Please blame Andrew Anker for this website. Quite honestly, I’d rather be watching a Giants game than writing anyway but it gives me something else to do. As friend of the show, long-time (and far better) blogger Michael Sippey likes to say, I think by writing. I hope you enjoy the site and feel the need to give me feedback, pass links along or generally just chat. My email address is “aa” at the domain name of this site.
More about me: I have worked for over 25 years in a variety of roles including company founder, venture investor, investment banker and programmer. I enjoy new challenges and always strive not to repeat myself. I am currently “in between” jobs, which is a polite way of saying not doing a whole lot. For the last seven years, I worked at Six Apart and then upon its merger with VideoEgg, at SAY Media. At SAY, I served as Senior Vice President of Corporate Development; at Six Apart I was also head of corporate development but ultimately ended up running the company during the merger with VideoEgg.
I have been Chairman of the Board of Directors of Ebates Shopping.com since 2007 and an investor and board observer there since 2000. I have angel invested in a number of companies including LinkedIn, FM Publishing, TCHO Ventures, Technorati, Byliner and Spot-On and am or have served as an adviser to many other internet services companies. I served on the boards of Loudeye (purchased by Nokia), Accrue Software (purchased by Datanautics) from each company’s founding until 1999 and was a director of Geeknet (NASDAQ: GKNT) from late 2004 until mid 2011.
From 1998 through 2003, I was a General Partner at August Capital. While at August I focused on consumer facing internet companies and led the partnership’s investments in such companies as Tickle (which was purchased by Monster Worldwide), Listen.com/Rhapsody (which was purchased by Real Networks) and Evite (which was purchased by Interactive Corp.).
In late 1992, I helped raise the start-up capital for Wired magazine’s launch and then co-founded and was CEO of Wired Digital, which at various times was a divison, partially-owned subsidiary or separate company from parent Wired Ventures. While at Wired Digital, I led teams that created HotWired, Wired News, HotBot, Webmonkey, Suck and a number of other good websites. Wired Digital, which was one of the 20 largest web networks in the world at my departure, was ultimately purchased by Lycos in June 1999 and soon after Lycos was purchased by Terra. Then pretty much everyone involved left and ultimately most of these sites died silent and sad deaths.
My early career was spent mostly in investment banking, I worked for five years at predecessor firms to Credit Suisse First Boston and UBS doing M&A and corporate finance transactions in the media, technology and communications space. I worked for two years at boutique merchant bank Sterling Payot and spent a year as a programmer at another start-up which unfortunately was never successful.
I graduated with a B.A. in Economics from Columbia University in 1987 and have studiously avoided formal education since.
