Forbes - Asia (December 2019 - January 2020)

STRATEGIES






out firms like KKR, Blackstone and Apollo Global Manage- fewer than 20, worth less than $100 billion, a decade ago. In-
ment. That’s even better than the returns from the software vestors around the world clamor to get into his firm’s funds,
buyout firm Vista Equity Partners, its closest rival, run by and lenders have checkbooks ready to finance his next big
Robert F. Smith, the African American billionaire who re- deal. “The opportunities today are the biggest I’ve ever seen,”
cently made headlines by paying off the college debt of More- Bravo says. “Right now we are in a huge, exploding and
house College’s entire graduating class. Since the beginning of changing industry.”
2015, Bravo has sold or listed 25 investments worth a total of
$20 billion, four times their cost. His secret? He invests only rlando Bravo’s isn’t a rags-to-riches story. He was
in well-established software companies, especially those with born into a privileged life in Puerto Rico in the Span-
clearly discernible moats. Oish colonial city of Mayagüez, which for decades was
“The economics of software were just so powerful. It was the port for tuna fishing vessels supplying the local Starkist,
like no other industry I had ever researched,” says Bravo, seat- Neptune and Bumble Bee canneries.
ed in his office in San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid. He Starting in 1945, his grandfather Orlando Bravo, and later
wears a tailored purple dress shirt and enunciates his words his father, Orlando Bravo Sr., ran Bravo Shipping, which
with a slight Puerto Rican accent. “It was just very obvious.” acted as an agent for the massive tuna-fishing factory ships
Bravo’s firm has done 230 software deals worth over $68 entering the port in Mayagüez. It was a lucrative business.
billion since 2003 and presently oversees a portfolio of 38 His parents moved him and his younger brother Alejandro
software companies that generate some $12 billion in annu- to what’s now a gated community in the hills of Mayagüez,
al revenue and employ 40,000 people. Forbes estimates the where the brothers attended private schools and tooled about
value of the firm, which is owned entirely by Bravo and a on the family’s 5m motorboat.
handful of his partners, at $7 billion. Based on his stake in the After taking up tennis at age 8, practicing on the courts
firm and his cash in its funds, Bravo has a $3 billion fortune. of a local university and a Hilton hotel, Bravo and his fam-
Not only does that make him the first Puerto Rican-born bil- ily began making the two-and-a-half-hour drive from their
lionaire, it was enough for Bravo to debut at 287th place on home to San Juan on weekends to allow him to train against
this year’s Forbes 400 ranking of the richest Americans. better competition. “What I loved about tennis was the op-


Every time we picked up our heads to peek


at a deal that wasn’t software, the software



deal looked a lot better to us.





Like a good tennis player who’s worked relentlessly on portunity,” he recalls. “I’m from Mayagüez, and I’m going to
his ground strokes, Bravo has made private equity investing come to the big city and I’m going to make it,” he says. “Let’s
look simple. There are no complicated tricks. He figured out go! The underdog!”
nearly two decades ago that software and private equity were He quickly became one of Puerto Rico’s top players, which
an incredible combination. Since then, Bravo has never in- landed him at Bollettieri’s academy and then on the tennis
vested elsewhere, instead honing his strategy and technique team at Brown University in Providence. “I was so scared I
deal after deal. He hunts for companies with novel software wouldn’t make it through,” Bravo says of the Ivy League, so
products, like Veracode, a Burlington, Massachusetts-based he took most classes pass/fail as a college freshman. But he
maker of security features for coders, or Pleasanton, Califor- quickly found his footing and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in
nia-based Ellie Mae, the default system among online mort- 1992 with degrees in economics and political science. That
gage lenders, which the firm picked up for $3.7 billion in helped him get a prestigious job as an analyst in Morgan
April. His investments typically have at least $150 million in Stanley’s mergers and acquisitions department. There he paid
sales from repeat customers and are in markets that are too his dues, clocking 100-hour weeks under the renowned deal-
specialized to draw the interest of giants like Microsoft and maker Joseph Perella.
Google. Bravo looks to triple their size with better operations, Bravo’s Spanish fluency put him in front of clients as other
and by the time he strikes, he’s already mapped out an acqui- analysts slaved away in data rooms. Working on Venezue-
sition or turnaround strategy. lan billionaire Gustavo Cisneros’ 1993 acquisition of Puerto
The pool of potential deals is growing. On public mar- Rican supermarket chain Pueblo Xtra International opened
kets, there are now more than 75 subscription software com- his eyes to the world of buyouts. But mostly he says he
panies, worth nearly $1 trillion, that Bravo can target, versus learned he didn’t want to be a banker.




