6 Investing Lessons From The Valeant Pharmaceuticals Scandal. It's not every day that a company with a market cap of more than US$ 70 billion (almost same as India's largest company by market cap), and one that is favoured by a lot of savvy investors, loses 80% in nine months (65% in just the last one month).
But that's what has happened with investors in the Canada-based Valeant Pharmaceuticals (NYSE:VRX), where a spate of scams has been discovered over the past few months - from bad M&A accounting, to wrongful income reporting, and now the company is facing a potential default. Valeant is a typical case of a high-growth business where people think nothing could go wrong and overpay ignoring the complexities and fuzziness, and which ultimately presents itself as a classic case on what not to do in business and investing. Like I wrote about the Volkswagen (OTCPK:VLKAY) scandal a few months back, there are several lessons one can learn from the fall from grace of Valeant. Here are just six of them. 1. Bill Gross: The single biggest reason why startups succeed. What’s Eating Silicon Valley.
Like most people, I look up to and admire the heroes of Silicon Valley (the real ones, not the ones from the TV show).
They’ve given rise to services (e.g., Google, Facebook, Uber, LinkedIn, Airbnb) that we use every day and make the world a better place. They’ve created value, wealth, and opportunity at unprecedented historic levels. I’ve also had the chance to meet some of the leading CEOs and entrepreneurs of the Valley and they are, by and large, good-natured, brilliant, and thoughtful people. They’re earnest and committed to building positive things. Some of them are donors to my organization, for which I’m immensely grateful.
Tim Cook's Apple Has Forced the Whole Tech World to Realign. In Silicon Valley, where wit and irony are far scarcer than venture funding, Aaron Levie is one of the few truly funny guys.
Levie is the CEO of Box, a software company that makes online tools for businesses. That doesn’t sound especially thrilling, as Levie self-deprecatingly acknowledged the other day at Box’s annual conference in San Francisco, where he had just sat down on stage to interview Apple CEO Tim Cook. “You know you’re at an enterprise software conference, right?” Levie asked Cook, whose company is known more for its hypnotic command over consumers than businesses.
“Your PR team told you?” 5 unexpected problems I faced when I became my own boss. Finally, the last thing that people don't anticipate when they're starting to work for themselves is the moment when they might have to decide to cut their losses and start looking for a job.
We don't want to think about our businesses or freelancing careers failing at the moment when we're trying to get them started, but it's important that we do. There is something called the "Sunk Cost Fallacy" that makes us less likely to give up on something when we're more physically, emotionally and financially invested in it. The Man Who Invented Scotch Tape.
“He created a greenhouse environment, a skunkworks, where we could do anything, try anything.
The Dumbest Idea: Maximizing Shareholder Value. Danish restaurant keeps track of occupied tables using low tech solution. Yahoo's Comeback Is All Smoke and Mirrors. The appointment of Marissa Mayer as Yahoo CEO has been a godsend for those in the media.
If nothing else, the photogenic, enigmatic and workaholic chief executive has made people interested in the company again. In 2011, Yahoo was never mentioned in the same breath as Google or Facebook. But now, Mayer has propelled the company into the top tier of Internet Companies That Tech Writers Like to Cover. Like investors, the media love a comeback story, and Yahoo seemed to fit the bill: Since Mayer joined the company on July 16, 2012, its stock price has risen 159%. Nest acquisition: Where next for 'new' Google? 14 January 2014Last updated at 09:48 ET By Dave Lee Technology reporter, BBC News In Pixar's Wall-E, mega-corporation Buy n Large is part of all human life and leisure In the adorable 2008 Pixar film Wall-E, much of the plot centres on the corporate behemoth that is Buy n Large.
BnL, a "mega-corporation", runs everything. Everything. Inside RIM: An exclusive look at the rise and fall of the company that made smartphones smart. Immigration reform is a no-brainer to help the economy. People are an asset, not a liability.
The United States is the most immigrant-friendly nation in the world and the richest country in the world. This is not a coincidence. Those voices that would make us less immigrant-friendly would make us less successful, less prosperous, and certainly less American. Today, some 11 million "undocumented workers" live in the shadows in the United States. Sixty percent of them crossed the Mexican border or the Canadian border without government approval and 40% arrived by plane and overstayed their visas.
Why did Pope Benedict XVI resign? 27 November 2013Last updated at 19:49 ET By Mark Dowd BBC Radio 4 Benedict XVI shocked the world in February when he became the first pope to resign in almost 600 years.
But attention shifted quickly to the succession, and the election of the new Pope, Francis. Amid the drama, one question was never fully answered - why did Benedict quit? Pope Benedict's official resignation statement offered his waning physical and mental powers as the explanation, but it's long been suspected there was more to it. Pope Francis - rebranding case study for business schools. When a pope meets a president — and the Vicar of Christ gets pulled into political coverage — trivialization ensues.
As a reporter, I covered the St. Louis meeting between Pope John Paul II and President Bill Clinton in January 1999, not long after Clinton admitted to “inappropriate, intimate contact” with Monica Lewinsky. There was a frenzy of speculation that, well, what? Seeing Through the Illusion: Understanding Apple’s Mastery of the Media. Apple CEO Tim Cook with former VP of Worldwide Communications Katie Cotton “Beautifully, unapologetically plastic.” “Feature for feature, it’s identical to iPad Air in every way.”