Thanks for reading

And thanks especially to those of you who left intelligent comments here.

I'd been planning to shut this blog down when I started the new ones (which my crack design agency still hasn't finished yet), and link to the new blogs here, but now I think maybe it's better just to start fresh. I got that idea over the weekend, based on the reaction to a subsequently deleted post. I knew blogging was mostly pointless going into it, but that was just another reminder of that.

I'll still be blogging, for a while at least, at the new blogs, as I have a new subscription-based site to promote. Perhaps I'll see a few of you there. Goodbye and best of luck in the new year to the to the rest of you.

Scratch that. Change of plans. I'll post links to the new blogs here. Still waiting on the set-up of them.

Sorry for the Paucity of Recent Posts

I've been busy with other things. If anyone has requests for post topics, feel free to make them in the comment thread below and I'll try to take a stab at them as time permits.

Thanks.

Possible Names for New Blog

I've mentioned this in a couple of the comment threads, but I'm going to be moving to a new blog soon. The new blog will probably be on Wordpress with a professionally designed logo and a customized theme, and the content will have a somewhat tighter focus on business and entrepreneurship. Here are three domain names I've purchased and am considering for the new blog:

- HackensackVentures.com

- LaunchingInnovation.com

- SteamCatapult.com

The first name has the tie-in with the name of this blog, of course, and continues the semi-ironic attempt at treating Hackensack as a brand. I say semi-ironic, because Hackensack, for those who are familiar with the place, does connote a certain grittiness and lack of concern about image; to the extent that you can spin that in a substance-over-style direction, that's a positive. It's also an ironic take off on the name of prestigious venture capital firms such as Union Square Ventures¹.

The second name is more straight forward, and describes what I plan to focus on: launching innovative business ideas of my own, and helping others launch theirs.

The last one is a play on the second one: a steam catapult is what launches aircraft off of carrier decks. As the unshaven fellow in the video on the homepage of this naming company, A Hundred Monkeys² says, a name ought to have some "mystery". Steam Catapult would have the most "mystery" of these three names. One downside though is that the Navy is apparently moving toward electromagnetic catapults, so when that transition happens, steam catapults might connote retro, which could clash with the innovation theme -- or not, perhaps, since steam catapults will still have been innovative in their time.

I thought I'd take an informal poll of my small handful of occasional commenters and see what you guys thought. Fire away.

The photo above, of a F-14 about to get launched by a steam catapult from the deck of the USS JOHN C. STENNIS, comes from Wikipedia Commons.

¹When you are attempting to attract wealthy investors, you generally use a name that connotes wealth or sophistication, or a combination of both. Hackensack, of course, connotes neither. I knew a Manhattan-based financial planner who came up with the name for her practice by combining the name of a prestigious prep school and adding the word "hill" to it, because rich people often live on hills, or in towns with "hills" in the name.

²I read about this company a few years ago in the Wall Street Journal. Nice work if you can get it, no? This, as with most public relations and traditional marketing businesses, seems to be made possible by OPM. I can't imagine a scrappy entrepreneur starting off with his own savings of those or his friends and family writing a big check to someone to name his business. But if a business is venture-funded, that's a different story.

Apathy Check

I started writing a post yesterday about Bobby Jindal, his recent op/ed on health care policy in the WSJ, and the folly of conservatives calling grants "refundable tax credits". Is anyone interested in reading that post? I'm on the fence about it myself, and I was the one writing it. You decide. If this post gets no comments, I'll take that as a "no".

A Critique of Pointless Blogging

This blog is, I realize, a glass house in some respects¹, but I'm going to ignore the old admonition in this post and throw a couple of polished stones from my blog's proverbial front porch. Today's target is the Oracle of NY, one of the blogs written by Joshua Persky, the subject of a recent post ("Infinite Corridor") and a man who was kind enough to correspond with me last week. After our correspondence, I checked out Persky's last few blog posts. I have critical comments about two of them, one of which I already noted on Persky's site, but I'll reproduce it here.

The first of the two posts I'll mention is this one, "President Obama on the American Graduation Initiative", which consists simply of three paragraphs excerpted from a recent speech by the President, without any context or commentary by Persky. This was the comment I left on Persky's site:

What is the "American Graduation Initiative"? You haven't explained what it is here, it's not mentioned in the three paragraphs you excerpted, and you didn't provide a link to the full text of Obama's speech. You also haven't provided your opinion of the American Graduation Initiative (whatever it is) here. What was the point of this post?