98 | FORBES ASIA DECEMBER 2019 / JANUARY 2020



STRATEGIES






Bravo eventually headed west to
Stanford University. He’d already been
accepted into its law school, but he also
wanted to attend the business school.
He called insistently and eventually got
accepted to pursue both. He worked
during a summer at Seaver Kent, a
Menlo Park, California-based joint
venture with David Bonderman’s Texas
Pacific Group that specialized in middle
market deals. Upon graduation in 1998,
Bravo wasn’t offered a position there
or at TPG, and he spent months cold-
calling for a job. After about a hundred
calls, Bravo’s résumé caught the eye
of Carl Thoma, a founding partner of
the Chicago-based private equity firm
Golder, Thoma, Cressey, Rauner
(now known as GTCR), and they hit it
off. “The biggest mistake Texas Pacific
made was. . . that they didn’t make him
a job offer,” says Thoma, 71, who Forbes
estimates is also a billionaire based on
an analysis of public filings.
One of the pioneers of the private
equity industry in the 1970s, Thoma is
a tall and mild-mannered Oklahoman
whose parents were ranchers. Thoma
and his partners practiced a friendlier
version of the buyouts popularized by
Michael Milken, preferring to buy small
businesses and expand them using ac-
quisitions. When Bravo came aboard
in 1998, Thoma and partner Bryan
Cressey had just split from Stanley



I learned I didn’t want to learned I didn’t want to invest in risky
things ever again,” Bravo says. “It was too

invest in risky things ever painful to live through.” Thoma Cressey
was also struggling elsewhere, with un-
derperforming investments in oil and gas
again. It was too painful. and telecommunications. It was among the
worst performers in the private equity in-
dustry at the time.
But the failure led to an epiphany that
Golder and Bruce Rauner, who later went on to become gov- soon made Bravo and his partners billions. He realized his
ernor of Illinois, creating Thoma Cressey. Thoma sent Bravo mistake was in backing startup entrepreneurs, an inherent-
to San Francisco to hunt for investments and eventually ex- ly risky move, when for the same money he could buy estab-
pand the firm’s Bay Area presence. lished companies selling niche software to loyal customers.
Bravo’s first few deals, struck before he turned 30, were di- With Thoma’s blessing, Bravo pivoted and became an ex- JAMEL TOPPIN FOR FORBES
sasters. He backed two website design startups, NerveWire pert on these arcane firms. Coming out of the dot-com bust,
and Eclipse Networks, just as the dot-com bubble popped. the market was littered with foundering companies that had
The two lost most of the $100 million Bravo invested. “I gone public during the bubble and had few interested buy-




