URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT

1047 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 8, 2007 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

Accidental Bosses Seize the Opportunities
BYLINE: By GLENN RIFKIN
SECTION: Section C; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk; SMALL BUSINESS; Pg. 7
LENGTH: 1236 words
When Archie Williams, an entrepreneur in Boston, died in his bed on Thanksgiving Day in 2002, his youngest daughter, Elizabeth, recalls confronting feelings that went beyond grief.

Should she take over her father's company and give up her career, she wondered? At 38, she had been director of diversity at Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts for two years, and the future seemed promising. Ten days earlier, Ms. Williams, a single mother, had just bought her first home.

''It came down to the fact that I was the only qualified person in the family to take over,'' she said. ''If it wasn't me, it was close the doors.''

Her father's company, Roxbury Technology, remade used toner cartridges for copying machines. Though her father started the company in 1994, it was still a fledgling operation with three employees and less than $4 million in sales. Ms. Williams knew nothing about the business, she said, but she admired her father's devotion to building a business in the inner city.

Consultants and others who advise start-ups and track small businesses agree that accidental entrepreneurship is a tough undertaking. Notable chief executives like Martha Rivers Ingram of Ingram Industries have surprised people by successfully steering a company after the death of a leader -- in Ms. Ingram's case, her husband. More recently, Apollonia Poilane gained fame in France when at age 18 she took over Pain Poilane, her family's renowned Paris-based bread business, after her parents were killed in a helicopter crash in 2002. Ms. Poilane is a senior at Harvard running the $18 million business from afar.

But for many who face such unexpected opportunity, the task is daunting, the failure rate high. So many factors figure into the decision to pick up a business and run with it. The stability of the enterprise, the presence of trusted employees and advisers, and the financial well-being of the company are all crucial decision points. But in the case of the sudden death of a parent or spouse, these decisions are often supplanted by emotional concerns and burdens.

Ms. Williams reached out to her father's business associates, including Thomas G. Stemberg, founder and chairman of Staples, for advice. Within a few days, she decided to make the leap.

''This thing really dropped in my lap,'' she recalled. ''I was scared to death and thought, 'What am I going to do?' I believed in my father's legacy and what he was trying to do for the community. I also knew the company supported my mom, who had never really worked. I knew I had a responsibility to get this done.''

Her four years at the helm have been difficult, particularly because of health problems along the way. Yet Ms. Williams says she is convinced she made the right decision. Roxbury Technology has blossomed into an $11.5 million company with 35 employees and a thriving business model. ''I'm still amazed sometimes that this happened,'' she said. ''I cried a lot of nights.''

Mr. Stemberg said: ''She had the combination of her dad's entrepreneurial genes and some business experience at great companies like Blue Cross/Blue Shield that give her business discipline. She's done a great job building the company.''

Andy Birol, founder of Birol Growth Consulting in Solon, Ohio, interviewed more than 5,000 business owners, and estimates that 50 percent of businesses inherited unexpectedly fail or are sold in a year or two. He suggests that prospective business owners must answer three essential questions when considering what course to take.

The first is, Can you do the job? ''This is critical because there is so much guilt along with the assumption of the duty or responsibility to take over the business,'' Mr. Birol said. ''Many people end up making irrational decisions. They go into it with the idea that they have to do it, and they may simply not have the capability.''

Then there is, Will you do it? ''The person they are replacing had that confidence and conviction that they could run a business, and the new person rarely brings the same level of confidence,'' Mr. Birol said.

If the heir can and will take on the job, the third question is, How will they do it? Mr. Birol noted that this last question is made more difficult because the business owner who died might have been on the wrong track, leaving the new leader to figure out ''the best and highest use'' of the company.

When Radha Jalan's husband died at age 47 in 1992, for example, she had to either find a job or take over her husband's six-year-old company, ElectroChem. Ms. Jalan had a Ph.D. in education but was a stay-at-home mother in Concord, Mass., raising the couple's two daughters, one of them still in high school. She knew nothing about the company's fuel-cell technology but realized that she had to make a living to support herself and her daughters. She decided to run the company, but then all but one of the 10 employees quit after three months.

It was time for a change. Ms. Jalan decided to refocus the company away from research and development to sell products for fuel-cell researchers.

