Posted on 4th August, 2009 | | Under : company, internet, investment, technology
Merrill Lynch thinks you’d be better off pretending that the Internet bubble never happened. When the firms chief technology strategist, Steven Milunovich, issued a report recently about the valuations o test stocks, he incorporated the usual metrics- price/earnings ratios, projected growth rates, that sort of thing- but added an unusual twist: His calculations were all made “ Excluding the bubble period”
This is but one example of a phenomenon sweeping the tech industry following the Nasdaq’s tumble: revisionist history. The venture capitalists are doing it, in some cases erasing all traces of their failed portfolio companies from the exhaustive lists on their websites. Sequoia Capital, for one, makes no mention of its $55 million stake in the now-defunct Webvan; ditto for Hummer Winblad and its $29 million investment in Pets.com. major media companies are doing it too: Disney, for example, he has removed virtually all reference to its deceased Go.com portal from its corporate information and Walt Disney Internet Group pages, despite the fact that both side on a site whose URL remains www.disney.go.com.
But the award for the most egregious case dotcom revisionism goes to a Chicago firm now called simply Divine, started by Platinum Technologies founder Andrew “Flip Filipowski. The firm was born at the height of the bubble as an incubator called Divine Interventures. Less than two years ago, Filipowski was busy extracting tax breaks from the city to build a campus for his fledgling firms, boasting that it would “help established Chicago as the leader in Internet business-to-business commerce and the tech mecca of the 21st century.” Today the renamed company bills itself as a software and services provider, the “About Divine” section of its website makes no mention of its origins as an incubator, and Filipowski himself declared in an interview earlier this year. “We’d like to eradicate people’s perception that we are incubator” Now that’s a trip in the way back machine, Mr. Peabody.
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