100 | FORBES ASIA DECEMBER 2019 / JANUARY 2020

ers. Bravo got to work. His first big move, in 2002, was to buy Redwood Shores, California’s Imperva. They juggle their
Prophet 21, a Yardley, Pennsylvania-based software provid- Rollaboard suitcases and thick financial books as Thoma
er to distributors in the healthcare and manufacturing sectors Bravo partners map out corporate strategies on dry-erase
that was trading at a mere one times sales. whiteboards. Those on break hammer away at keyboards in
Rather than clean house, Bravo kept the company’s CEO, small workrooms or demolish chicken sandwiches in a no-
Chuck Boyle, and worked beside him to boost profits, main- frills kitchenette.
ly by rolling up competitors. When Boyle wanted to buy a This is one of Thoma Bravo’s monthly boot camps for
company called Faspac, Bravo flew to San Diego to work out new acquisitions, grueling daylong sessions that are critical
of the Faspac owner’s garage for five days, analyzing reams of to its success. Partners regularly buzz into Bravo’s spartan
contracts to see if the deal would work. “Orlando would help glass-walled offices, while in the background the drilling and
not only at the highest level with strategy but also when we hammering of construction workers making room for 13
got grunt work done,” Boyle recalls. After seven acquisitions, new associates disturbs the peace.
Bravo sold the business for $215 million, making five times After two decades studying software, Bravo recogniz-
his money. es clear patterns. For instance, when a company pioneers a
Software quickly became Bravo’s sole focus, and Thoma product, its sales explode and then inevitably slow as com-
Cressey began to thrive. By 2005, Bravo and Thoma had petitors emerge. Often a CEO will use this cue to stray into
recruited three employees, Scott Crabill, Holden Spaht and new markets or overspend to gin up sales. Bravo calls this
Seth Boro, to focus on software applications, cybersecurity “chasing too many rabbits.” To fix it, he and his ten partners
and Web infrastructure. All remain with the firm today as work alongside 22 current and former software executives
managing partners. who serve as consultants. They begin tracking the profit-and-
Bravo’s big opportunity came during the financial crisis loss statements for each product line and pore over contracts
when Thoma put Bravo’s name on the door and split with his in search of bad deals or underpriced products. Critical-
partner Bryan Cressey, a healthcare investor, creating Thoma ly, by the time a Thoma Bravo acquisition check clears, exist-
Bravo. From that moment on, the firm invested only in soft- ing management has agreed that this rigorous approach will
ware, with Bravo leading the way. help. Bravo calls it “making peace with the past.”
A string of billion-dollar buyouts followed—Sunnyvale, There are also layoffs. Those can total as much as 10% of
California-based network securi- the workforce, for which Bravo doesn’t apologize. “In order
ty firm Blue Coat, financial software to realign the business and set it up for big-time growth, you
Days after Hur-
outfit Digital Insight of Westlake ricane Maria hit his first need to take a step back before you take a step forward.
Village, California, and Herndon, native Puerto Rico, It’s like boxing,” he says. “These are unbelievable assets with
Virginia’s Deltek, which sells project Orlando Bravo loads great innovators, and they are usually undermanaged.”
up a plane with sup-
management software—all of which plies for victims.
more than doubled in value under
Bravo’s watch. The firm’s inaugu-
ral 2009 software-only fund post-
ed a 44% net annualized return by
the time its investments were sold,
making investors four times their
money and proving the wisdom of
discipline and specialization. “Every
time we picked up our heads to
peek at a deal that wasn’t software,
the software deal looked a lot better
to us,” he brags.

t’s late May, and Orlando Bravo’s
20th-floor offices overlooking
Ithe San Francisco Bay are filled
with dozens of tech executives
from its portfolio companies. Folks
from Houston’s Quorum Software,
which makes technology systems
for oil and gas companies, mingle
with cybersecurity experts from




