AUGUST 2006
Newsmakers
Photo Courtesy of Google
Top Lawyer for Google
As the second lawyer hired at Google, Miriam Rivera, JD/MBA ’95, “quickly
made her bones as a tough, fast negotiator at the contract table,” reports
Law.com. “She hammered out deals with scores of companies that use Google’s
search tools on their websites or bought sponsored links on Google pages.”
Now vice president and deputy general counsel at Google, Rivera told
Hispanic Business magazine that she finds it exciting to work with “160
lawyers who are really talented people. What makes it hard is the incredible
amount of work and the time away from family every day.”
Asked for a brief explanation for her success, Rivera, 41, pointed to years
of hard work, beginning with her first job at age 14. Raised by a single
mother in Chicago, she won scholarships to Stanford for her undergraduate
work and then went on for law and MBA degrees.
“A lot of people want to become an overnight success,” she said, “but as far
as I’m concerned, it took me 28 years to get here.”
Corporate Counsel magazine name Rivera as one of 10 corporate attorneys
“most likely to be general counsel at a Fortune 500 company in the next five
years.” The publication Lawdragon named her to its list of “500 leading
lawyers in America.”
Defender of Experience
At a speech in London recently, Lord John Browne, chief executive of BP,
attacked the “cult of youth” in business. “When did you last see the word
‘old’ used as a positive attribute for anything other than works of art or
bottles of alcohol?” he asked his audience, according to the Financial
Times.
Browne, Sloan ’81, called mandatory retirement ages, which are permitted in
some countries but no longer in the United States, a “shocking” waste of
talent. He added that he did not disagree with and would comply with BP’s
policy by retiring in two years at age 60, but he added, “I do not intend to
spend my life on the golf course.”
Impulse Dream Job
When Microsoft veteran Bruce Ryan consented to meet with the headmaster of
his old prep school, he intended to politely listen to the school’s needs
for a technology officer. Alas, a math teacher/football assistant chose that
same hour to call the headmaster with news he was resigning. Before Ryan,
JD/MBA ’89, could get cold feet, he found himself asking the headmaster for
the job—not as technology officer but as eighth-grade algebra teacher!
In his fifth year at Memphis University School, the Memphis Commercial
Appeal caught up with Ryan and asked for a report card. “Loving it, loving
it, loving it,” the paper reported, describing the moment when his students
found the midpoint between two fractions.
Ryan added that his former job was great preparation. “We had a lot of smart
folks at Microsoft, but they were not always the most mature people in the
world.”
Dollar-Sign Names
If you were at Stanford in the late eighties and early nineties, you were
more likely than most people to be bitten by the dot-com bug and sign up for
an internet domain name.
Among those names are “farm.com,” which was registered by Kenneth Saxon
and Thomas Bird, both MBA ’88, and “sex.com,” which was among a portfolio of
4,000 domain names registered by Gary Kremen, MBA ’89. The fate of these two
monikers illustrates the Wild West nature of the internet.
Bird and Saxon formed Farm Capital Services and registered farm.com. With
internet revenues picking up last year, the two decided in March to donate
the name to the Boston Foundation, which promptly sold it to an online
supplier of pet supplies for $200,000, according to the Boston Globe.
Kremen purchased a match-making business called Match.com and lost track of
sex.com. He later found the name had been stolen by Stephen Michael Cohen, a
career criminal who allegedly made millions from it. In 2000, a California
court ordered Cohen to pay Kremen $65 million in damages and stolen revenue,
but Cohen fled the country leaving Kremen to possess his Rancho Santa Fe
mansion but no cash. In 2003, Kremen won a settlement from Network
Solutions, the domain registrar company that had mistakenly transferred
ownership of sex.com, and last October, Cohen was arrested in Mexico and
transferred to a jail in Silicon Valley. In January, Kremen sold sex.com for
what was reported to be “a minimum of $12 million” in cash and stock,
according to DN Journal, a trade publication for the domain industry.
In the meantime, the saga of Kremen and Cohen has been detailed in
publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Playboy to
Wired.
Former Consultant Heads Perth Biz School
Clients have been known to hire their consultants, which is how Tracey
Horton, MBA ’91, happened to become dean of the Faculty of Economics and
Commerce at the University of Western Australia in Perth. On a five-year
contract, Horton will oversee construction of a $45 million building to
house the university’s business school. She told Western Australia Business
News that her goal is to create deeper relationships with the business
community.
