I've just started a band called 999 Megabytes. We haven't done a gig yet.
cainvommars
I really admire Ben Horowitz. His blog is great. He has a great attutide. And citing The Godfather and NAS is “cool”. Plus he has a lot of money and a great wealth of experience he is willing to share.
Recently he blogged about Alfred Chuang.
Alfred began his (almost CEO) career as Chief Architect at BEA Systems. He lead the acquisition of Weblogic (not yet as CEO). It seemed quite a stupid move to pay $150M for a company that generated $150k at that time. But Alfred, coming from the heart of engineering, knew the landscape. So he nevertheless pushed the acquisition through.
His aquisition quickly turned into a huge amount of money for BEA and he became CEO of BEA. In that position he made BEA an application server market player and reallocated a huge amount of resources to this new strategic goal of the company. It was quite a bet, but it worked out impressively well.
2008 BEA was bought by Oracle for $8.5B. Next year (2012) Oracle is scheduled to make $8.5B in total revenues with it’s BEA department alone. In retrospective it was a bit stupid to sell BEA to Oracle - but BEA was a publicly listed company at that time.
Sounds like a really great story of somebody who can lead and execute. Some tiny remarks from my side:
- Was it a "bet" on the application server market? A bet has to do with "luck" after all. Well. I do not think so. Even if it would have been not a great idea I am sure that Alfred would have found ways to earn a lot of money with it.
- I am sure that Alfred has execution qualities that are far better than other person’s. Does not matter too much what he executes.
Ben writes a bit more on that and what Alfred is planning to do now. He calles him the CEO of CEOs[1].
[1] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alfred-chuang/10/598/7b7
[2] http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/27/the-ceos-ceo/