DECEMBER 2019 / JANUARY 2020 FORBES ASIA | 101

STRATEGIES






Mark Bishof, the former CEO of Flexera Software, an ap- is biggest challenge these days is likely back home
plication management company outside of Chicago that Bravo in Puerto Rico where it all began. Bravo announced
bought in 2008 for $200 million and sold for a nearly $1 bil- Hin May that he is contributing $100 million to his
lion profit three years later, has a succinct description for this Bravo Family Foundation that will be used to promote entre-
wild success. “He just kind of cuts all of the bullsh*t,” Bishof preneurship and economic development on the island.
says. “It’s refreshing.” Flexera’s profits rose 70% during Bravo’s This new foundation was birthed by Hurricane Maria,
ownership, largely thanks to four major acquisitions. “Orlan- which devastated the island two years ago. Bravo was in
do’s like the general in the foxhole with his sergeant. You know Japan raising cash for yet another massive fund and franti-
he’s knee-deep in there with you,” Bishof gushes. cally calling San Juan trying to locate his parents, who were
Under Thoma Bravo’s watch, companies on average saw living in the capital. They were fine, but the island wasn’t.
cash flow surge as margins hit 35%, as of 2018, nearly tri- Five days later, he flew his Gulfstream jet with 450 ki-
ple those of the average public software company at that time. lograms of supplies—water, granola bars, meal kits, satel-
“It’s like training for the Olympics. . . . You have a finite goal to lite telephones, diapers, intravenous tubes and hydration
make it [in year four], and you make it very, very clear,” Bravo pills—to Aguadilla, near Mayagüez. When an airport work-
says. Today’s roaring market adds potency er opened the door of his plane,
to the playbook. Lenders are now gorging Bravo says, the look of fear on his
on software debt, and stock market multi- face was unforgettable. “All you
ples for these businesses are surging. With a fresh could say was ‘I’m sorry for what
A recent example is Detroit’s Com- happened to you.’”
puware, a decades-old pioneer of soft- $12.6 billion war He returned two weeks later in
ware applications to manage mainframe a larger plane with 3 metric tons of
computer systems. In 2013, this Nasdaq- chest, Bravo is supplies. Then he came in a massive
listed giant was all but left for dead and now eyeing $10 DC-10 cargo plane before ultimate-
up for sale. There was minimal interest, ly chartering two container ships
other than from Bravo and partner Seth billion-plus deals carrying 272 tonnes. “It was just like
Boro, who were keen on Dynatrace, soft- cold-calling for deals,” Bravo says of
ware that helped companies move data- and expects to rounding up all the donations. He
bases to the cloud, which Compuware personally put in $3 million in just
had acquired in 2011. Thoma Bravo used begin buying the first 30 days, and committed
$675 million in cash and raised $1.8 bil- $10 million altogether.
lion in debt to buy Compuware and then entire divisions When the Federal Emergency
split off Dynatrace as a separate compa- Management Agency became fully
ny. The pair began to move Dynatrace of tech giants. operative there, the island’s rich-
from selling database licenses, once the est native turned his attention to
bulk of its business, to cloud subscription Puerto Rico’s future. Though 44%
services, now 70% of sales. This past Au- of Puerto Ricans live below the
gust, Dynatrace went public, and Thoma Bravo’s 70% stake is poverty line, Bravo believes in the potential to foster entre-
now worth over $4 billion, with the remainder of Compuware preneurship, citing that a tenth of the population has tried
worth nearly a billion more. “I learned more about build- to build a business.
ing an efficient software company over the last four and a half Armed with his money, his foundation is looking to back
years than in the first 30 years of my career,” says Dynatrace Puerto Rican technology entrepreneurs, even ferrying them
CEO John Van Siclen. to Thoma Bravo’s offices for training. Bravo admits to being
With a fresh $12.6 billion war chest for its 13th fund raised tired of the debate over Puerto Rico’s statehood and holds
in 2018, Bravo is eyeing $10 billion-plus deals and expects his tongue when asked about President Trump’s performance
to begin buying entire divisions from today’s technology gi- during Maria. “My passion, which is the same as with com-
ants. But thanks in part to the success of his firm, he now panies, is to move beyond the strategic, long-term pontifica-
faces more competition. Heavyweights like Blackstone and tion, and into the operational and tactical moves that make
KKR are increasingly sussing out software deals, not to men- you move forward today,” he says. “Economies go down,
tion his longtime rival Vista Equity. And he’s not immune to companies miss their numbers, trade stops, product issues
mistakes. Bravo’s $3.6 billion 2015 acquisition of San Francis- happen and people quit. [The question is] do you have a
co-based digital network tracker Riverbed Technology is cur- creative approach to problem solving?” Bravo says. “Some
rently struggling because of slowing sales and too much debt. people are stuck . . . and some people love putting the pieces
He isn’t worried. “There are bigger and better companies to fix together. I just feel like every operational problem can be
than there were ten years ago,” Bravo says. solved. There’s always a solution.” F