Before coming to Stanford Business School, Horton worked at Australia’s
Reserve Bank. After receiving her MBA, she was a consultant for Bain & Co.
and then Poynton and Partners and GEM Consulting.
Venture Capital Across Languages
Among the venture capitalists who now make house calls outside the Silicon
Valley is David Katsujin Chao, MBA ’93, cofounder of DCM–Doll Capital
Management. Raised in Japan by ethnic Chinese parents, Chao is comfortable
jetting to board meetings in both countries, although there is still an
occasional cultural snafu, reports the Wall Street Journal’s StartupJournal
website.
A party hosted by Doll Capital in Beijing went sour early this year when
attendees were offended by the firm’s business cards, which listed contact
information in Japanese and English but not Chinese. Despite numerous
business ties between China and Japan, World War II animosities occasionally
surface. Chao’s solution: Allow partners to use different business cards,
including some without Japanese.
Flex-Fuel Promoter
Ethanol produced from perennial crops like switchgrass could rescue the economics of the American auto industry and rural America while making the country less dependent on oil, argue Vinod Khosla, MBA ’80, and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle in a May opinion article in the New York Times. Khosla, a venture capitalist and cofounder of Sun Microsystems, wants Congress to pass new “carbon alternative fuel equivalent” mileage standards for vehicles, thus encouraging more flex-fuel vehicle production and more gas pumps containing fuel blends of ethanol and gasoline.
Advice to Utilities: Don’t Confuse Readers
As energy demand grows, more utilities and their regulators will install
sophisticated meters and data management systems to get more bang per
kilowatt, says Alison Silverstein, MBA ’83, the senior technical advisor to
the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from 2001 to 2004.
Now a “recovering regulator” and consultant, Silverstein writes reports and
gives speeches to persuade state regulators, utility administrators, and
energy suppliers to think about sophisticated meters and data as tools to
please, rather than irritate, customers.
Called “demand-response systems,” the latest meters can be used by consumers
to automatically change their household or business energy usage patterns
when certain price or supply conditions make it prudent. One problem,
Silverstein told the Power Report, published by the Power Marketing
Association, is that the power industry is focused on its own costs, not its
customers.
“California proved a few years ago, when every utility’s program was
different and there were too many programs, all of which were changing
constantly, [that] most of the customers just said, ‘I don’t understand, I’m
not going to play,’” she said. “We need to be designing smarter, more
customer-friendly demand-response programs so that there is stuff the
customer wants to do as opposed to betting or bullying them into load
reductions.”
Courting MBA Interns
As the job market for fresh MBA graduates improves, companies are finding
that quality internships and early job offers are important tools of
recruitment, according to Stephen Pollock, MBA ’93, president of WetFeet, a
company that studies and sells reports on college internship programs.
According to BusinessWeek Online, WetFeet surveyed 746 MBA students from 30
business schools plus the internship classes of seven large employers who
pay WetFeet for detailed findings. As of last November, the seven companies
had extended offers to 80 percent of their MBA interns, with 57 percent of
the interns indicating they would accept. Among the other interns, only 51
percent had received offers and 29 percent said they would accept.
“For students, the conversion rate is important,” Pollock said. “A company
that entices its interns to become full-time employees usually devotes
significant resources to the internship program.”
Affinity Appeals to Investment Banker
If you’re a fan of NASCAR, the Los Angeles Dodgers, or your daughter’s
school soccer team, you may have shopped for products to display your
enthusiasm at a website built by Kimathi Marangu, MBA ’93. He is the
cofounder of Mall Networks, a company that builds shopping portals for
affinity organizations such as charities, sports teams, and consumer
associations. NASCAR and the Dodgers are his best known clients but school
districts and other nonprofits also use affiliate organizations to market
products. Marangu says he likes the field because “I like working on
projects that deliver measurable results.”
Before business school, Marangu worked with wildlife conservationist Richard
Leakey in Kenya negotiating lease agreements for lodges in national parks.
He then was an investment banker in New York and Australia until a 1998 GSB
class reunion brought him exposure to classmates starting internet
companies, according to Revenue, a marketing magazine. That prompted him to
move back to the Bay Area and work with a number of dot-coms in marketing
before cofounding Mall Networks in 2005. Marangu is also president of the
board of directors of the Stanford Business School Alumni Association.
