Author: David Parry

(This is another in a series of posts, leading up to The Corporate Presence’s 40th anniversary, that will focus on noteworthy deals we have commemorated).

“What’s that place called again where the Broncos play?”.

That’s the question that was posed the first time we wrote about this deal toy.

And at the time, at least, the answer wasn’t so clear.

For years the Denver Post simply refused to call it anything other than Mile High, even after that structure had been demolished and replaced by Invesco Field.

In later years, other local holdouts continued to take their pick of names: “Mile High”, “Invesco Field”, and even, occasionally, what was once its official name: “Sports Authority Field at Mile High”.

The Bronco Deal Toy

The deal toy shown below commemorates the rebuilt facility’s inaugural game in its incarnation as “Invesco Field at Mile High”, and also recognizes the team’s banking partners in the project’s financing.

In the years since, the stadium name thing seems to have been resolved once and for all.

And as for the game itself, a Giants team led by Kerry Collins, Amani Toomer, and Michael Strahan fell to the Broncos on “Monday Night Football” 31-20.

But it wasn’t the outcome of the game that was noteworthy.

It was its timing.

The Post-Game Tragedy

After the game finally wrapped up after midnight EST, the biggest lingering concern for many Giants fans headed to bed, outside the loss itself, was probably the condition of  Shaun Williams, the Giants safety appeared to have suffered a significant knee injury laying an especially nasty hit on Ed McCaffrey (and breaking the Bronco receiver’s leg in the process).

But the events of the very next morning would prove unimaginably worse.

If you look closely at this deal toy, you’ll notice the date of the game: September 10, 2001.

A Catastrophe Unfolds

About 8 1/2 hours after the final whistle, a hijacked passenger plane slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, commencing the 9-11 attacks.

In the days following the attacks, there would be a number of direct and anecdotal reports, in both the press and on New York sports radio, of Giants fans avoiding harm’s way that morning only because they had attended the game in Denver, or slept in because of its late finish on what the New York Times would dub “Nightmare Eve”.

It was a small consolation, but it did offer some degree of comfort to a shell-shocked city.

David Parry is the Director of Digital Strategy for the Corporate Presence and Prestige Custom Awards, which provides a variety of awards including ESPN’s Espy Awards, and The National Football League Commissioner’s Awards.

(This is another in a series of posts, leading up to The Corporate Presence’s 40th anniversary, that will focus on noteworthy deals we have commemorated).

It’s hard to imagine which of these might’ve been more satisfying.

Selling your company for $19 billion to a firm that once passed on hiring you…

Or signing that deal in the very same office where you’d once stood in line to receive food stamps.

Facebook’s Acquisition of WhatsApp

Jan Koum emerged from the 2014 sale of WhatsApp to Facebook with $6.8 billion. His cofounder, Brian Acton, came away with $3.5 billion.

The two had worked together at both Ernst & Young and Yahoo.

Their shared employment history also included experience with Facebook: in 2007 both had applied for positions at Facebook.

Both had been rejected.

And as for the place where the deal for the messaging app was signed, it wasn’t the Mountain View, California headquarters of WhatsApp; instead it was a building just down the street that had formerly housed the North County Social Services office where Koun had once regularly picked up food stamps.

“Can’t You Go Standby?”

Koum had been born outside Kiev in 1976 in what was then the Soviet Union. He and his mother emigrated to California when he was 16, relying on government-subsidized housing and food stamps while his mother found work as a baby sitter, and he attended high school and swept floors at a local grocery store.

There was one other telling detail of the signing.

A financially-strapped Koun had learned to program though manuals he’d purchase at bookstores and, on completion, regularly return for the refund.

Despite the imminent prospect of receiving billions, he insisted that the Facebook deal be consummated in time for him to make a scheduled flight to Barcelona.

He’d booked the flight using frequent-flyer miles.

David Parry is the Director of Digital Strategy for the Corporate Presence and Prestige Custom Awards, which provides a variety of awards including ESPN’s Espy Awards, and The National Football League Commissioner’s Awards.

This $3.5 billion deal resulted in what was announced as the “world’s largest audio entertainment company”.

This $71.3 billion deal was Disney’s largest since the $19 billion 1995 purchase of Capital Cities/ABC, through which it had acquired what proved to be a critical asset: ESPN.

The deal also included Fox’s 30% interest in Hulu, raising Disney’s stake in the streaming service to a controlling 60%.

With the acquisition of OppenheimerFunds, Invesco brought its assets under management to approximately $1.2 trillion.

The Roman galley design? It played off the deal’s code name.

Emboldened by the success of Sky’s miniseries Chernobyl, Comcast plans to double Sky’s budget for original programming–and create an in-house studio. Sky Studio’s first planned production is the six-part series The Third Day, starring Jude Law.