102 | FORBES ASIA DECEMBER 2019 / JANUARY 2020



As president of family-owned
Patek Philippe, Thierry Stern
makes clear that his watches are
for sale—but not the company.



BY CHRISTIAN BARKER



The Company





He Keeps

FORBES LIFE






atek Philippe is known by en- “In our family, we don’t at a faster pace. “We are not Swatch,
thusiasts as one of the watch we cannot just push a button” to boost
industry’s “holy trinity”— just pass the watches production, he says. Aspiring owners
Pthree highly regarded Swiss down the generations. of a Patek must often join waiting lists
watch brands—along with Audemars We pass the whole to buy one. There’s a five- to eight-year
Piguet and Vacheron Constantin. Patek wait, for instance, for a stainless-steel
Philippe, like Audemars Piguet, remains company.” Nautilus model.

independent of the big luxury groups, Stern also says more production
such as Kering, LVMH and Richemont. Philippe handed over control of the would undercut Pateks’ value. “If we
For four generations, it has been owned business. The company employs 1,600 made a million watches per year, do
by the Stern family of Switzerland. staff at its Geneva headquarters and you really think people will still buy
In an exclusive interview with an additional 600 internationally, and them? I don’t think so,” he says. “I have
Forbes Asia during Patek’s recent had estimated 2018 sales of 1.45 billion one vision for Patek, and that is to have
Watch Art Grand Exhibition in Singa- Swiss francs ($1.5 billion). the highest level of quality. Quality and
pore, Patek president Thierry Stern of- Philippe Stern remains as honorary quantity don’t get along. Ask Picasso to
fers a personal take on its famous tag- chairman of the company. “I’m proud reproduce the same picture 20 times—
line: “You never actually own a Patek that during the transition between my- it is not possible, and also, he would
Philippe. You merely look after it for self and my dad, nobody realized [there never do it. It’s the same for Patek.”
the next generation.” Stern’s version? was a change in leadership]. We kept One of Stern’s two teenage sons is
“In our family, we don’t just pass the the same strategies and communica- showing interest in the business. His
watches down the generations. We tion, the same type of product. We kept 16-year-old son has just commenced
pass the whole company,” he says. our soul,” says Stern. studies at a watchmaking school, as Stern
The Watch Art Grand Exhibition Stern has helped maintain Patek’s did in his youth. “He made his own deci-
that brought Stern, 49, to Singapore status as one of the world’s most highly sion, he’s enjoying it,” Stern says. His el-
is the company’s signature event, held prized watches through scarcity. Since dest son, 18, will soon begin studying
on four previous occasions since 2013. the company’s foundation in 1839, hotel management. Stern says he won’t
This one was the largest to date, at 1,800 Patek has been known for its low out- force either into the business. “That’s a
square meters, and marked the first put—annual production now is about huge mistake,” he says. “They have to de-
time the exhibition was held in Asia— 62,000 pieces. One Patek timepiece can cide what they would like to do; I’m not
an indication of Asia’s continued impor- take a year or more to craft. Stern says obliging them. I didn’t have children just
tance for the global luxury watch indus- it would be difficult to create watches so they could take over Patek.” F
try. It is also another demonstration of
the Stern family’s determination to re-
main an independent, family-owned
From left: Patek Philippe Nautilus 3700/1A, Perpetual Calendar Ref. 3940G
business. Early this year, rumors sur- and Grandmaster Chime Ref. 6300A.
faced that LVMH was considering a bid
for Patek. In January, analysts at Ger-
man investment bank Berenberg esti-
mated that Patek could sell for as much
as €9 billion ($10 billion).
Asked whether he’s received offers
from some big groups, Stern replies,
“Are they interested? I would say ‘yes’.”
Then he adds that these bids reinforce
his determination to stay family-owned.
“That means that you did something Precious Time
SCOTT WOODWARD FOR FORBES ASIA Philippe family in 1932 during the far higher than retail. While not all high-end watches appreciate in price, some Pateks have risen
right. But we are not for sale,” he says.
Buying a secondhand Patek does not require joining a waiting list but resale prices can often be
The Sterns bought Patek from the
sharply in value. A 1970s steel Nautilus, sold for about $3,000 when new, now commands more
Great Depression, when the Philippe
than $60,000. Patek’s perpetual calendar chronographs from the 1980s, sold for around $20,000
at the time, have recently been auctioned from $400,000 to over a million. A very rare, 1950s
family were the original watchmakers
perpetual calendar chronograph in steel, originally priced at $2,200, became the most expensive
and the Sterns a supplier of watch dials
wristwatch ever sold, at more than $11 million in 2016. That sum was eclipsed this November when
to them. Thierry Stern has headed
a one-of-a-kind, steel Grandmaster Chime (a model released in 2014, in a limited edition of seven
pieces, for a price close to $2.5 million) sold for $31 million.
Patek since 2009, when his father


