Jeff Arnold: Poster Boy
from the of-what? dept
Similar to the Bill Gross article of a couple days ago, now Fortune is writing about Jeff Arnold the charismatic founder of WebMD who is now working on a new project called Convex. He’s apparently quite the salesman, but I’d say the Fortune article doesn’t do his pitch much justice, because I’m not convinced about Convex. It sounds like a weird “me too” play mixed with some confusing ideas. The basic idea seems to be to set up a new advertising network that’s “targeted” and only based on actual “click throughs” and recommends other similar sites or items. As if no one has thought of this or tried that before? But, then it also includes a vulture capitalist aspect of buying up distressed dot coms to turn around and sell to brick-and-mortar operations for big profits. Yes, there’s some opportunity in doing that, but I’m not sure how big. There’s not much in the way of assets to pick up from these distressed dot coms, and everyone knows they’re distressed. So, it’s not clear how they can turn them around and sell them off at “big profits”.
