NEW YORK - It's hard to imagine Bloomberg's top tech officer living with his mother. But TheStreet.com, the wily financial news service started by money manager James Cramer and New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz, tapped 22-year-old nestling Gregg Bishop Wednesday as the company's technical director.
In an industry of wunderkinder, the promotion of the soft-spoken autodidact - Bishop dropped out of college and his previous experience was in Vibe magazine's new-media department - might prove simply the latest marketing gambit by the struggling upstart. Bishop's ascendance, following a massive redesign of the site by Starwave in September, signals an outright effort by TheStreet.com to recast itself as the hippest "personal Bloomberg," as Cramer deems it.
"When the time came for us to pick a chief technologist, there were a lot of people who wanted us to pick the top guy from MIT or Cal Tech or Microsoft, but I said [it's going to be] the guy who has been in the trenches," says Cramer. "Age is irrelevant, education is irrelevant. I want to hire the guy to get the job done."
Cramer settled on Bishop because of the customer-service touch he's demonstrated during his tenure since the site launched. He expects Bishop to combine a sensitivity to consumer demands with backend savvy. Bishop will also work to push TheStreet.com into pagers and ISPs.
Given such tech tasks, naming Bishop - who has a noted antipathy for math and programming - is a contrarian move. Born in Grenada and raised in Brooklyn, Bishop flirted with college at the New York Technical Center, but his self-confessed weak performance in math kept him from staying on. "I took a C++ class and realized I hated it," he recalls. After he created a hip hop culture site in 1994, the new-media manager at Vibe picked him up to develop its site.
Bishop offers another contrarian streak - he's a devoted Christian in an industry built on the cult of the greenback. "[The promotion] is extremely weird - a lot of credit I give to God," Bishop says. "I leave it to him and his blessing."
The company still has a ways to go to make an impact. Despite much fanfare at the debut last November, TheStreet.com has been able to achieve only a modest success with 6,000 subscribers for the US$6.95-a-month service, which provides some 20 market-driven stories a day.
But TheStreet.com's core audience of financiers couldn't care less about the whiz-kid hype or Starwave's design magic, said Julio Gomez, who heads online financial site watcher Gomez Advisors. "Having a 22-year-old CTO and Starwave doesn't resonate at all with [TheStreet.com's] customer base," Gomez says. "What they want is some good content on the markets."
Cramer is the site's real attraction, Gomez adds. And he points to serious contenders like Microsoft's Investor site on MSN or new finance-newsletter hub Investools.com. "TheStreet is one of the few sites that has been able to charge for content, but in the long run, they won't survive as a standalone subscription service," Gomez adds. "Their product is primarily Cramer."