DECEMBER 2019 / JANUARY 2020 FORBES ASIA | 105



FORBES LIFE













Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos at a dinner in 2009.
“She should have gotten 50% of

the company,” says Nick Hanauer,


one of Amazon’s first investors.

“MacKenzie was an equal partner

to Jeff in the early days.”







finalized their divorce in July, with MacKenzie getting 25% of
his Amazon stock. That stake is currently worth $36.1 billion,
enough to put her 15th on this year’s Forbes 400. “She should
have gotten 50% of the company,” says Nick Hanauer, one of
Amazon’s first investors. “MacKenzie was an equal partner to
Jeff in the early days.”
In keeping with character, MacKenzie wouldn’t talk for
Ghost this story. To shed some light on her, we spent weeks con-

tacting more than 100 friends and former classmates and co-
workers; even that yielded only a hazy picture, one of an in-
tensely private but talented woman who has, quietly, excelled
Writer with two siblings. At 6, she wrote a 142-page book called
at every stage of her life.
MacKenzie grew up in San Francisco, a middle child


The Book Worm. Her parents, a homemaker and a financial
planner, sent her to Hotchkiss, the Connecticut boarding
MacKenzie Bezos is an author, school, where she graduated a year early. She studied at
an early Amazon employee, Cambridge, then Princeton, where she majored in English;

a billionaire—and isn’t talking. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison was her
thesis advisor. “She was generally a very poised and a quiet

BY NOAH KIRSCH and brilliant presence,” says Jeff Nunokawa, one of her
English professors.
After graduating, she took a job at the hedge fund D.E.
acKenzie Bezos was not fussy, which was Shaw, where she began dating Jeff Bezos, who left to found
helpful, as there was no time for fussiness Amazon in 1994. From the outset, MacKenzie was heavily
at Amazon headquarters in early 1996. She involved. “No one really had job titles. . . so she did just about
Mshared her office with a junior employee in a everything,” says Tod Nelson, another early employee.
space that doubled as the company kitchen. For 12 hours MacKenzie pulled back around the time Amazon went
a day, as workers squeezed by to use the microwave, she public, in 1997, to focus on fiction writing. She kept a low
presided over the accounting. At night she headed to the profile until 2005, when HarperCollins published her first
warehouse to pack orders. She “was a huge contributor,” says novel, The Testing of Luther Albright. Morrison deemed it
Mike Hanlon, Amazon’s seventh employee. “She really is a “a rarity.” MacKenzie followed it in 2013 with Traps.
talented person in a way that I think gets lost when you’re The more recent chapters of her life are largely unknown.
the billionaire’s wife.” In 2018 she and Jeff committed $2 billion to fight homeless-
The mystery around MacKenzie, 49, seems carefully cul-
ness and support nonprofit preschools. In May, as their di-
ELENA SEIBERT tivated. She largely slipped into anonymity after Amazon’s vorce neared completion, she signed the Giving Pledge,
early years and has granted no interviews since January,
promising to donate at least half her wealth. True to form,
when her split from husband Jeff became public. The couple
she hasn’t said a word about where those billions will go. F



