Linford Christie is best known as Britain’s fastest-ever sprinter. But he is also a sharp investor, says The Daily Telegraph, and has his own sports management agency, Nuff Respect.
Christie’s family were Jamaican immigrants; he grew up in Kingston, the island’s capital, moving to England when he was seven. He always knew he was a fast runner, but after leaving school he worked for six years for the tax office and in the accounts department at the Co-op rather than pursuing an athletics career. Christie only took running seriously when he was 24 and went full time, without any sponsors. “Things were very tight.”
After winning every major title in the sport, Christie tested positive for drugs in 1999, losing sponsors and his income. But by then he had saved money and had founded Nuff Respect, which represents other athletes. “I’ve always lived by the maxim, if you look after the pennies, the pounds look after themselves.” Christie now plays the stockmarket and has shares in Aviva, the insurance group, plus a portfolio of Premium Bonds. “My Dad was good with money,” Christie says. “He used to say: ‘While you are sleeping, have something growing’.”
Ten percent crazy
Black Swan Data is one of Britain’s brightest tech start-ups. The Waterloo-based firm uses sophisticated algorithms to predict what people are about to buy. It recently worked with pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline to boost the group’s vitamin sales, by pooling tweets, Google search trends and government health statistics. “We were able to create a model that could predict cold and flu faster than any local authority,” co-founder Steve King tells The Evening Standard.
The data allowed Glaxo to time its advertising perfectly and make sure its products were on the shelves at the point of peak demand. Similarly, King has also worked with Tesco to predict the all-important first barbecue weekend of the year, using online data, weather forecasts and sales in previous years. His firm’s impressive client roster also includes Pepsi, Unilever and Panasonic.
Black Swan, which is named after a best-selling book on uncertainty by the economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, was co-founded by King and Hugo Amos four years ago. Initially the business was funded by King, but it has since drawn larger investors, including Blackstone, the American private-equity giant.
The firm now has annual sales of £12.5m, with a staff of 250, and King is planning a stockmarket listing in three to five years. However, he wants to keep the company’s experimental edge. A former DJ, he recruits “un-normal people” and hosts an annual staff party in the Cotswolds, which is an overnight music festival. But it’s not all money and parties.
The company has a charitable arm, called White Swan, which helps the NHS to predict medical emergencies. King likes to express the company’s ethos as a statistic. It’s “10% crazy”, he says.
A future for advertising
William Eccleshare, the head of advertising group Clear Channel, was “flattered” when his daughter followed him into the industry. But advertising has lost its sparkle, Eccleshare tells The Times. In the 1970s and 1980s, if you needed to find a colleague after 11.30am, you had to go to Meeting Room X, better known as The Coach and Horses. Executives had Martinis for lunch, “and for tea. It was the best fun. I had a superb time”. Now his daughter tells him that advertising “is a lot less fun than you described”.
Nonetheless, the industry has a vibrant future, Eccleshare believes – and it does not lie with Google or Facebook. Instead, the unlikely beacon is billboard advertising. The modern equivalent of a cave wall, it is still the best way for brands to attract attention. “What you want for your brand is fame,” says Eccleshare, 60. “If a brand is confident enough to put itself out there, that sends a powerful message… people like to buy brands other people know about.”
Clear Channel has sales of $1.8bn and profits of $300m. Its biggest client is Apple – even tech companies seem to recognise that outdoor advertising is the best way to convey their message. “You can’t ad-block a billboard.”
The rise and fall of America’s online gossip kingpin
Nick Denton, the founder of controversial US gossip website Gawker, has filed for personal bankruptcy protection, four months after losing a lawsuit against former wrestler Hulk Hogan, writes Chris Carter. Hogan had sued Gawker after it published a video clip of him having sex with the then-wife of his friend, shock-jock Todd “Bubba the Love Sponge” Clem. In March, a jury awarded Hogan $140m in damages.
Proceedings in the case were unsurprisingly colourful, but the revelation that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel had bankrolled Hogan’s case was the most controversial aspect. The PayPal founder had been “outed” as gay by one of Gawker’s sister sites in 2007, and Thiel was furious that Denton had made a private matter public. “I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations,” Thiel told The New York Times in May.
Denton, who is openly gay, says that Thiel had made no secret of his sexuality in Silicon Valley circles. He has described Thiel’s funding of Hogan’s lawsuit as a “personal vendetta” and attempted to cast the case as a battle over free speech. It is “disturbing to live in a world in which a billionaire can bully journalists because he didn’t like the coverage”, he wrote in a memo to Gawker staff.
Under the judgement, Denton – a former Financial Times journalist – is personally liable for $10m of the damages and jointly liable for a further $115m. In court papers he valued his 30% stake in Gawker Media and his Manhattan flat at under $50m, and says he cannot pay. The bankrupcty filing is intended to protect his assets while he and Gawker appeal against the verdict.
Whatever the outcome of the appeal, it seems likely that Denton has lost control of the business that he founded in 2002 and grew into a string of sites with annual revenue of $45m and profits of $6.5m by 2014. Gawker Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in June and has been put up for sale, with publisher Ziff Davis making an initial $90m offer.