This merger brought together three popular outdoor brands: Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shops, and White River Marine Group.

This 2016 deal—aimed at easing regulatory concerns from AB InBev’s $100 billion acquisition of SABMiller—had a good deal of significance in its own right. Worth over $7.8 billion, it gained Japanese brewer Asahi 9% of the European beer market, and a dominant position in the Czech Republic, which leads the world in per capita beer consumption.

Widely reported as the largest transaction in pro sports history when it closed in 2016, this $4 billion deal brought together a formidable group of players, including Michael Dell as well as Ari Emanuel, the acknowledged inspiration for the Ari Gold character in HBO’s “Entourage”.

SoftBank’s resilient CEO Masayoshi Son, Japan’s richest individual, estimates that he lost 99% of his net worth in the dot.com crash of 2000—including $70 billion in the course of a single day. On the plus side, SoftBank was also the first carrier to bring the iPhone to Japan, and took an early 32% stake in Alibaba.

The deal toy was simple and understated but the deal itself was anything but. “Even by the standards of Wall Street”, The New York Times noted, “where high-stakes brinksmanship often determines who wins and who loses in the takeover game—the takeover battle will long be remembered for its last-minute strategic maneuvering”. (See deal toy below for more).

Another perspective on the same $47 billion Cingular-AT&T Wireless deal. The design includes a dig at Vodafone, whose executives had gone to bed in London convinced they’d won the takeover battle—-only to learn of an outflanking maneuver in New York hours later.

Read more about “the most profitable deal in history”.

From 2017: Abbott paid $25 billion for St. Jude Medical, a firm founded in 1976 by med-tech entrepreneur Manny Villafana. The son of Puerto Rican immigrants, Villafana also founded what is now known as Guidant (a part of Boston Scientific).

From 2006: This $9.8 billion deal involving BlackRock and Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, at the time the largest asset-management merger in history, was described as having “far-reaching implications for rank-and-file reps as well as the financial industry at large”. As of early October 2017, BlackRock had approximately $5.9 trillion under management.

Modular deal toy commemorating the acquisition of Albertson’s, the then second-largest supermarket chain in the U.S. The total transaction value of the 2006 deal was $17.4 billion.

Europe’s largest office building.

New York City’s most expensive rental.

The building is nicknamed “The Bottle Opener”.

The hotel was created by feuding blue-blood cousins.

They’re all here—and more—in our Real Estate Tombstones of iconic buildings and properties.

New York City’s most expensive non-hotel rental? It was reportedly a five-bedroom, five-bathroom spread on the 68th floor of the Time Warner Center’s south tower recently listed for $110,000 per month. (The Pierre still topped hotel rentals with a $500,000/month listing).

In February 1964  a group of “English businessmen” arrived for their stay at the Plaza Hotel in New York. “The Plaza’s management”, the New York Times reported at the time, “had no comment on a report that it would not have accepted the reservation of the Beatles..if it had known who they were”.

The Plaza reportedly requested that the group seek other accommodations on any future visits to the city. In subsequent New York trips, the Beatles would stay at The Warwick.

The Shanghai World Financial Center, aka “The Bottle Opener”, is the 10th tallest building on earth–but only the second tallest in its own city. Floors 79 through 93 are occupied by the Park Hyatt, which can lay claim to being the world’s tallest hotel.

The Coeur Défense complex in Paris is Europe’s largest office building. It was last sold several years ago for €1.8bn.

The golf course just east of the Wynn Las Vegas hotel was slated to be replaced by Paradise Park. Plans for the construction of the $1.5 billion complex, featuring a 20-acre lagoon, were abandoned in 2018.

At the time of its completion in 1915, The Equitable Building was the world’s largest office building. The Downtown Manhattan property is a National Historic Landmark.

The original incarnation of the Waldorf Astoria resulted from a feud between two Astor cousins, who ultimately agreed to merge their two rival, adjacent hotels. The property has been closed for renovations since January 2017, with a revised re-opening date of 2021.

The Canary Wharf name reflects the area’s early history as one of the world’s busiest ports—with the “Canary” portion referring specifically to the sea trade in fruits and vegetables with the Canary Islands.

1. Take Shots
2. Embrace the Grind
3. Be a Nice Person
4. Keep Tilt External
5. Be Serious About Your Legacy

Dealmaking wisdom from some investment banking grandee?

Actually they’re tips for beginning World Series of Poker players—offered up by 15-time champion Phil Hellmuth, aka “The Poker Brat”.

Hellmuth’s victory in the WSOP 30 years ago almost single-handedly transformed poker’s dominant class from geriatrics with names like “Slim” and “Tex”, to a significantly younger set, one more inclined to analytics and probabilities than folksy yarns.