DECEMBER 2019 / JANUARY 2020 FORBES ASIA | 107

THOUGHTS ON












VALUE










“Just because people throw it “Price is a proposed point
out and don’t have any use for of agreement between a
it doesn’t mean it’s garbage.” buyer and seller. The
Andy Warhol proposal is the key. It is not
a marching order.”
Jeffrey Tucker
“Value is not made of money,
but a tender balance of
expectation and longing.” “Networks gain sovereignty
Barbara Kingsolver through their own digital
currency.”
Olaf Carlson-Wee
“Who steals my purse steals
trash; ’tis something, nothing.”
William Shakespeare “It is in dialogue with pain
that many beautiful things
acquire their value.”
“Statements of fact are
after all statements, which Alain de Botton
presumes a number of
questionable judgments.” “One does not cease to treasure

Terry Eagleton a gem simply because one owns
another that is larger.”
Marie Brennan
“Every advance in knowledge
brings us face to face with the
mystery of our own being.” Pixels and Portfolios “The one who gets wisdom
Max Planck May 6, 1985 loves life; the one who
cherishes understanding will
Thirty-four years ago, the dawn of “electronic investing” soon prosper.”
“Beauties in vain their pretty
eyes may roll; charms strike the was upon us. Nerdy enthusiasts could suddenly compete Proverbs 19:8
sight, but merit wins the soul.” with market professionals. Well, sort of. You could get
Alexander Pope stock quotes via an FM radio device for about $300
($710 today) or pay CompuServe, owned by H&R Block,
“Look beneath the surface; 10 cents per quote during market hours. Dow Jones let
let not the several quality you access Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal for $2.40 FINAL THOUGHT
of a thing nor its worth a minute, while something called the Radio Exchange
escape thee.”
($279, or $660 today) dropped limited financial data
Marcus Aurelius
directly into your Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. The only thing
you absolutely couldn’t do in 1985 was trade digitally.
“Law, and force, and ether,
and the like, are merely To buy or sell, you had to pick up the phone—and pay
useful symbols, while the a broker. Still, the speed of it all seemed intoxicating.
ignorant and the careless “Like buying a Porsche that seduces you to drive too fast,
take them for adequate having instant access to market information can tempt
expressions of reality.”
you to trade stocks too quickly.” You were warned.
Thomas Henry Huxley
“Money’s merits are
measured by its use,
“Gold is the corpse of
SOURCES: OTHELLO, BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE; ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE, not amount.”
value. Wealth stored up BY BARBARA KINGSOLVER; CRYPTONOMICON, BY NEAL STEPHENSON; THE RAPE
in gold is dead.” OF THE LOCK, BY ALEXANDER POPE; MEDITATIONS, BY MARCUS AURELIUS; —Malcolm Forbes
LITERARY THEORY: AN INTRODUCTION, BY TERRY EAGLETON; WHERE IS SCIENCE
Neal Stephenson GOING?, BY MAX PLANCK; THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY, BY THOMAS HENRY
HUXLEY; THE TROPIC OF SERPENTS, BY MARIE BRENNAN.




108 | FORBES ASIA DECEMBER 2019 / JANUARY 2020