''I had no credentials in technology, but I also never really thought about selling the company,'' she said. Nearly 15 years later, Ms. Jalan is still president and chief executive of ElectroChem, based in Woburn, Mass., and the company is three times the size it was when she took over.

''I've eked out a living with this,'' she said. ''My family in India are Marwaris, a group known for their business acumen. I guess business was in my blood.''

An unexpected death is not the only catalyst for accidental entrepreneurs. Family obligations can lead to unexpected careers as well.

Kent Griswold, armed with a Harvard degree and a master's degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, moved to Australia permanently as a financial consultant, or so he thought. His mother, Jean, an entrepreneur, had started her own home health care business, Griswold Special Care in Erdenheim, Pa., in 1982, despite having multiple sclerosis. Two years after Mr. Griswold left the country, his mother fell and broke her arm and shoulder. His father, a Presbyterian minister, could not run the business, so Mr. Griswold returned to help until his mother mended. He thought it would be a six-month stint.

''I felt an obligation to my parents to try to help them with something they were working very hard at,'' he said. He realized that his mother's concept was ahead of a coming trend and he found himself enjoying the work. He ended up as president and chief executive of the fledgling company. Despite the intensity of living and working with his mother who threatened to resign numerous times, Mr. Griswold helped her build a $100 million business.

Richard Stim, a lawyer in San Francisco and author of ''Whoops! I'm in Business,'' warns that getting into family businesses can wreck personal relationships. ''You need to address financial issues in a businesslike way so you are not sitting around at Thanksgiving with relatives wondering where their money is,'' he said.

For Ms. Williams, her success has justified the faith her father had in her as she was starting her own career. ''I found a letter he wrote to me when I was 22,'' she recalled. ''He wrote: 'You don't see what I see in you. I'm building this business so you can take it over someday. I see you as a star.' I think he would be very proud of me.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: SMALL BUSINESS (90%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (90%); ACCIDENTAL FATALITIES (78%); WORKPLACE DIVERSITY (77%); CELEBRITIES (77%); HEALTH INSURANCE (72%); CONSULTING SERVICES (72%); AIRCRAFT ACCIDENTS (64%); THANKSGIVING (73%); SINGLE PARENTS (72%) Small Business; Small Business
COMPANY: BLUE CROSS & BLUE SHIELD OF MASSACHUSETTS (84%)
ORGANIZATION: Birol Growth Consulting; Roxbury Technology
INDUSTRY: NAICS524114 DIRECT HEALTH AND MEDICAL INSURANCE CARRIERS (84%); SIC6324 HOSPITAL & MEDICAL SERVICE PLANS (84%); NAICS524114 DIRECT HEALTH & MEDICAL INSURANCE CARRIERS (84%)
PERSON: Glenn Rifkin; Andy Birol; Elizabeth Williams
GEOGRAPHIC: BOSTON, MA, USA (90%); PARIS, FRANCE (54%) MASSACHUSETTS, USA (91%) UNITED STATES (91%); FRANCE (54%)
LOAD-DATE: March 8, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photo: Elizabeth Williams took over her father's company, Roxbury Technology, after he died. It has nearly tripled its sales volume under her reign. (Photo by Jodi Hilton for The New York Times)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1048 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 8, 2007 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

Out of Jail, Out of Options, Out on a Limb
BYLINE: By JANET MASLIN
SECTION: Section E; Column 4; The Arts/Cultural Desk; BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Pg. 6
LENGTH: 954 words
Con EdBy Matthew Klein285 pages. Warner Books. $23.99.

There's no great case to be made for Matthew Klein's ''Con Ed,'' a bright swindling-scam comedy set in the world of the Internet nouveau-riche. It's not a groundbreaking book. It's just funny, full of tricks and very, very hard to put down.

In other words ''Con Ed'' makes perfect airplane reading, not least because its satirical targets are the kinds of people who have their own planes. By contrast its narrator is lucky to be a passenger on any form of public conveyance, since the ability to travel freely is a novelty to him.

He's a seasoned (to put it nicely), paunchy, 54-year-old con artist named Kip Largo, and he has done time in a California prison for one of his failed schemes. It involved the sale of a diet product, and most of what Kip did was reasonably well-intentioned. He's not likely to make that mistake again.

