Michael Milken Backs New Business Advice Site
By Brad StoneAs Forbes, Fortune, Business Week and other management magazines wither away, another business media start-up with an unusual pedigree is moving to fill the void.
Bizmore, which goes live on Wednesday, aims to be a sort of Yahoo Answers for executives at small and medium-size companies. Users pose business questions — like “Is search engine optimization right for you?” or “How do I increase online sales?” — and others weigh in with answers and vote the best responses to the top. (You can get a quick taste of Bizmore’s advice on its Twitter feed.)
Bizmore will round out that user-generated content with contributions from freelance writers on evergreen topics like how chief executives should plan their succession strategies. It has also secured the (unpaid) contributions of management gurus like Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford University business school professor ,who hope to sell a few more books in the process of answering questions like “What is the single biggest and costliest mistake you have seen execs and C.E.O.’s make time and again?”
The ideas behind Bizmore are not new, of course. Other companies, including LinkedIn and The Wall Street Journal, offer similar Q&A features.
What’s most interesting about the San Francisco start-up is its backer: the financier Michael R. Milken.
The company is a subsidiary of Vistage International, an executive coaching and networking organization with about 15,000 members who pay up to $13,000 a year to attend meetings, hobnob with fellow execs and get one-on-one leadership counseling.
Vistage, based in San Diego, is partly owned by Mr. Milken, the philanthropist and former junk bond king. Mr. Milken sits on Vistage’s board and was instrumental in the founding and financing of Bizmore, the companies say. (So far, Vistage has committed about $10 million in seed financing.)
Rafael Pastor, chief executive of Vistage and a former executive vice president at News Corporation, said Bizmore’s opportunity is to provide “instantaneous information that is very tailored to a specific question or need, which some of those old media organizations couldn’t do even when they were at their height.”
The start-up, based in San Francisco, is being run by Alice Hill, the former editorial director of CNet Networks, and Jeffrey Davis, a former senior editor at Time Warner’s now defunct Business 2.0 magazine who ran BNet, a business advice site owned by CNet. The site currently runs ads from Google but plans to expand its ad inventory and also at some point charge for setting up private networks for companies, affinity groups and organizations like Vistage itself.
