The reason Michael Hirschorn is not making an insane amount
of money on IPOs is because he can't see the ink from the
dead trees. He laments about peckings orders, envy, and
old culture while at the same time completely
ignoring his own advice.
One of the greatest words of wisdom one can offer is,
do the obvious. Create a site similar to garage.com,
take 5% of all money raised, hire a bunch of ex-hollywood
gophers and have a full time staff pitching well-structured
movie scripts to hollywood studios. They are paying upwards of $2M
per script, and $100k will keep two dozen USC and UCLA film
students in kibble and rice for a year. The only upfront development
costs is using Fusion 4.0 to copy the garage.com site and
do a global substitute of all the names. Heck, pitching
first round funding to VCs is basically equivalent to pitching
scripts to film execs.
New Yorkers crack me up.
Greg
Grlygrl201@aol.com wrote:
>
>
> Retreating Under the Guise of Good Intentions
>
> By Michael Hirschorn
>
> To read this diary from the beginning go to
> http://www.slate.com/diary/99-03-30/diary.asp?iMsg=1
>
> Day 3: Wednesday, March 31, 1999
> No one I know is discussing any of this. In New York these days,
> Internet fever is in full bloom. There were lots of bitter, bitchy
> comments about a Times article on Monday about New York-based Internet
> successes, most of them even more improbable than the Silicon Valley
> ones of the past years and months. People seemed particularly annoyed
> about the business section's front-page photo of Nancy Evans, a
> veteran of the dowdy book business who had just made some insane
> amount of money on the iVillage IPO, mugging smugly while
> gesticulating broadly with a huge stogie. This was simply outrageous,
> and prompted a number of calls from dead-tree media pals of mine
> announcing that they were going off to make their first billion. Hey,
> if "fucking iVillage" (as it's invariably called) can do it, we can
> too. Everyone used to have a screenplay going; now we've all got URLs
> on the brain. Me too. I've been meeting with local Web honchos,
> marinating in the lingo, marveling at the way the old pecking order
> has been not so much overturned as rendered thoroughly irrelevant. Web
> culture is reminiscent of nothing so much as that time in the '80s
> when an institution called Maharishi University somewhere in the
> Midwest announced that all the students would get together and
> levitate the school. This time we're all students: The new Web
> mandarins know they're peddling a form of BS, and we know it, and they
> know we know it. But if we all believe in it, the thing just might
> float. I never found out what happened at Maharishi.
>