Vintage Filings
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Newsletter: December 2007

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Al Gore's Next Act: Planet-Saving VC
The recovering politician is teaming with a legendary venture capitalist and bigtime moneyman to make over the $6 trillion global energy business. A Fortune exclusive

By Marc Gunther and Adam Lashinsky, Fortune
November 13, 2007

It's lunchtime on Sand Hill Road, and Al Gore wants answers. "How does the efficiency decline with latitude?" he asks. "What size community could be served by one plant? If a manufacturer like GE wanted to make smaller turbines, would the technology support a smaller scale?"

We're sitting in the giant conference room at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where the partners hold their weekly meetings. After loading his plate with Chinese food from a buffet, Gore is firing detailed questions at the management team of Ausra, a Kleiner-backed company in Palo Alto whose technology uses mirrors the width of a flatbed truck that focus the sun's energy to generate electricity.

Once Gore is satisfied -- sunlight lags north of South Dakota, an Ausra plant can serve 120,000 homes, and yes, smaller turbines will work fine -- he shifts from inquisitor to fixer. He was chatting with California Senator Barbara Boxer "on the way over," he reports, and he isn't optimistic that Congress will extend the tax credits Ausra has been relying on. On the upside, he offers on the spot to organize a summit highlighting the company's solar thermal technology to educate lawmakers and other policymakers on its potential. He also thinks a powwow at General Electric (Charts, Fortune 500) would be beneficial, even though Ausra is a tiny customer.

"I know Immelt well," he says, referring to GE's CEO. "We ought to set up a meeting."

Continue reading this article:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/11/news/newsmakers/gore_kleiner.fortune/index.htm

Meet the PayPal Mafia
An inside look at the hyperintelligent, superconnected pack of serial entrepreneurs who left the payment service and are turning Silicon Valley upside down.

By Jeffrey M. O'Brien, Fortune senior editor
November 26, 2007

A door opens, and a blond man appears in a white jacket with large buttons. "Good morning," he says. "Peter's in back. Make yourself comfortable in the dining room. I'll be serving breakfast shortly."

Holy cannoli. Peter Thiel has a butler. The 40-year-old entrepreneur runs a $3 billion hedge fund. He's the founder of a new venture capital firm that's the talk of Silicon Valley. He's got an early $500,000 stake in Facebook that's now worth about $1 billion on paper. The man has bankrolled everything from restaurants to movies and is lauded by many as some kind of free-market genius. He drives a half-million-dollar McLaren supercar. And now a butler.

Just back from a morning run, Thiel emerges into the dining room of his home in the shadow of San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts. Wearing a powder-blue T-shirt wet with sweat, he displays the relaxed self-confidence of Michael Corleone. Perhaps it comes with the butler. "I'm Peter," he says, extending his hand and smiling before thanking me for agreeing to such a late breakfast meeting. It's 7:30 A.M. "It was nice to sleep in."

The doorbell rings, and in walks a scruffy, sleepy-eyed Max Levchin, 32, who has trekked over from his new $5 million-plus home a few blocks away in Pacific Heights. Every garment on Levchin's unwashed body is a freebie - University of Illinois zip jacket, mismatching shorts, bright orange T-shirt with some Hebrew lettering.

Continue reading this article:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/13/magazines/fortune/paypal_mafia.fortune/index.htm

How Not To Choke
Sports psychologist Bob Rotella says the secret to great performances--in golf and in the boardroom--is in the mind.

By Monte Burke, Forbes
November 26, 2007

The fourth hole at Glenmore Country Club in Keswick, Va. is a very long par 3 and rife with danger. From the tee box the green looks as tiny as a tea saucer and has two sand traps guarding its front. A thicket of high grass lines the left of the hole and a creek snakes along the right.

I grip my 2-iron and step toward the ball, trying mightily to block out negative thoughts. "I want you to focus only on your target," says the man standing a few feet away. Coming from a golfing buddy that would be a wisecrack, but this is from Robert Rotella, sports psychologist. We're a few holes into our session, the same drill he's performed for 100 of the world's best professional golfers.

According to Rotella, the trap, grass and creek are just distractions, manifestations of my self-critical conscious brain, which needs to be sublimated in favor of my more intuitive and instinctual unconscious brain. I'm supposed to focus only on the flagstick and visualize the ball getting there. I let it rip. The ball flies off the club head and goes straight ... into the thick grass, where it will remain, gone for good. Score one for life's distractions. "Hey, you struck that really well," Rotella says, cheerfully.

