The Deal's Mary Kathleen Flynn speaks with Greycroft's Alan Patricof about toughing it out through economic cycles
08:57
Lazard's Parr and Sullivan Cromwell's Cohen on the transformation of Wall Street
Gary Parr, deputy Chairman of Lazard and H. Rodgin Cohen, chairman of Sullivan Cromwell LLP both spoke at The Deal's 2009 M&A Outlook conference about the transformation of Wall Street. In this video Parr and Cohen project their outlook of what the banking landscape will look like over the next year and discuss what changes will be made to the regulatory system.
President Obama's $150 billion commitment to public infrastructure projects could prove a boon to private investors. And it's not just roads, bridges and tunnels targeted for investment. Broadband expansion, energy grid upgrades, renewable energy projects and other 21st-century infrastructure projects are also on the agenda. In this edition of Inside The Deal, former Massachusetts Governor William F. Weld expands on his recent article in The Deal magazine titled "Going private 2.0." Weld, a partner in the New York office of McDermott, Will & Emery LLP, tells Suzanne Stevens that a perfect storm of events, including crumbling infrastructure and deteriorating state and local budgets, has created an environment in which significant public-private partnerships can thrive. See the video below or download it at iTunes.
Alan Patricof has ridden high tech's booms and busts from the advent of the computer age to the rise of the Internet. Which is why his perspective about the latest industry spasm is worth considering. Indeed, although Silicon Valley's venture capital titans have hogged the limelight over the past decade, few have Patricof's depth of experience in watching -- and weathering -- the cycles of investment in technology that periodically ripple across the U.S.economy, flattening some businesses as they create others. See www.thedeal.com/techconfidential for the full article.
07:57
Inside The Deal: NYC Web 2.0 attendees react to crisis on Wall Street
How is the technology industry reacting to the Crisis on Wall Street? In this episode of Inside The Deal, Mary Kathleen Flynn speaks with luminaries at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City, including Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, Web 2.0 conference organizer Tim O'Reilly andLonelygirl15 creators Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried.
"How can we use this technology to solve real-world problems?," ponders Tim O'Reilly, who coined the term Web 2.0 four years ago when he hosted a San Francisco conference on the topic. "There's been a lot of focus on silly consumer applications, like Facebook throwing sheep," says O'Reilly in a video interview from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City last week. "Meanwhile we have economic meltdown, global warming, oil price shocks, terrible education in this country, dysfunctional politics," says O'Reilly. "What are we doing as an industry to apply our intelligence to solve these problems? I'd love to see a lot more focus in this community on moving away from more things for people to consume and really tackling the hard problems of the world." O'Reilly points out that the biggest companies in the computer industry began with lofty goals. Microsoft Corp. aimed to put a computer on every desktop, and Google Inc. sought to organize all the information in the world. "Finding a problem that's ...
07:28
M&A Outlook 2009: Georgetown's Pitofsky on antitrust under Obama's administration
At The Deal's M&A Outloook 2009 conference Robert Pitofsky, professor of antitrust & trade Georgetown University addressed how antitrust enforcement will change during the Obama administration.
One of our last videos of our Decade of the Deal series pays a visit to Rodgin Cohen, the bank lawyer and Sullivan & Cromwell managing partner who Andrew Ross Sorkin in his new "Too Big to Fail" describes as "one of the most influential and yet least well-known people on Wall Street." Well, Cohen is pretty familiar to us at The Deal, not least for his role in many of the most important banking transactions of the past thirty years. But 2007 and 2008 provided the kind of challenges that even Cohen, who also had a history of crisis management, found unprecedented. Indeed, he proved ubiquitous throughout the tangled sequence of bailouts and bankruptcies last year, from orchestrating various sovereign wealth infusions to advising failing firms such as Bear Stearns Cos., Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, AIG and Wachovia, not to say the likes of Morgan Stanley and Goldman, Sachs & Co. It was quite a stretch. In Sorkin's book, people are always saying: Somebody call Cohen. In this clip, Cohen discusses some of the ...
Sullivan & Cromwell LLP managing partner Rodgin Cohen says the steps that had been taken after the failure of Bear Stearns & Cos. may not have been aggressive enough, but the fallout after the failure of Lehman Brothers was, "just unpredictable." "I just assume and don't know that it was thought that with that period of time that the impact of a failure of a major institution could be understood, to me if that was the view, it was a major mistake," Cohen states.
John Glynn of PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Jeffrey Schmidt of Linklaters spoke with The Deal's William McConnell at The Deal Economy 2010 about Obama's increased enforcement of antitrust and its effect on dealmaking and accounting standards.
