It’s a great story for us whenever an entrepreneur makes a crazy amount of money and we get to tell the world about it. For the entrepreneur? Not so much. Hitherto unknown relatives, entrepreneurs seeking angel investments, money managers and supposed baby-mamas all come out of the woodwork with dollar signs in their eyes.
Since I outed their take-home pay from the Amazon merger a few weeks ago, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and COO/CFO Alfred Lin have figured out a way to cope with this: Giving everyone my email address and telling them I’m in charge of their investments.
To be fair, Hsieh told me he was going to do this. He even told me they’d make an investment decision based on my favorite pitch. I just thought he was kidding. Then, two nights ago I had dinner with a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur who had “a hilarious” story to tell me. It seemed a friend at one of the more prominent Southern California investment firms was hounding him for an intro to Sarah Lacy. Clearly, this made no sense since writers don’t generate wealth. We’re lucky to pay rent and have some left over for booze. “No, I need to talk to her about managing this guy Alfred’s money,” the money manager insisted.
So let me be clear: I am not actually in charge of distributing that near-$400 million worth of Amazon stock, but if Hsieh is a man of his word, I will pass on the best single pitch I get in the next two weeks. Send to sarah(at)techcrunch(dot)com or leave in the comments.
Here’s the email he’s sending everyone:
As you can probably imagine, since the Amazon announcement, I am being
inundated with many requests for different opportunities, including
private wealth management services, investment opportunities, and
partnership opportunities.To help sift through through the various opportunities, I’ve enlisted the
services of Sarah Lacy. As a journalist and author, her career has been
all about research and figuring out the story behind the story.I’ve asked Sarah to help sift through many of the opportunities that I’m
being approached with between now and August 31. In September, I will ask
Sarah to present to me what she thinks the most interesting opportunities
are for me to consider.I’ve cc’d Sarah so you should feel free to email her directly. However, I
encourage you to reach out to her in whatever medium you think would allow
you to best properly convey the value of your opportunity so that she can
give it a fair evaluation relative to all of the other opportunities.This is the contact information that Sarah has made publicly available on
her web site:http://sarahlacy.typepad.com/sarahlacy/contact.html
(For me personally, I’ve always found that talking to Sarah by phone or in
person to be more effective and enjoyable.)Thanks for your understanding in participating in this process. I look
forward to hearing from Sarah her thoughts in September.
[Photo Credit: Tomas Muscionico]