11/2/09
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The Little Sis team is preparing a final package for Spot.Us and all those who contributed but to whet your appetite we wanted to link back to some of the highlights so far.
And...
Wells Fargo, Wachovia, and the Vulcan Three
Published in Little Sis' research blog
If you haven't seen this blog post by Kevin Connor- It's highly recomended.
Last October, in a stunning turn of events at the height of the Wall Street crisis, Wachovia backed out of a deal with Citigroup and agreed to a $15 billion merger with Wells Fargo — the biggest bank merger ever. The Charlotte-based Wachovia had recently collapsed under the weight of its own mortgage portfolio and Citi had come to the rescue, offering a rock bottom $1/share that Wachovia accepted in order to avoid bankruptcy. A few days later, Wells Fargo swooped down with an offer worth seven times as much, and Wachovia gladly accepted.
The Wells Fargo deal confused most observers, infuriated Citigroup, resulted in weeks of intense legal wrangling, and ultimately went through. It was an odd marriage, pairing a Charlotte-based bank that had financed the sun belt’s housing bubble with a San Francisco-based bank that had largely avoided it.
How did the two banks come together? What was the real story behind this deal?
As it turns out, a Birmingham, Alabama-based construction aggregate supply company appears to have played a key role in this merger. Last week, I blogged about this bizarre discovery (part of our Spot.us research project) without offering too much detail. Today I’ll make my case.
Boards of directors of Wells Fargo & Wachovia, pre-merger
Keep reading Fargo, Wachovia, and the Vulcan Three
Posted by Spot. Us on 11/02/09 10/13/09
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From the LittleSis blog.
I spent last week investigating Apple for our project Who’s Behind the Bay Area’s Top Ten Companies?, which we’ve posted as a pitch on Spot.us.
Good thing I researched Apple — number eight on our list of the Bay Area’s top 10 companies — because I’ve spent this week probing Google and there are a myriad of connections between the two. It’s well documented how quickly and easily Silicon Valley employees move between competing companies, but there are a high number of people moving between Google and Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Facebook. There are also a large amount of Google employees who have started out as consultants at McKinsey & Company. Check out Google’s interlocks page for more specifics, but here’s some of what I uncovered.
College drop-outs in a garage apartment
Google, number 10 on our list, has grown rapidly since its inception in 1998. Like Apple, its humble beginnings are now legend. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, then PhD students in the computer science department at Stanford University, rented a garage apartment from Susan Wojcicki in Menlo Park, Calif. That’s where the two developed Google and promptly dropped out of their program at Stanford.
Brin and Page have repaid their landlord handsomely. The duo gave Wojcicki, then working at Intel, a job at newly branded Google as VP of Product Development where she has worked ever since. But the generosity didn’t stop there. Google would eventually employ her husband, Dennis Troper, as an operations executive, and her mother, Esther Wojcicki, as an educational consultant. Brin also went on to marry Wojcicki’s sister. Talk about keeping it in the family.
Apple to Google exodus
There are several ex-Apple employees now working in key executive positions at Google:
- Jonathan Rosenberg: current Senior VP of Product Management at Google, who held a similar position at Apple and also worked in software at Palm
- Dave Girouard: Google’s President of Enterprise, who worked as a product manager for Apple
- Megan Smith: she’s worked as Google’s VP of New Business Development and manager of Google.org since 2003, but previously worked at Apple Japan
- Mark Fuchs: VP of Finance and Chief Accountant for Google, who worked in finance positions at Apple and the SEC
- Kai-Fu Lee: was VP of Google China until last month, but also helped build Asian bases as a VP for both Apple and Microsoft
Spearheading the social media revolution
In turn, there are also several former Google employees now in strategic posts at Facebook. Both Sheryl Sandberg and Elliott Schrage left their jobs at Google in 2008 for the same positions at Facebook: Chief Operating Officer and VP of Communications, respectively. Sandberg has also been a director at Starbucks since 1999, which does a heavy advertising business with both Google and Facebook. Additionally, Ethan Beard worked as Google’s Director of Social Media until 2008 when he was naturally snapped up by Facebook.
From its two-man-and-a-landlord beginnings, Google has grown to over 20,000 employees worldwide. There are so many connections between its employees, both current and former, and other Silicon Valley tech companies. If this research interests you or if you want to see more of it, please consider donating to help us at Spot.us.
