Tag: Silicon Valley

#GetMohamedAJob

Refugee Mohamed Elbarkey could not get a job; he did not give up and took enterprising action to try to get work

Mohamed Elbarkey came to Britain as a refugee from Libya. He worked hard and got degrees from the University of Southampton and University College London yet still could not get a job in finance.

After having sent out 70 CVs without success, 22-year-old Elbarkey decided to stand outside Canary Wharf tube station with a sign pleading for work. Whilst there, he encountered Mary Engleheart – a digital manager at the International Rescue Committee and having heard his story she decided to share it with her Twitter followers.

Elbarkey’s stunt subsequently went viral and aside from being shared by the former Labour politician David Miliband, the hashtag #GetMohamedAJob attracted press attention internationally. In comments to the Evening Standard last week, Elbarkey remarked:

“I found this young man, David, he did the same stunt in Silicon Valley. He wanted a job in technology and what better place. I found that he had over 200 job offers and I thought I only need one.”

“Why don’t I try and see if my story resonates with these executives at these large financial firms and see if they wanted to take me under their wing, even offer me an internship and a job or genuinely just some advice.”

If you can help, email [email protected] and we will pass on your details to Mohamed Elbarkey. Here is an enterprising youngster who deserves to be encouraged and we urge readers to share the hashtag: #GetMohamedAJob also.

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August 21, 2018
Palming Off Il Palmetto

Billionaire founder of Netscape has failed to sell his Palm Beach mansion in a year; it remains on the market for £105 million (or 754% more than he paid for it in 1999)

Four times married, a father of four and a collector of rather large gin palaces, Texan James H. Clark founded Netscape in 1994 and earnt $2 billion (the equivalent of $3 billion, £2.3 billion, €2.6 billion or درهم11 billion today) from that project when it was sold to AOL in 1998.

Clark paid just $11 million for a Palm Beach mansion named ‘Il Palmetto’ in 1999 (the equivalent of $16.2 million, £12.3 million €13.8 million or درهم59.5 million today) and spent four years renovating the 5.46-acre property. He placed it for sale for $137 million (£105 million, €117 million or درهم503 million) last August but has plainly failed to attract a buyer.

Built to the designs of the Swiss architect Maurice Fatio (1897 – 1943) as an “Italian Renaissance-style palazzo” in 1930, the house – which is also known as 1500 South Ocean Boulevard – is described by selling agents Sotheby’s International Realty as “without peer in Palm Beach.” The building was subjected to a four year renovation by Mr Clark, reportedly extends to around 44,200 square foot and aside from including 10 bedrooms, 14 full-bathrooms and 12 partial-bathrooms, also comes with a 20,000 bottle wine cellar and a second cellar for an additional 1,000 crates.

Architecturally “a series of pavilions connected by cloisters,” the main house is dominated by formal entertaining areas with 16^th century carved ceilings and accessed from a private tunnel underneath the road is a 2-bedroom beach house with an infinity pool that “blends into the turquoise waters of the Atlantic Ocean.” To the other boundary, on Lake Worth, is a boathouse with motorised launches for two vessels and a 2-bedroom apartment above.

July 30, 2017
Sex and the Single Zillionaire

Belvedere, CA home of late tech billionaire and author of ‘Sex and the Single Zillionaire’ Thomas Perkins for sale; he entertained amongst others Sophia Loren and Rupert Murdoch there

Thomas Perkins (1932 – 2016) had it all. Born in New York, this Harvard University and MIT graduate made his fortune in Silicon Valley, California when he co-founded Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1972 and invested in amongst others Amazon, AOL, Compaq, Google, Macromedia, Netscape and Segway. He was said to be worth £6.4 billion ($8 billion, €7.4 billion or درهم29.4 billion), was briefly married to famed author Danielle Steel between 1998 and 2002 and wrote a novel of his own, Sex and the Single Zillionaire, in 2006.

