10 BIG THINKERS FOR BIG BUSINESS
McNamee cofounded Elevation with five other business veterans--as well as U2 frontman Bono--to invest in media firms like videogame companies and music labels, at precisely the moment that the Internet is demolishing traditional media-business models. McNamee says Elevation's strategy is to buy media companies and position them to thrive in an age when audio and video are transmitted over the Internet and anyone can become a musician or filmmaker. Hollywood, he says, has been too defensive about Internet copying and distribution. "They are going to miss a massive period of creativity and will have to buy the companies that get this at a very high multiple," he says.
McNamee and his partners want to invest and actively guide media companies for periods of seven to 10 years. That tune isn't in the typical songbook used by media investors. But McNamee credits a major health crisis for his long-term perspective. In 2001, he had a stroke. He was just 45. Doctors discovered the cause was an inch-and-a-half-wide hole in his heart and performed open-heart surgery to repair it. McNamee spent a year recuperating and re-evaluating his life. --He recommitted to his music and funneled his new revelations into a 2004 book, "The New Normal: Great Opportunities in a Time of Great Risk." McNamee now preaches unconventional wisdom not just about managing companies, but managing life in an increasingly stressful world. "The key piece of advice I'm giving people is that 98 percent of the stuff in their in box doesn't matter," he says. Now that's a catchy tune.
--Brad Stone
Around the halls of DayJet, Ed Iacobucci is called "George"--as in George Jetson. Iacobucci, after all, wants to make the car-size jets imagined in the cartoon a reality, with an air-taxi service for short business trips that he's trying to launch next spring. Iacobucci (pronounced YAK-ah-boochee) sees a future in which people can hail one of his DayJets on short notice to go where and when they want, without the hassle of changing planes or navigating big hub airports. What will make this a reality is the expected arrival next year of a new class of aircraft called "very light jets," or VLJs. Other companies are also planning to launch air-taxi companies, but Iacobucci, the former chairman of software company Citrix Systems, says proprietary software his company is developing--called Advanced System Technology for Real-time Operations, or ASTRO (after Jetson's trusty dog)--will give him an edge over the competition. "It couldn't have been done five years ago," he says.
Iacobucci's inspiration wasn't sci-fi books, but the drudgery of business travel from his days as an IBM engineer. "The busier I got, the harder it was to do my job," says Iacobucci, who lives in Delray Beach, Fla. When Iacobucci made some $100 million as cofounder of Citrix Systems, which pioneered remote computer access, he bought himself a Learjet. "It was a revelation--not the luxury, but the convenience," he says. He wondered why on-call jets were only for CEOs.
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