Posted by Spot. Us on 10/13/09 10/9/09
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From Kevin Connor at the LittleSis blog.
Also published at AlterNet.org.
Spot.Us Note: Only $77 shy of our goal! Please spread the word.
Yesterday, using basic features of LittleSis, I discovered that the key matchmaker in the biggest, most complex bank merger in the history of Wall Street was a construction aggregate supply company based in Birmingham, Alabama.
Strange as it may seem, the evidence strongly suggests that individuals associated with this company leveraged their networks to bring the two banking giants together against all odds, with tremendous consequences for shareholders, homeowners, and taxpayers.
I turned this up as part of our Bay Area research project. It’s been one of the more gratifying research experiences I’ve had on LittleSis, because it demonstrates the power of the platform to expose hidden, surprising connections that bring significant depth and fresh life to news stories (this merger is still quite relevant today). And my findings should raise questions about whether the merger was an example of cronyist self-dealing at the expense of bank shareholders.
I am going to detail my findings in a Valdis Krebs-inspired blog post (including network graphs), but first:
Please consider making a $10 or $20 donation to our Spot.us pitch. This kind of work is being supported by that pitch, and we are very close to our fundraising goal!
Posted by Spot. Us on 10/09/09 9/26/09
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Being one of the largest and most-established producers of consumer technology in the world, it is no surprise that Hewlett-Packard maintains a dominating presence within northern California’s business, commerce, and and information networks.
(Want to learn more about the ties behind the Bay Area’s biggest companies? Donate to our investigation on Spot.Us.)
Noteworthy Executive Team Members
Connections, Connections, Connections
Michael J. Holston, executive VP and General Counsel, was also a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, a law firm that staffs Wenseng Pan, Thomas E. Duley, and several other associates and counsel members who don’t seem to be shying away from accepting legal work for major pharmaceutical companies.
Holston worked alongside John H. Hemann at Morgan Lewis, a member of the official Department of Justice Enron Task Force who served as lead trial counsel on the prosecution of Enron’s CFO Andrew Fastow and CEO Kenneth Lay. Hemann also served as an assistant US attorney in San Francisco, where he handled many white-collar crime cases, including a case of fraudulent conduct by executives of McKesson Corporation and Media Vision.
Hemann and Holston both served as attorneys on an interesting courtroom case titled “People of the State of California vs. Hewlett-Packard Company” (read the PDF). While the context from which this document was generated is not quite clear, it is worth noting that the document carries another big legal name: Charles N. Charnas, VP and Deputy General Counsel for HP, who filed a 2006 SEC document reporting the resignation of Thomas J. Perkins from its Board of Directors.
HP’s Board of Director Scandal
Despite being several years old, the Tom Perkins / HP story is worth repeating. On May 18th, 2006, Perkins unexpectedly resigned from the HP board and issued a letter to HP’s directors that quickly wound up in the hands of reporters. In the letter, Perkins states that an alleged information leak was mismanaged by the chair of the board at the time, who had instigated an illegal investigation to discover the origination of the leak. Claiming that his personal and private AT&T phone records were “hacked” during the investigation, Perkins argued that he came to realize that his disagreement was not merely with HP’s chair, but with the larger company as well. He closes the letter: “I consider HP to be an icon of Silicon Valley, and one of the great companies of the world. It now needs, urgently, to correct its course.”
Perkins is a co-founder and Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a major Bay Area venture capitalist firm that has achieved staggering profits from investments in Google, Sun, Genentech, Intuit, and Amazon (the firm is also associated with Colin Powell.) Along with HP CEO and President Mark Hurd, Perkins is also on the board of directors for Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp empire.
As if Perkins weren’t busy enough, he has also married several times: in what is arguably the most surprising relationship I have profiled thus far for LittleSis, he was even married to romance novelist Danielle Steel.
HP’s Inter-Connections with the Rest of the Bay Area
Finally, A Visualization
Using data visualizer tools atNNDB.com, I constructed a quick visualization to spatially chart some of the inter-connections uncovered during my research:
Click here for a full-size image.
Posted by Spot. Us on 09/26/09 9/12/09
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From the LittleSis blog as part of their research in to Bay Area Companies.
I’m going to start posting a locality-specific version of the NameWire (lets call it SFNewsWire) in order to shed light on recent activity and happenings affecting the Bay Area organizations we’re researching with Spot.us.
- AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah partners with IBM for Green Data Center (Routers.com)
- Lloyd Dean, CEO of Catholic Healthcare West, expressed optimism about upcoming healthcare reform. According to Dean, the mostly favorable reception from business, the buy-ins on access and costs from insurance and drug companies are among the “evolutionary” forces that have come to outweigh the “minority opinions” - dissenting voices from the GOP and elsewhere. “Look how far we’ve gotten,” he said. (SFGate.com)
- San Francisco’s Sunday Streets program is now a permanent weekly event, Mayor Newsom pronounced. (Twitter.com/andrewross)
- Chevron backs ‘Energy Citizens’, an oil industry movement aimed at derailing climate-change legislation. (SFGate)
- Robert Lloyd, most likely successor to Cisco CEO John Chambers goads channel partners to wallop HP ProCurve (NetworWorld - thanks to JZukfor the link)
Posted by Spot. Us on 09/12/09 9/10/09
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From Little Sis' blog "Eyes on the Ties."
Last week Kyle wrote about some of the important names behind Chevron as part of our latest research project on LittleSis, which we’ve posted as a pitch on Spot.Us. We’re going to be blogging about our findings as we go, so we’ll hopefully produce a post about each of the ten companies we’re scrutinizing as part of this project.
Today I want to introduce you to some of the bigwigs behind McKesson — the world’s largest health care company and the third largest company in the SF Bay Area, headquartered in downtown SF — without naming any of its leadership, as a way of illustrating the kinds of networks that today’s typical megacorporation is plugged into. You can follow along at McKesson’s interlocks page on LittleSis.
McKesson’s ten board members hold or have held many top positions in major US corporations, including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Clorox, Qwest, OfficeMax, PG&E, and ARCO — as well as many “smaller” companies in the health industries like SDI Health, Aerogen, Theragenics, Agilent Technologies, Kaiser Health Plan, Dynavax, and Kriptiq.
Equally impressive are their ties to powerful think tanks and policy groups at the national level. You can be sure that McKesson’s $15.2 Billion are represented at all the serious discussions taking place at RAND, Brookings Institution, Business Roundtable, The Conference Board, and The Carter Center. A variety of other national nonprofits like the AAA, American Council for Capital Formation, Healthcare Leadership Council, and National Association of Former US Attorneys are also interlocked with McKesson.
Law firms? Oh, just a couple of the biggest ones: McKesson’s team includes a former partner at Jones Day and one from Goodwin Procter. Government ties? A former DoJ attorney and US Sentencing Commissioner from the Bush I and Clinton administrations, and a seat on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Higher learning? A trustee at Wheaton College. Philanthropies? McKesson has a former Rockefeller Foundation trustee and trustees from the Catalina Island Conservancy and the Denver Center for Performing Arts. A former McKesson VP is now a program officer at S. D. Bechtel, Jr Foundation, a fund set up by the SF-based Bechtel construction family.
McKesson’s connections to prominent Bay Area organizations are less plentiful. Because corporate boards meet only several times a year, they’re typically dominated by out-of-towners. According to campaign finance data from OpenSecrets, McKesson’s board members hail from Portland, Denver, Atlanta, Boston, Pasadena, Atherton, Orinda, and Piedmont. But even including McKesson’s top seven executives, I could only identify one significant local position: a former board membership on the Bay Area Council, a business lobbying group with representatives from about half of our ten-company watch list.
(The company’s resident lobbyist (”VP of Public Affairs”) is a former board member of The City Club of San Francisco; she’s also on the board of the Public Affairs Council, a national association of lobbyists. McKesson’s former VP of Community Relations is on the board of United Way of the Bay Area.)
At the federal level, these folks have made some big political donations to both parties, with a slight preference for Democrats. Each of McKesson’s seven top executives contributed to McKesson’s employee PAC. One director gave a cool $30K to Obama, and a few others gave $1K or more to McCain.
Interestingly, only one of McKesson’s corporate leadership was bred for success in elite universities, attending Stanford and Harvard Business School.
Seventeen directors and executives bring a lot of connections to an industry giant — connections useful for business partnerships, economic intelligence, public relations, and, of course, political influence. McKesson as a corporate entity may not have immediate and full access to the array of institutions and networks that its leadership inhabits, but you can bet these bonds are crucial to its success.