''You don't remember the Kip Largo boom?'' he asks the reader. Well, there was one. Kip was worth millions then; now he subsists on home-heated spaghetti dinners at $3.49 a pop and works at a dry cleaner for $10 an hour, plus tips. ''You ever leave a tip at a dry cleaners?'' he asks. ''That's what I thought.''

Mr. Klein, who has some firsthand knowledge about living in Silicon Valley and flopping in the world of venture capital and technology start-ups, begins by establishing Kip's checkered history. Then he plants Kip in picturesque Palo Alto. ''On all four sides are beautiful gated condominium buildings where one-bedrooms go for half a million dollars,'' he says. ''My place is old, cheap stucco, with an open carport in the front, like the neighborhood cold sore.''

From inside this tenuously rented haven (the landlord's grandson-in-law would love to evict him), Kip runs an online vitamin sales operation that has so far brought him nothing more than a bouncing pill as a screen saver. ''It's totally legitimate,'' he says of this business. ''Unfortunately.'' But 800 bottles of vitamins are stockpiled, ready to go. ''In the unlikely event that the world ever switches to a selenium-based economy, I will become a very rich man.''

As this setup is introduced, the elements of an elaborate scheme begin to appear. The book starts in a bar, where Kip sadly watches an amateur crook fail miserably at setting up a scam. This draws Kip's professional sympathies: ''It's like what would happen if Renoir went to one of those art schools advertised on the back of a matchbook.'' Despite himself, he wants to help the stranger who louses up.

Less eagerly he needs to help his own son, Toby, who appears at Kip's little sanctuary needing a place to stay. ''Toby has the stupid Gotcha! grin of a 15-year-old boy,'' Kip explains, with his version of fatherly affection. ''Unfortunately for both of us, Toby is 25 years old.''

Toby is in trouble because he's run up gambling debts. ''There is only one thing Toby can do to avoid having his brains knocked out of his skull by Russian goons,'' Kip reasons. ''He must build a time machine in my garage.'' Failing that, Toby must prompt his father to swing back into con-man mode to get the kid out of a jam.

Along comes the fall guy who will figure in Kip's plotting: Edward Napier, whose wife turned up in the opening bar scene asking Kip to help her escape her husband's clutches. Napier is a gambling magnate, with a lavish, heaven-theme hotel in Las Vegas that the book merrily skewers. He's also the kind of guy who appears to be active in business but is diverted each day by wine and golf around lunchtime. In light of this work ethic Napier is a good target for a get-richer-quick scheme, and the plan calls for an attractive woman to pique his interest.

Kip enlists Jessica, a onetime porn actress whose body has been made to look ''less like a boast and more like a promise,'' so that she can pass for an Internet executive type. ''She radiates a quiet sexiness,'' Kip says admiringly, ''like the voluptuous PTA mom whose comments about homework and field trips are met with clamorous applause by all the fathers in the auditorium.''

''Con Ed'' is distinguished from countless routine books in its genre by the other kinds of elements that Kip's scheme requires. He knows how to use dizzying arrays of computer equipment in ways that are bewitching, even psychedelic, to potential investors. Kip's knowledge of the stock market also figures prominently in his plans.

And he uses Silicon Valley jargon (''massively parallel computing''), wardrobe (chinos and chambray shirt to suggest an entrepreneur, ''Code Warrior'' T-shirt for the programming geek) and manners to amusing effect. He knows his Northern California turf, from its near-religious faith in the Internet to its lock-step sedateness. ''I know a Black Panther who settled here in 1972, with an Afro the size of a cosmonaut's helmet,'' he says. ''Thirty years later, he's a white man who shops at Whole Foods for organic barley.''

As ''Con Ed'' and its sting plot gather momentum, the book poses a constant threat: that Kip will use this situation to seek redemption, become a great father, right his past wrongs. Happily, Mr. Klein shows no signs of a sentimental side. And he keeps his story largely surprising, with the exception of one major jolt that is too easily foreseen.