I hate to be critical, but through your moxie and hard work, you've gotten a lot of national attention, and I don't think posts like this one are anyway to retain that attention. This one seems like you just wanted to post something for the sake of posting something.

The second post is this one, "Valuation Services and Consulting", and here's the text of it:

Steps for producing a valuation for a bank loan to a private company:

1. Gather and review financial and legal documentation.


2. Note key loan parameters such as: interest rate, maturity date, type of loan (bullet or amortizing), first or second lien, financial covenants, up-front and other fees, pre-payment penalty.


3. Note key financial performance parameters: EBITDA, income, margins, cash flow, balance sheet (historic, current and projected).


4. Analyze key financial ratios: leverage, interest coverage, loan to value.


5. Perform DCF analysis.


6. Compare company to similar publicly traded companies.


7. Compare loan to publicly traded similar debt instruments.


8. If the company is distressed, determine the value of its assets.


9. If the company is in bankruptcy, determine the probability and timing of recoveries.

For competitively priced hedge fund portfolio valuations, business development corporation and private equity valuation services and consulting, please contact:

Joshua Persky
tel: 917 650 8700
email: joshua.persky@sloan.mit.edu

Here's my thought on that post: Wouldn't any potential customer of Persky's valuation services already know about these steps? If so, how does enumerating this list in a blog post demonstrate one's talent for valuation? A better tack might be to offer as an example a case study where you can demonstrate your mastery of some tricky aspect of valuation. Persky could use a historical case where he has access to all the necessary data, or he could speculate a little and attempt a valuation (or comment on the reported valuation) of a well-known, privately held company. A way to get some attention as a valuation expert while demonstrating that you are familiar with current technology might be to attempt a valuation for a business such as Twitter.

Another thought: is it best to lead with price by offering "competitively priced" valuations? First, it's probably implicit that your valuations will be "competitively priced", given your current situation and the state of the labor market, and second, is price the most important factor to a hedge fund or other firm seeking a valuation? If it is, they can probably find an even cheaper valuation by outsourcing the job to India, but my guess is that they have more pressing concerns than price, such as, for example, accuracy, and protection from liability. This sounds like a difficult market to compete in as a sole proprietor. I wish I had some positive suggestion to offer here, but I always try to picture myself on the other side of the deal: if you were running a hedge fund and you were concerned about litigation from your investors, wouldn't you feel more comfortable having your valuations done by an established accounting firm?

Perhaps Persky would be better off taking his talents in a different direction. Presumably, if he is talented in valuing private businesses, he'd have some talent for investing in them as well. There are always business owners looking to sell their privately-owned businesses, and affluent individuals and companies looking to buy them. Persky might, for example, offer service where he'd help affluent individuals diversify their assets by buying privately-held firms. He might also scout out businesses currently for sale, do his own valuations on them, and then offer to help sell those businesses. Last year I approached a business broker about a situation and he was happy to offer me remuneration contingent on finding a buyer for his client. I imagine most business brokers would be amenable to this.



¹Namely (for starters), in its lack of focus, its name, its use of a generic blogger template. I plan to address some of this in the near future.

The Arc of a Typical Blog

From a post by John Scalzi last month (Hat Tip: commenter "Nate" on Megan McCardle's Atlantic blog):

The vast majority of blogs, in fact, have nothing but the following three posts:

Post One: “Here’s my blog! This is where I’m going to share all my thoughts about life, the universe and everything! It’s going to be great and I can’t wait to tell you all what I’m thinking about everything!”

Post Two: “Hey, sorry I haven’t updated in a while — life’s been crazy. But I’ll be back soon.”

Post Three: “Here’s a picture of my cat.”

And then it’s done.

Nothing wrong with this — writing on a regular basis is work, even when you’re ostensibly doing it for fun, and it shouldn’t be a surprise not a lot of people really want to work that hard. Also and perhaps more to the point, I suspect many people who start blogging realize fairly quickly that they either don’t like sharing all their thoughts to the world, or that their thoughts, while interesting to them, appear fairly banal once they’re typed out, and it’s better just not to post them for the sake of posting them. And there’s nothing wrong with this either, and indeed the blogger is to be congratulated of the bit of personal insight. Most blogs are abandoned because they should be.