour used to seem expensive, but not outrageous, while this latest number seems to me to be totally over the top.
Given that bandwidth and hardware continue to drop in price/increase in performance, and that commercial rents are still much lower than what took place in the last bubble, we're left primarily with personnel costs as the only increasing cost for any start up company. It's true that general hiring and employment costs continue to go up in general, at least in the Bay Area, but we're able to outsource or offshore activities to lower a lot of those operating costs, including 1/3 of our personnel here at Donnerwood - but not in the legal field...
Now I understand that there is specialized expertise involved here (but not that specialized - they're not doing brain surgery), and that the effects of mistakes due to poor judgment or representation can involve a penalty far higher than the measly $300 one pays for a 30 minute phone call, but doesn't it seem like there should be alternatives in today's World is Flat scenario? And yes, we all try not to use the partners very much unless we really need them so that it's not really that big a bill each month, but wow, it's still a mind boggling number for a start up when you're buying used furniture and sub-leasing office space to save money.
So what can you do? You can switch to a less prestigious firm where the prices are probably in the low $400 range, but the VC's aren't always comfortable with that. You can bring it in-house as soon as possible, where a General Counsel can not only handle much of the work formerly sent out to the firm, but he/she can also manage the outside firm with presumably greater expertise - but that's not always possible with earlier stage companies, especially since many lawyers are not known for their risk tolerance. And you can do much of the work yourself and pray that you got it right, but that can seem a little scary sometimes.
Or you can just stick with the deal you have with the big firm (no one ever got fired for choosing Wilson, Gunderson, Fenwick, Pillsbury, etc), attempt not to use them too much, and find other cheaper lawyers to help with deals while you grow enough to eventually bring it in-house. But why isn't there a firm hammering home the mantra - "same quality as the big guys, but lower price"? Or one which is aggressively using technology and/or outsourcing to lower the costs? There must be some way to reign in the constant increases in outside legal fees, just as new Internet start ups are finally starting to reign in the 5-6% standard fee paid to sell a house - but I haven't seen it yet.
Having spent a lot of time with Comcast business folks I have a huge amount of respect for their skills and intelligence. So I have to ask the obvious question as to why it makes sense to have such lousy customer service since I assume there is a economic reason for doing so.
I recently ordered digital cable, HBO, DVR, HD and high speed internet services from Comcast - that's about $150 a month, probably worth about $5,000 in life time value to Comcast. I get a 4 hour service window from 12-4 (why that makes sense in today's environment, no one knows since it was obvious I was the last customer of the day) - after 3 hours, I start getting nervous and I call them, where they tell me the installer will definitely be there before 4PM. At 4:15 with no word from anyone and no installer, I call again, where after being first put on hold for multiple minutes while they search for the dispatcher in SF, I am told that the installer will probably be there sometime after 5PM, but "that I would get a $20 credit for my problems". With that humorous statement in mind, I spent the next few minutes explaining how that wasn't going to work, but there didn't seem to be any way to reach a person with any authority, even after repeated attempts. So after leaving messages, having my call dropped, and speaking with at least 6 different Comcast reps, I cancelled the order and will continue with my DSL and satellite providers.
What I don't understand is the yield management issue here. In a highly competitive video and data environment, with 2-3 providers in each area (plus emerging Internet options), one would think that Comcast would go out of its way to make sure the initial experience for a new premium video & data customer would be a good one rather than rehashing the old "Cable Guy" horror movie. I realize everyone has to make their operating numbers and that installers cost money ($50/hour?), but my guess is that Comcast SF is running a little too lean on installers, or they need a better prioritization plan, since their inability to deliver service cost them a new customer who would pay $150 a month. Just mystifying to me.
As was first reported yesterday in Private Equity Week, and referenced in PaidContent.org, we closed a $4.3M B round of financing last month. Our lead investor is the Bay Area office of venture capital firm Battery Ventures and we're very pleased to have their support.
Now it's time to get a service out the door, so it will be a busy Holiday season
Blogging will become a little more erratic going forward since we're beginning our B Round fundraising process. We have a team I would put up against anyone, an alpha version of what will soon be a great entertainment service, and a healthy fundraising environment for consumer-facing companies, so I'm excited about our options, but now it's our job to convince the investors of the same things.
Unlike the last couple of years, it's becoming clear that the west coast market is tightening up for talented employees with experience in consumer-facing businesses. At the Casual Games conference, everyone seemed be hiring, with what I believe was Pogo.com actually making a plea for resumes from the panel. Given how many start ups are being funded by VC's right now, I think we'll see a tough labor market by Spring 2006, whether it's search, shopping, mobile, or digital media. This means companies really need to look at their overall compensation structures, as well as consider alternative options such as using off-shore firms and or offering more flexible work policies in order to attract and retain smart employees.
On that note, we're hiring for 5 positions right now, and it's a great place to work :). www.donnerwood.com
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