But even when it veers near heavily commercial storytelling (there's a bit of Janet Evanovich in Mr. Klein's ever-wisecracking tone), this book and its narrator are great fun. When Kip at last finds himself talking to law enforcement officials and one female officer sounds motherly (''I think we're being very fair''), Kip's comeback is perfect. ''Where were you 50 years ago,'' he asks, ''when I needed you most?''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: INTERNET & WWW (77%); EVICTION (70%); RESIDENTIAL CO-OWNERSHIP (67%); RENTAL PROPERTY (67%); VITAMIN SUPPLEMENTS (65%); WEALTHY PEOPLE (65%); VENTURE CAPITAL (63%); LITERATURE (78%); BOOK REVIEWS (78%) Books and Literature; Reviews
COMPANY: CONSOLIDATED EDISON INC (58%); GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING (58%)
TICKER: ED (NYSE) (58%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS221210 NATURAL GAS DISTRIBUTION (58%); NAICS221122 ELECTRIC POWER DISTRIBUTION (58%); SIC4924 NATURAL GAS DISTRIBUTION (58%); SIC4911 ELECTRIC SERVICES (58%)
PERSON: Janet Maslin; Matthew Klein
GEOGRAPHIC: SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA, USA (79%) CALIFORNIA, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (79%)
LOAD-DATE: March 8, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photo: Matthew Klein (Photo by David Nicholas)
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1049 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 7, 2007 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

Green Gold, or Just Slime?
BYLINE: By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
SECTION: Section C; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1613 words
DATELINE: NILAND, Calif.
The idea of replacing crude oil with algae may seem like a harebrained way to clean up the planet and bolster national security.

But Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones and her husband, David Jones, are betting their careers and personal fortunes that they can grow masses of the slimy organism and use its natural photosynthesis process to produce a plentiful supply of biofuel.

A few companies are in a race to be first to convert algae to fuel on a commercial scale, and it will require not a small amount of money, luck and biotech tweaking.

''You have a vintage here that you are not sure is going to mature into anything good, and you are putting money into it on the off chance that it might,'' Ms. Morgenthaler-Jones, acknowledged during a drive the other day to an algae-filled catfish farm in this secluded desert town.

Like thousands of other pioneer venture capitalists over the last two years or so, these two San Francisco Bay area investors have trolled through the dizzying, complicated world of renewable fuels -- from wave power, to hydrogen fuel cells, to lithium batteries, to cow manure for making methane. And just like their predecessors of the dot-com boom a decade ago, they have come up with their very own gamble, started their own company, called LiveFuels Inc., and are now negotiating with other potential venture capital partners.

What is different, though, about Ms. Morgenthaler-Jones and this latest entrepreneurial wave is that the search is for something that both produces profits and offers something good for the environment. One goal, for instance, is to find an energy-efficient way to convert algae into fuel , which is why she was visiting a catfish farm here that was for sale. Farmed catfish could provide a useful source of carbon dioxide for the algae, as well as a critical revenue flow to keep research going. The timing may be just right. With oil prices at high levels and fears of global warming growing, the old world of conventional hydrocarbon energy has been joined by an alluring new array of alternative-energy gadgetry, technical wizardry and potential riches. But there are still many more blind alleys than successes, and sleepless nights go with the territory.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of start-ups in the alternative-energy business, some so tiny they are run out of home basements. But the bigger ones are beginning to take off. A handful are now building at least three demonstration plants to convert wood chips and grasses into ethanol in the United States and Canada.

Meanwhile, venture capital firms and hedge funds are financing the construction of new plants to produce biodiesel fuel out of vegetable oil, larger and more durable wind turbines and new materials to make cheaper solar cells.

While still on the fringes of the energy mix, United States venture capital flowing into clean energy leapfrogged to more than $2.4 billion in 2006, well more than double that invested in 2005, and more than triple from 2004, according to Clean Edge, a research and consulting firm. The numbers are still small compared with the research budgets of the big oil companies, but the ascent of venture capital in renewable energy has reminded some Silicon Valley venture capitalists of the early flow of money into the Internet in the mid-1990s.

''Venture capital in energy has reached a critical mass,'' said Daniel Yergin, the energy historian and consultant. ''Enough is happening so that significant things will come out of this. With the same intent to do in energy what they did in biotech, they bring not only money and discipline, but they are results-oriented.''

One Seattle-based start-up, Prometheus Energy, attracted enough equity capital in the last three years to open a plant in Orange County, Calif., in January that for the first time produces liquid natural gas commercially out of landfill methane gas that would otherwise waft greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Another venture capital favorite, Jadoo Power of Folsom, Calif., has already pioneered portable hydrogen fuel-cell technology for remote satellite phones, critical emergency radio communications and police surveillance, and it is now working on cells for home use to free customers entirely of their utility bills.