Aside from an £8 million ($10 million, €9.3 million or درهم36.6 million) country house in East Sussex, England named Plumpton Place and ‘The Maltese Falcon’ – his 289-foot long, £104.3 million ($130 million, €120.9 million or درهم477.5 million) sailing yacht – Perkins owned a French style residence on Belvedere Island in Marin County, California. He purchased it with his Norwegian first wife, Gerd Thune-Ellefsen, in 1972 and continued to live there after her death in 1994.

Danielle Steel and Tom Perkins remained friends even after their divorce

Steel even hosted a party for Perkins’s novel at her Pacific Heights, San Francisco mansion when it launched in 2006

The tech billionaire’s yacht, The Maltese Falcon, was the largest sailing yacht in the world when it was launched in 1990

Perkins at his English country home, Plumpton Place in East Sussex

The exterior of Perkins’s Belvedere home, 345 Golden Gate Avenue, appears modest

But what is to be found within includes this spectacular ‘Grand Salon’

Extending to 8.885 square foot in total, the house – which was put up for sale last June by Perkins’s children – was built to the designs of architects Julia Morgan and George Kelham in 1928 and features 16th century linenfold wood-paneled walls in a room described as a ‘Grand Salon’. Here, Perkins entertained European royalty, his fellow News Corp board member Rupert Murdoch and the Italian actress Sophia Loren and given the room’s outlook to the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay, these luminaries cannot have failed to have been impressed.

Known simply as 345 Golden Gate Avenue, Perkins’s former home is for sale through Sotheby’s International Realty for £13.2 million ($16.5 million, €15.3 million or درهم60.6 million). It includes a formal dining room seating 18, 6 bedrooms, 7.5 bathrooms, a guest apartment, an outdoor swimming pool and stands on a plot of 0.85 acres.

Prior to his death, in 2014, Perkins attracted controversy when he penned an article for The Wall Street Journal. At the time, he wrote:

“Writing from the epicentre [sic] of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one per cent’, namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one per cent, namely the rich”.

He later apologised for making comparisons to Nazi Germany but subsequently added: “In the Nazi era it was racial demonization, now it’s class demonization”.

February 6, 2017
The Times They are a-Changin’ (and All it Takes is a Tweet)

Matthew Steeples highlights the workings and truths behind the changed political landscape of 2016

2016 will be remembered as the year when the world flipped convention on its head. With the brutal monster Fidel Castro finally gone, Donald Trump headed for The White House and Brexit in Britain, comes a new era but it is not one that is actually as clear-cut as many make out.

Unlike in previous eras, social media undoubtedly has had more influence than the traditional media and pollsters have taken a bashing. In spite, for example, of the fact that “Hillary Clinton [is] currently beating Donald Trump by 64.2 million votes to 62.2 million in the popular vote” and thus “winning the election by 3.1%”, according to Kevin Chesters, chief strategy officer at Ogilvy & Mather Group UK, “as usual the historical narrative will swallow the bulls**t myths instead”. He rightly points out “the polls nailed it” as they predicted “all gave Hillary between a 2-5% lead nationally with a +/- 3% margin of error” but the likes of Breitbart, unsurprisingly instead, spread a myth that ‘The Donald’s’ victory was epic. It was just that, in the sense that he achieved a win in spite of being mocked as an extremist joker who’d fail at the beginning, but the true margin of support for him is indicated by the fact that nationwide turnout fell from 61.6% in 2008 to 57.9% in 2016.

In Britain, equally, the Brexit vote was “won” by just 2.2% and thus both results can be described as being far less significant than the right-wing media make out. Nigel Farage is lauded as a “hero”, yet, despite standing seven times, has never won a seat in the House of Commons; Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP failed to get independence for Scotland yet she dominates our screens daily.