Rotella, a trim 58-year-old with dark, bushy eyebrows and deeply etched laugh lines, has fashioned a career out of teaching the virtues of optimism. His brand of therapy owes more to Norman Vincent Peale than to Sigmund Freud, but there is scientific support for the power of positive thinking. Psychologist Albert Bandura of Stanford University has written extensively about the connection between positive thoughts and better sports performance, demonstrating that belief in oneself improves motor skills.

Continue reading this article:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/1126/162.html

The Legend of Will Smith
How One Man Built a Global Movie-Magnet Machine.

By Rebecca Wintesr Keegan
November 29, 2007

Will Smith plots his strategy for world domination from the head of the kingly wooden dining table in his sweeping Calabasas, Calif., home. "We call it Global Willing," says Smith of his travel itinerary to warm up the globe for his next film, I Am Legend, in which he plays the only survivor of a man-made plague that has wiped out humanity. "We're going to Hong Kong, Tokyo, Korea ..." It's the morning after Thanksgiving, and Smith, 39, is sleepy-eyed and unshaven after hosting 30 friends and family members for dinner. His wife Jada Pinkett Smith enters with breakfast and a kiss, asking, "Want jelly with that, baby?" Even Hollywood's Genghis Khan needs some tenderness before he sacks the box office.

With his ready grin, jug ears and baritone belly laugh, Smith's image is that of the happy-go-lucky Everyguy. But you don't accrue $4.4 billion in worldwide box-office receipts and two Oscar nominations without machine-like drive. Smith's four most recent movies--The Pursuit of Happyness, Hitch, Shark Tale and I, Robot--have each grossed more than $300 million worldwide, vaulting him into a category usually reserved for white guys named Tom. Because Smith has mastered the delicate art of appearing artless, few moviegoers realize that his is one of Hollywood's most meticulously planned and executed careers.

Willard Christopher Smith Jr. hatched his scheme for global supremacy at 16, after his first girlfriend cheated on him. "In my mind, she cheated because I wasn't good enough. I remember making the decision that I will never not be good enough again," he says. Sure, he may have overcompensated, but how else are movie stars made? Smith grew up the second of four children in middle-class West Philadelphia; his parents Willard and Caroline divorced when he was 13. From his father, who worked seven days a week running a refrigerator company, Smith inherited his work ethic. From his mother, a school-board employee, he derived the notion that "education is the elixir for all problems," he says. "Every problem Jada and I have ever had, we found the answer in a book." The Smiths have a family library stocked with everything from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism to homeschooling texts for their children--Willow, 7, and Jaden, 9, and Smith's son from his first marriage, Trey, 15.

Continue reading this article:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1689234,00.html

LeBron Inc.
The Building of a Billion-Dollar Athlete.

By Tim Arango, Fortune writer
November 28, 2007

It's May 31, 2007, in Auburn Hills, Mich., and the Cleveland Cavaliers, a Cinderella team no one expected to get this far, are down 107 to 104 in the crucial game five of the Eastern Conference finals against the Detroit Pistons when LeBron James launches a fadeaway three-pointer to tie with 1:14 to go in the second overtime. One minute and 12 seconds later he seals the game with a vicious drive down the lane to put his team up 109 to 107.

Those were the two finishing flourishes of a feat that NBC anchor Marv Albert crowed would "go down as one of the all-time performances in NBA history." James's play was stunning and described by another announcer as "Jordanesque": He scored 29 of his team's final 30 points, including the last 25.

Watching the 22-year-old's performance closer than the bookies in Vegas were the executives at Nike, who had shelled out $90 million to James as soon as he'd graduated from high school in hopes of latching onto the NBA's next great superstar, the one who would carry the mantle of Michael Jordan. "We measure everyone against Michael Jordan at Nike," says Lynn Merritt, the company's senior director of basketball development and the executive who crafted James's sneaker deal - the size of which irked some within Nike (Charts, Fortune 500).

That is, until James's performance against the Pistons. "Game five set me free from any criticism at Nike," Merritt says.

Within the halls of Nike's basketball division at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., executives began referring to a whole new era for James and Nike. "AGF" is what they called it: "after game five."

Also watching game five intently, as if it were an IPO for a company they had nurtured from the startup phase, were investment bankers at Allen & Co. and executives at Microsoft.

Continue reading this article:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/28/news/newsmakers/lebron_james.fortune/index.htm

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