''I can honestly say that for the first time in my life we are seeing the venture capital community put sizable amounts of money into energy,'' Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman said in a speech in Houston last month. ''This is real money. They are betting, if you will, that clean, safe, affordable energy represents the new innovation frontier.''

To this group add LiveFuels , with its improbable company jingle that goes ''from pond to pump.''

''If the U.S. put 15 million acres of desert into algae production, we could produce enough volume of liquid fuels to get us off the Middle East oil addiction and give Iowa back to the songbirds,'' said B. Gregory Mitchell, an algae research biologist at the University of California, San Diego, who is a friend of Ms. Morgenthaler-Jones and Mr. Jones.

The company projects that in three years it can produce some biofuel, which theoretically could eventually be produced in quantities of as much as 20,000 gallons of fuel a year per acre of algae.

The road to algae has been far from straight for Mr. Jones, and Ms. Morgenthaler-Jones, who comes from a family of venture capitalists and started her own clean energy venture capital fund in 2004. It culminated more than two years of reading and research, tracking down and talking to scientists and attending energy and venture capital gatherings, where Ms. Morgenthaler-Jones has a habit of munching on chocolate-covered strawberries while doodling molecular diagrams of fatty acids during the duller lectures.

They looked at investing in wave energy but decided that corrosion from salt water and unpredictable weather made it unreliable. They looked at investing in hydrogen fuel cells but decided that they were too expensive for generating stationary power and too fragile to install in cars.

They looked at wind energy but decided it could not beat the price of power from coal anytime soon, especially with Congress's past habit of allowing production tax credits to lapse whenever the price of oil dropped and the sense of urgency faded. They looked at solar but concluded that it would be tough to compete with venture capitalists experienced in semiconductors already pouring into the field.

They came close to investing in a cellulosic ethanol company that had designed machinery to turn sugar cane or wood chips into a synthetic gas. But after talking to experts, they concluded that the scientist behind the firm was promising more than he could deliver.

Ms. Morgenthaler-Jones spent months visiting dairy farms around the country to see if there might be a good business opportunity in converting cow manure into methanol.

''Oh, boy! Do you smell it?'' she said. ''I was tramping around in manure and admiring five-acre manure ponds.'' But what bothered her most were the regulatory and cost hurdles to making the business work.

''For most of these alternative fuels, you need a perfect confluence of technology, regulation and market conditions,'' she said.

During her research, Ms. Morgenthaler-Jones found a decade-old government study on algae that lost funding during the Clinton administration. It was a moment that led her to more conversations with algae specialists. The slime, she concluded, showed real potential.

And since Ms. Morgenthaler-Jones and Mr. Jones both had prior business experience in biotechnology, they founded LiveFuels as an algae business last February. She became chief executive, and he, chief financial officer.

Since its founding a year ago, the company has not attracted outside capital, much less made any money. They need $45 million in seed money. LiveFuels has survived so far with nearly $1 million of family money to pay two full-time and two part-time employees and to rent laboratory space outfitted with a centrifuge and microscopes to research algae DNA.

But the fledgling company caught the attention of the energy world in recent months when it formed partnerships with two Energy Department national laboratories to help revive the government's moribund algae energy research. The couple are now negotiating with several investors, whom they would not identify.

At the catfish farm recently in the dusty Imperial Valley, they and three advising scientists peppered the owner with questions about the salinity of the water in the ponds, local water rights, evaporation and drainage. LiveFuels would have to use biotechnology to make stronger, fecund and more productive strains of algae to be superheated or pressurized into fuel.

Geothermal activity under the desert could provide a free source of carbon dioxide to bubble up for the algae to absorb and convert into organic matter to process as fuel. But fish farming, the scientists warned, would not be a sure-fire profit-maker and could prove to be more of a diversion of time and capital than an asset.

By the end of a long day, the couple were still not sure whether to invest in the fish farm or not, and this was their fourth visit.

Last month at a biodiesel conference in San Antonio, when Ms. Morgenthaler-Jones met Peterson Conway, an executive with the GreenFuel Technologies Corporation, a competing algae company, he jokingly asked her, ''Do you think some day we'll look at this as rabbit farming or the holy grail?''

She smiled but quickly turned serious. ''I wouldn't put my money and time into this,'' she said, ''if I didn't think it would work.''

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