Finance Geek

WASHINGTON–With the Senate committees poised to consider versions of the expensive climate-change bill narrowly approved by the House of Representatives, it’s time for the country to take a fresh look at nuclear power, which already generates 20 percent of our electricity.
The Environment and Public Works Committee and the Finance Committee hope to finish drafting a bill before the August recess. Floor debate and a vote will come only after Labor Day, to be followed later in the autumn by House-Senate conference. Whatever the Senate finally does, the process will be contentious and…

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Caught between rising default rates and new legislation that will cap interest rates, banks are protecting profits by charging even their better customers more.

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It’s been more than a year since Bear Stearns imploded.  At the time, many Wall Street insiders thought that WAS the crisis.  Obviously, they were wrong.  So, what caused the crisis and what’s changed as a result?  That&rsq

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JESUP — Funding for a new City Hall is up in the air because residents want to have a say in the project.

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Despite a lousy finish, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 15% in the second quarter,  its best quarter in a decade.  For sure, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s now famous ‘green shoots’ phrase helped fuel that rally. …

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From The Business Insider, July 1, 2009:Six months into the Obama presidency and the New York Times is already running an autopsy analyzing how he could have been so wrong about the economy.
David Leonhardt’s bottom line?  The administration was del

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Among the alumni of Far Rockaway High School in Queens are three Nobel Prize winners — two in physics (Richard Feynman, Burton Richter) and one in medicine (Baruch Blumberg) — plus a pioneer in women’s basketball (Nancy Lieberman), a famous psychologist (Joyce Brothers), a financier (Carl Icahn) and, appallingly and with much regret, Bernard Madoff, Class of 1956. Apparently, even back then I didn’t like him.
I was in the Class of 1958, two years behind Bernie, but in the same class as his wife, Ruth. She was my friend, or so our yearbook strongly suggests, although my memory of…

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Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will announce long-awaited details on the PPIP plan Wednesday or Thursday this week, according to CNBC.PPIP, the Public-Private Investment Program, is

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Om Malik has a great post up today on GigaOM reporting on Joost’s announcement that it will now offer a white-label video hosting platform whilst at the same time letting some people go and closing its Netherlands office.  The reason for this shift in strategy is clear in the chart below – they haven’t got enough traction.

As well as covering the change in strategy (which he describes as a strategy of last resort) OM does a bit of post mortem analysis on the the consumer play.  He lists the many things they had going for them at the start (many of us were very excited by their prospects at the time) and then the reasons they went awry.

According to OM these are the top three reasons things went wrong at Joost:

• Too Big, Too Fast: Joost hired too many people, too quickly. It never behaved like a startup but instead always felt like a grown-up company with too many bureaucratic layers.
• Too Geographically Spread Out: The company was based in multiple geographic locations — New York, London and The Netherlands — and as a result, each location became somewhat of a silo.
• Not Enough Focus: Remember what your mom used to say when you took too big of a bite? If you’re not careful, you’re going to choke. Startups are just like that. Unless you focus, you’re going to choke. Joost couldn’t focus on one single market — and startups need to focus on one market at a time in order to win.

The reason I am bringing these out is that I think they apply to just about all startups anywhere.  I actually think they all boil down to the same thing, which is focus. 

In my experience companies which think of themselves as big companies from day one rarely succeed because they start doing too much.  Instead the great ones focus obsessively on doing one thing brilliantly.  That can be a single product that works globally (Skype, Google) or it can be a service that you perfect in a single country before going international – and most media and advertising businesses fall into this second category.  Just look at Hulu, which has made itself successful by focusing on the US (much to my irritation as I’d love to be able to use it here..).

Once you have success in one area it becomes much easier to grow either geographically (which is where Hulu is going) or by adding new products.

The other great virtue of this approach of course is capital efficiency.

I think these arguments have much more weight than the opposing one of wanting to get everything done super-quickly for fear of ‘missing the window’.

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MOLINE, Ill. — About 800 salaried employees will be leaving Deere & Co. as part of a voluntary separation program it announced in April.

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