Wenda Harris Millard is convergence incarnate. She's currently co-CEO and media president of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. (NYSE:MSO), which she joined in 2007 after six years as chief sales officer at Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO). But at 11 a.m. Monday, January 10, 2000, when Steve Case and Gerald Levin held a jubilant press conference to announce American Online Inc.'s $164 billion bid for Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX), Millard was at DoubleClick Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). There, she was a founding executive of the pioneering provider of Internet ad services that was ultimately acquired by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) for $3.1 billion last year.

In this episode of our Decade of The Deal video series, Millard recalls feeling "extremely skeptical" of the natural fit AOL and Time Warner purported to be. Millard's skepticism drew not only from her new-media experience but from such analogue-era stints as publisher of Family Circle and executive VP/group publisher of Adweek, Brandweek and Mediaweek. As Martha Stewart put it, Millard's "strong grasp and understanding of emerging platforms, combined with her in-depth knowledge of traditional publishing, make her the perfect choice." Stewart shared this insight on welcoming Millard to MSLO's executive ranks. But it also serves to introduce our commentator on a merger that many less astute than Millard considered, if only briefly, "the deal of the century."

As we celebrate The Deal's 10-year anniversary, we are featuring monthly video interviews with personalities from each year of our history. Click here to watch venture capitalist Fred Wilson's take on the dot com boom in 1999. And click here to see how Ted Turner explains his bizarre comment that the AOL-Time Warner deal was better than sex. -- Richard Morgan

When The Deal launched on Tuesday, Sept. 14, 1999, the go-go dot com era was in full swing. The investment atmosphere was like that of a giant casino and everyone wanted to join a startup or invest in one, recalls venture capitalist Fred Wilson in the first episode of our video series, "A Decade of the Deal."

And as we celebrate The Deal's 10-year anniversary, we'll feature monthly video interviews with personalities from each year of The Deal's history.

Flatiron Partners, the VC firm founded by Wilson and Jerry Colonna in 1996, invested in 59 companies by the time the bubble burst in 2000. Some, such as StarMedia, crashed and burned; while others, such as comScore Inc. are thriving now. Wilson shared with us some of his memories of 1999, as well as some of his memorabalia. (He's a self-described pack rat.)

Today Wilson is a partner of Union Square Ventures, a VC firm he founded with Brad Burnham in 2005 that backs Web 2.0 companies, including microblogging service provider Twitter Inc. Wilson's "A VC" blog is considered required reading in entrepreneurial and VC circles, and in September when he gave a talk about the New York Internet industry from 1995 to 2008 at Web 2.0 Expo, the house was packed.-- Mary Kathleen Flynn

Hard to believe, but we've been at this for 10 years.

When we launched The Daily Deal newspaper (and the attendant thedailydeal.com) on Sept. 15, 1999, M&A was surging, private equity was in ascendance, and the IPO markets churned out paper millionaires by the day. While other news outlets (from our ink-stained competitors to those newfangled tools of the time: Web sites) all covered bits and pieces of the proceedings, we were the only publication then trying to ascribe unifying themes to what we defined as the Deal Economy.
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The Daily Deal was breaking news before the first newspapers were even delivered. On Sept. 15, 1999, we reported that VoiceStream Wireless Corp. was acquiring Aerial Communications, Inc. for $1.8 billion. (See the original story in The Deal Pipeline.) The deal valued Aerial stock at about $25.50, or a 27.5% premium over its preannouncement stock price.

VoiceStream-Aerial would be the first of hundreds of scoops during our first 10 years. It was also the first of hundreds of articles about VoiceStream, whose rocky deal history is illustrative of the fate of many of its telecom peers.


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In the very first issue of The Daily Deal newspaper, we launched The Private Equity 50, a ranking of the top private equity players as determined by our own senior writer David Carey. (See complete list on The Deal Pipeline.)

The Private Equity 50 was billed as "An earnings scorecard of the buyout and private investment world that will run in the paper each year." After our premier issue, the list did indeed run again -- six days later when we fretted no one had seen it the first time.

As for our ambition to repeat the exercise annually ... well, let's just say we had the best of intentions (which is better than saying we just plain forgot).

Kirk Kerkorian topped that first list. Carey tipped his hat to Kerkorian because he "harvested at least $650 million while unloading a fraction of his stake in Chrysler Corp. during the spring and summer of 1998, before the company merged with Daimler-Benz."

The debut of The Daily Deal was also a good day for Leon Black. As we reported that day, his PE firm Apollo Management LP secured about a $200 million profit from the sale of Alliance Imaging Inc., a provider of diagnostic imaging services, to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in an $850 million leveraged recapitalization. (Read the complete story in The Deal Pipeline; subscription required).

Apollo, which had acquired Alliance in December 1997, merged the company with SMT Health Services Inc. in May 1999.

KKR eventually took Alliance public in late July 2001. It was the third IPO for Alliance, and the markets were not kind: Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown had to price the offering at $13, or 13% below the range of $15 to $17.




 


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