"We call the shows that we produce 'social shows,' and they're very different from a TV show or a film," says Miles Beckett, a creator of YouTube hit "Lonelygirl15" and the CEO of Eqal Inc., a production company he co-founded earlier this year with fellow "Lonelygirl15" creator Greg Goodfried. "The way that you actually construct the narrative, the way that the plot points flow over the course of the week, the way the site interplays with the video, the way the community works together and talks to the videos and talks to the characters, is all different," Beckett tells Tech Confidential in our Behind the Money video interview with Beckett and Goodfried, who is president of Eqal. Over the weekend, Beckett and Goodfried debuted their new online video show, a serial drama called "LG15: The Resistance." Including some of the original characters -- but not the leading role of Bree -- the new show is a bit like "Hamlet" meets "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" while working on the "Blair Witch Project" in the ...
07:05
Get Satisfaction's Lane Becker on Web 2.0-style customer service
At least one startup is using Web 2.0 technology to do something more ambitious than tossing virtual sheep: Get Satisfaction uses social networking to provide customer service to companies. "We help companies lower the costs associated with customer service while also fostering more engaged, more satisfied customers by using social tools," says Get Satisfaction co-founder and president Lane Becker in a Behind the Money video interview. The idea behind Get Satisfaction is to set up a "third-party space" where customers can talk about different products and services. Companies can choose whether or not they want to participate in the discussion. Currently, 7,000 companies are being discussed on Getsatisfaction.com, with half the companies actively participating, according to Becker. " Depending on the type of company, their customer support e-mail drops overnight 20% to 85 percent," he says. "At the same time they're building up their community." Get Satisfaction is moving faster to monetize ...
David Hinkel of Towers Perrin, Jim Rosenthal of Morgan Stanley, and Bryon Rubin of CBS Corp. spoke at The Deal Economy 2010 conference. In this video Rubin speaks to The Deal's Suzanne Stevens about restructuring after the acquisition of CNET. Rosenthal adds his experience of restructuring at Morgan Stanley after the Smith Barney deal.
Sullivan & Cromwell LLP managing partner Rodgin Cohen says that one of the great myths of The Great Recession is that the abolition of Glass-Steagall was responsible for the financial crisis. Cohen says the origin of the financial crisis was actually unregulated mortgage bankers and brokers. See the video below or download it at iTunes
Someone might want to check technology entrepreneurs Kevin Ryan (left) and Dwight Merriman for steroids. Since selling DoubleClick Inc., where Ryan was CEO and Merriman was co-founder and chief technologist, to Hellman and Friedman LLC for $1.1 billion in 2005, they have coached not just one but half a dozen startups under the AlleyCorp LLC franchise, which they describe as a network of affiliated companies. (Meanwhile, Google Inc. bought DoubleClick for $1.3 billion earlier this year.) For more see www.TheDeal.com
General Electric Co. (NYSE:GE) has spent more time in 2009 divesting businesses than buying them. Whether the trend continues in 2010 depends on stability of the broader economy and the health of its lending arm GE Capital. According to Duncan O'Brien, GE's general manager of global business development, the focus over the past several months has been on retaining cash. - Suzanne Stevens
Cadbury plc (NYSE:CBY) executives and British government officials have repeatedly slammed Kraft Foods Inc.'s (NYSE:KFT) $16.3 billion hostile bid for the U.K. confectioner. Most recently the British Secretary warned Kraft (The Deal Pipeline subscription required) against trying to "make a fast buck." But John Briggs, co-chair of the antitrust practice group at Axinn, Veltrop and Harkrider LLP, says the backlash against Kraft may be as much about culture as it is about price. - Suzanne Stevens
The M&A landscape has changed dramatically since the rules governing merger reviews were adopted in 1992. that's one reason why the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are reviewing the Horizontal Merger Guidelines. As Michael Cohen, an antitrust partner with Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP, writes in the current issue of The Deal magazine, "the guidelines attempt to give corporations and counsel transparency and predictability regarding merger clearance." In this edition of Inside the Deal, Cohen says, unfortunately, the guidelines in their current form make those objectives difficult to achieve.See the video below or download it at iTunes. - Suzanne Stevens
06:42
M&A Outlook 2009: Linklaters' Rees and Grant Thorton's Beecy on cross-border M&A
At The Deal's M&A Outlook 2009 conference, Nick Rees, co-managing partner of the corporate M&A group at Linklaters LLP, and Paul Beecy, a tax partner at Grant Thornton LLP, discussed cross-border dealmaking and investments by BRIC countries -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- in U.S. businesses.
Avaya Inc.'s Mohamad Ali had little time to settle in after becoming senior vice president for corporate development in July. Four days after the former IBM Corp. (NYSE:IBM) dealmaker started, Avaya made a $475 million stalking-horse bid for a unit of bankrupt Nortel Networks Corp. The enterprise communications provider was the victor in a heated auction with a bid nearly double its original price. Even as a complex integration is underway, Ali continues to scan the landscape Avaya's next target. - Suzanne Stevens
Not finding what you want? View results from YouTube.
Comments