Posted by Spot. Us on 09/10/09 9/4/09
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From Kyle at Little Sis
Research for the “Who’s Behind the Bay Area’s Most Powerful Companies?” project is now in full swing. last week, I sifted through hundreds of Chevron-related press releases, financial documents, and executive board summaries in order to pull together the profiles highlighted below.
Note: I have made a special effort to call attention to Chevron executives and affiliates with specific involvement in Bay Area organizations, corporations, committees, and educational systems.
Excited about this stuff? Show your support by making a small donation at our Spot.us page.
Executive Team
David J O’Reilly: Appointed the chairman and CEO of Chevron in 2000, O’Reilly has been an employee of Chevron for nearly 40 years. Before becoming CEO, O’Reilley worked as Vice-Prsident of the Chevron Chemical Company, Director of Chevron-Texaco, and Director of Caltex. O’Reilly is a director of the American Petroleum Institute, a member of the San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors, and the Bay Area Council.
Charles A. James: Joined Chevron in 2002 after serving as assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division at the U.S. Department of Justice. Previously, he was an employee of the Federal Trade Commission and a partner with Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Washington. James also serves as a Trustee on the board of the San Francisco Ballet.
John S Watson: elected Vice Chairman of Chevron’s board in April, Watson oversaw the Chevron-Texaco merger in 2000, becoming Chevron-Texaco’s CFO. Watson is also director of the American Petroleum Institute. He holds a degree in agriculural economics from the University of Calofirnia Davis and is a director of the San Diego Padres.
Peter J. Robertson: Recently retired from Chevron’s executive board, Robertson is also co-chairman of the US- Saudi Arabian Business Council. In terms of local involvement, Robertson is the director of the Bay Area division of United Way of America, an organization dedicated to improving childhood literacy and community improvement.
Patricia A Woertz: Despite recently retiring from Chevron, Woertz worked for Chevron and its subsidiaries for nearly 30 years, including Gulf Oil, Chevron International, Chevron Canada, and Chevron Texaco. Previously, she worked as an accountant for Ernst & Young, a Big Four accounting firm. Woertz is also a regular member of the Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women in America list. She sits on the board of directors of the California Chamber of Commerce, the Board of Trustees of the University of San Diego, and has addressed the Women in Leadership Conference at the University of California, Berkeley.
Patricia E. Yarrington: became Vice-President and a Treasurer of Chevron on January 1st, 2009. Yarrington is also a member of the San Francisco Economic Advisory Council, where she serves as a director and advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Yarrington is also a Bay Area resident.
Noteworthy Lobbyists:
Mel Assagai: In addition to lobbying on behalf of Chevron, Assagai is the chief lobbyist and senior executive for governmental affairs for the State Bar of California, as well as the press secretary to California Senate President (pro Tempore) David Roberti.
Wayne Berman: This guy is truly a lobbyist who has done at all, as you can see from his McLobbyist profile. Berman served as a Chevron lobbyist through Ogilvy Government Relations, a firm that has lobbied just about every government department in existence. Berman’s wife, Lea, was chief of staff to Lynne Cheney, and both supported the defense funds of Lewis Libby and Tom DeLay.
Interesting Facts:
- In 2007-08, Chevron was the 3rd largest contributor to the California Republican Party in the state, donating at least $700,000.
Noteworthy Government Contracts
- 2009-04-22: $1.2 million Dept. of Agriculture contract for research and development.
- 2009-02-26: $602,216 Dept. of Defense contract for “Fuels, lubricants, oils and waxes”.
- 2009-01-27: $340,000 Dept. of Energy contract for strategic relocation of energy reserves.
- 2009-02-04: $333,607 Dept. of Defense contract for “Professional, admin, and management support services”. (Pricey!)
- 2008-11-06: $333,607 Dept. of Defense contract for the same purpose. (Source: USASpending.gov):
More Ties to Research:
- Who are the key players at Waggener Edstrom, a PR firm of Chevron?
- Who were the recipients of a $1.7 million dollar lobbying transaction between the Bay Area Ogilvy Government Relations and Chevron?
- William Wicker, a former executive of Texaco, is currently the head of the Goldman Sachs China investment bank. How many more ties does Chevron have to Goldman Sachs?
Posted by Spot. Us on 09/04/09