Trump and Farage have clearly both been clever in their respective strategies and just as Castro opted to ignore convention and ruled Cuba with a rod of iron, these two ditched the politics we know and played an entirely different game. Hillary Clinton’s decision to stand with self-serving billionaires and loudmouth celebrities truly backfired and instead, in Jared Kushner, his 35-year old businessman son-in-law, and the tech tycoon Peter Thiel, Trump was led to a strategy that trounced traditional political convention.

A truly revealing analysis of Kushner’s genius appeared in Forbes this week when he was interviewed by for the first time since Trump’s victory. In the feature article, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and designer of the Clinton campaign’s technology system, stated:

“Best I can tell, [Kushner] actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources… Jared understood the online world in a way the traditional media folks didn’t. He managed to assemble a presidential campaign on a shoestring using new technology and won. That’s a big deal”.

Kushner himself added:

“I helped facilitate a lot of relationships that wouldn’t have happened otherwise… People were being told in Washington that if they did any work for the Trump campaign, they would never be able to work in Republican politics again. I hired a great tax-policy expert who joined under two conditions: We couldn’t tell anybody he worked for the campaign, and he was going to charge us double”.

“People really saw hope in [Donald Trump’s] message. They wanted the things that wouldn’t have been obvious to a lot of people I would meet in the New York media world, the Upper East Side or at Robin Hood [Foundation] dinners”.

“I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff. They gave me their subcontractors… Our best people were mostly the ones who volunteered for me pro bono. People from the business world, people from non-traditional backgrounds”.

“We weren’t afraid to make changes. We weren’t afraid to fail. We tried to do things very cheaply, very quickly. And if it wasn’t working, we would kill it quickly… It meant making quick decisions, fixing things that were broken and scaling things that worked”.

As Dan Hodges concluded in an editorial in today’s Mail Online:

“Once, we used to send a gunboat. In the post-Brexit era, all it takes is a tweet”.

November 27, 2016
Slash and die

Asking price of Californian estate cut by £37.8 million; condition of owner being allowed to live there until he dies removed (more…)

July 25, 2015
Flooding Woodside

£46.4 million Woodside estate remains for sale despite £10.1 million price cut (more…)

March 8, 2015
Marissa Mayer

With some 725,000 followers on Twitter, Wisconsin born Marissa Mayer is a popular and powerful lady. Formerly the key spokesperson for Google, San Francisco based Mayer became the CEO of Yahoo! in July 2012 and was ranked one of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women by Forbes in 2013. This Stanford educated Lutheran was the first CEO of a Fortune 500 company to appear in a Vogue magazine spread in September that year and once stated her priorities as “God, family and Yahoo, except I’m not that religious, so it’s really family and Yahoo”. Worth some £191 million ($310 million), Mayer surprisingly describes herself as “shy” and “naïve”; we’d bet that she’s really far from either.

September 12, 2014
Dr William Shockley (1910 – 1989)

Considered by some a racist, “The father of Silicon Valley” was an American born in London who won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Stanford professor William Shockley’s attempts to comercialise his transistor design led to him being credited as “the man who brought silicon to Silicon Valley” but by the time he died of prostate cancer he was estranged from most of his friends and family. The children of this staunch advocate of eugenics are reported to have only learnt of his death through the print media.

August 17, 2014
A house that hasn’t sold in 14 years

‘Cotswold style’ mansion dramatically reduced in price after 14 years on the market

Americans love all things British and they especially love to replicate our architecture. In the Northern Californian town of Hillsborough, a fine example is a 35,000 square foot mansion named The Tobin Clark Estate. (more…)

December 12, 2013
Price vs. Patience

Stonebrook Court Manor: The sale of a Californian mansion where it’s more about patience than price

Stonebrook Court Manor in California’s Los Altos Hills has been on and off the market since January 2008. Its owner, a “television executive turned Internet investor” and investment banker named Kelly Porter, though said to be “in no hurry to sell”, has reduced his asking price from £28.1 million ($45 million) to £16.8 million ($27 million) through Arthur Sharif & Associates. (more…)

September 23, 2013