Bonus Bananas Apr 20, 2012

1) Citigroup Investors Vote Down CEO’s Lavish Pay Package (Time Magazine) - Vikram Pandit has had better weeks. First shareholders tell Citi executives to get bent with their pay increase, and then Zillow tells Pandit that the Ct. home he just listed for sale is worth nowhere near his asking price. Cheer up, Vik. It's Friday, so there's only two working days left until Monday.

2) Tumi Surges 44% in Debut (DealBook) - Luggage is the new signalling device for prestige, and high-end luggage manufacturer Tumi proved that yesterday. The company priced at $18 a share, above the expected $15-$17, and ran up to $26 - valuing the bag maker at nearly $2 billion. What can you say? They make a great product.

3) Free $10 Million Loans For All! and Other Wall Street Notes (Rolling Stone) - Is anyone else surprised at the quality of Wall Street coverage coming from Rolling Stone? This entry discusses FDIC chair Sheila Bair's suggestion that every American should be given an interest-free $10 million loan. She wasn't being serious, just making the point that this is the exact deal the banks got. But when you think about it, that might actually work...

4) Is Speed Trader Mark Gorton Killing Wall Street? (Huffington Post) - Disregard the source of this article for a moment and give it a read. It is a really fascinating profile of Mark Gorton and the world of high frequency trading. I'll admit that I think HFT is screwing up the market, but Gorton makes some really solid counters to that accusation. I guess I just suffer from latency-envy.

5) 18 Venn diagrams showing how corrupted American ‘democracy’ really is (Activist Post) - You guys are probably wondering what's going on this week. I moved from Rolling Stone to Huffington Post and now to extreme lefty Activist Post. Fear not; I haven't gone to the dark side. There's just some really entertaining chart porn to be had here. How do you spell conflict of interest?

6) How to Pay No Taxes: 10 Strategies Used by the Rich (Business Week) - That's more like it, right? This is a surprisingly in-depth look at some of the tricks the uber-wealthy use to avoid taxable events. Taking a loan out to buy out a partners equity and then writing off the interest payments is pure genius - and just this side of money laundering. Enjoy.

7) Make Business School Pay Off: 3 Ways (Inc. Magazine) - We have a lot of monkeys heading off to B-school, so the timing on this one is pretty clutch. Make sure to do a thorough cost:benefit analysis, though. According to the WSJ, those school loans are absolute killers.

8) How to Build a Billion Dollar Startup (Steve Blank) - Few names carry more weight in the Lean Start-Up world than Steve Blank's, so when he tells you how to build a billion dollar business you should listen. As always, his insights are spot on and he goes into much useful detail. BTW, if you managed to catch his Advanced Entrepreneurship series this week at Columbia, I'm jealous.

9) Why Don’t We Make Learning A Computer Language A Requirement In High School? (Feld Thoughts) - We had visitors here in Paris for the past couple weeks, and they brought their son who is a junior in high school. He's in his third year of Latin, but doesn't know how to do much more on a computer than log in to Facebook and write a term paper in Word. That is a travesty. Why the hell are we still teaching dead languages but there's no requirement to learn even basic HTML?

10) Instagram Founders Go to Vegas to Party with Deadmau5 & Avicii After Selling Company for $1 Billion (Bro Bible) - ATTN: This link is best opened from home and not work. There's nothing NSFW in it, but some companies get a little cranky about Bro Bible. Anyway, what would you do if you were 26 years old and just sold your company for a billion fucking dollars? I think Vegas goes without saying. Can't say I love their taste in music, but screw it. Baller.

The Video of the Week this week is a trailer for a movie that I think promises to be the greatest movie of all time. Seriously. I haven't looked forward to a movie this much since, like, Die Hard. Take it away, Ted:

And here's an alternate trailer that isn't as nasty, but every bit as funny:

Have a great weekend guys, and let me know what you think about this week's bunch of bananas in the comments!

 

Something about that $1 bln Instagram sale keeps rubbing me the wrong way. That's like the 3rd thing I've seen of the Instagram ass clowns essentialy saying "fuck you" to all things capitalism. It mostly rubs me the wrong way because they're literally not even trying to hide their true feelings of "holy shit! How the fuck did we do this!?". Like at least wait for the cameras to be off

GBS
 

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