Michael Robertson, who made $115 million when he sold his startup MP3.com to Vivendi in 2001, wants every other entrepreneur to tell the world how much, or little, they pocketed during their business deals.
His new site, the recently launched Dealipedia, aims to become a hub of information about mergers, investments, acquisitions, and other business deals by encouraging the people in on the deals to upload information to its public wiki. The goal is to help entrepreneurs, VCs, and other curious parties understand what goes on behind the scenes of the business world.
"We're a wiki model, so we're depending on the wisdom of crowds," Robertson said. "If somebody types in that my company, MP3.com, was sold for $200 million,
I'm going to say, 'Like hell it was, it was sold for $385 million!'
People have a vested interest in making sure the data is accurate."
The kind of data Dealipedia is attempting to assemble could be invaluable to business people seeking background information to help structure their own deals. That could include entrepreneurs negotiating a first round of investment, investors dipping their toes into the startup market, or shareholders trying to figure out how much money one company paid to acquire another. Databases operated by companies like Dow Jones or Dun and Bradstreet currently have much of this information, but charge subscription fees to access it. Dealipedia, by contrast, will make all of its information free and accessible to the public.
In a conversation with EPICENTER, he noted that some people have vested interests in getting deal information public, from the company founders in the thick of the negotiations to ancillary participants like PR executives and bankers who shepherd the deals. To encourage contributions, Dealipedia will allow people to add information anonymously.
As for the reliability of anonymous contributions, Robertson is relying on a communal intelligence.
So far, the site has information on past web deals such as the sale of Weblogs, Inc. to AOL (which apparently netted founder Jason
Calacanis $11 million) and the acquisition of photo sharing site Flickr by Yahoo in 2005. An anonymous person on the site contributed the tidbit -- still unverified -- that Flickr founders Caterina Fake and Steward Butterfield each took home $5 million for the sale. And Robertson himself has contributed content. His $115 million payday is recorded in Dealipedia's entry on the MP3.com sale and in its tantalizingly named "Who Made The Money" section, which details the amounts distributed to key people at the close of a deal.
"I'm proud that I made $100 million, or whatever it was, on MP3.com. I'm proud of that. I don't mind people knowing because, at some level, that says that I'm a decent businessman," Robertson said. "So I think that if people may be fearful of being boastful, I think that deep down, they will want this information to be made public and that's our bet with Dealipedia."
Photo courtesy of Michael Robertson