We’ve previously marked the opening of the World Series of Poker with a gallery of gambling-themed deal toys.

So with the WSOP set to begin May 28th at the Rio All Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, we thought we’d share some additional designs—some current, some dating back as far as the 90’s.

Take a second to check out a world of riverboats, indoor beaches, and giant lagoons, populated by names like Paradise Park, and Eldorado.

A vintage 1904 slot machine recently sold at auction for $80,000. Bidding for the nickel-plated oak piece took all of 60 seconds. The Okada Manila resort features a 9,000 square-meter indoor beach/nightclub. Cove Manila can accommodate 4,500.

The Rio (shown here in a 1999 deal toy), has hosted the WSOP since 2005.

Since these two 2008 transactions, table games equipment and slot machines supplier Shuffle Master rebranded as SHFL Entertainment in 2012 and was acquired in 2013 by Bally Technologies—which was itself acquired a year later by Scientific Games.

Hollywood Casino Shreveport—a 3-level dockside riverboat — was acquired by Reno-based Eldorado Resorts in 2005.

Paradise Park, Steve Wynn’s planned $1.5 billion addition to the Resorts complex off the Las Vegas Strip—has been reconsidered. The 20-acre lagoon has been scrapped, but the company is still proceeding with construction of a convention center, as well as the redevelopment of the property’s existing golf course.

The firm that helped launch the careers of Ken Moelis, Paul Singer, and Stephen Schwarzman—among many others?

It no longer exists.

But we see reminders of DLJ around our office every day—along with countless other firms that, regrettably, are also no longer with us.

Over the years we’ve received numerous requests to share deal toys done for these now-defunct firms. When we finally agreed to showcase these pieces, we were relieved that the galleries were received in the spirit we’d intended: not as a snarky post-mortems, but as tributes to firms, and bankers, who were our clients, and in many cases, friends.

With that in mind, we now once again pry open the deal toy vault…

Lehman.

Bear.

Chase Manhattan.

SSB, H&Q, CSFB…..

And also Goldman and Blackstone.

They’re all names featured in our latest gallery of Dinosaur Deal Toys.

From 1995: The hotel interests involved here were purchased by a joint venture that included Starwood Capital Group and Goldman Sachs.
Eller Media Company officially changed its name in 2001 to Clear Channel Outdoor.

Garden.com closed down in November, 2000—a little over a year after going public. San Francisco-based Hambrecht & Quist was purchased in 1999 by what was then Chase Manhattan Corp.Formed in 1997 by the merger of Smith Barney and Salomon Brothers, SSB was folded into Citigroup in ’98. The name was ultimately dropped altogether in 2003.
Credit Suisse First Boston was rebranded as Credit Suisse in 2006.
Eight years after this 2000 acquisition, Bear Stearns faced collapse. The 85 year-old firm was acquired in March, 2008 by J.P. Morgan Chase. Rhodia was acquired by Belgian chemical firm Solvay in 2011.

Any retrospective of landmark IPO deal toys runs the risk of appearing, well, ill-timed—maybe even tone-deaf.

But if you checked out the earlier posts in this series, you know that many of these pieces make for interesting cultural artifacts in their own right. And some are simply fun to look at.

That being said, IPO’s are obviously still getting done, and with growing prospects for a rebound in offerings in 2017, there is even more reason to take a look back.

The 2000 IPO by China’s second-largest telecom raised almost $5 billion—making it, at the time, the largest ever in Asia outside Japan.

Deutsche Annington changed its name to Vonovia in 2015. It is still Germany’s largest residential landlord, with over 340,000 apartments across the country.

Some investors chafed at Mark Zuckerberg’s preferred road show attire—prompting the PC Magazine headline “Zuckerberg Wears Hoodie, World Ends”.

The housing market predicted by Zillow to be the hottest in 2017? Nashville—-with Seattle coming in second.

Orbitz was acquired last September by rival Expedia—for $1.6 billion.

Mao Zedong.

Vladimir Putin.

Steven Seagal.

What do they have in common?

Undoubtedly very little—other than maybe appearing in the gallery below. Be sure to check out as well our earlier collection of landmark IPO deal toys (as well as the third —and final—installment). And just to avoid any misleading or deceptive claims, we should probably note that Steven Seagal makes absolutely no appearance in that earlier gallery.

At the height of its popularity in mid-1990’s, Netscape’s “Navigator” browser had 70% of the market. The company was eventually acquired in 1999—by AOL.

The mammoth IPO of AIA—the Hong Kong subsidiary of American International Group—-was instrumental in enabling AIG to pay back the U.S. government after its 2008 bailout. AIG ultimately sold its remaining stake in 2012—-for around $6.5 billion.

Now a Russian citizen, American actor Steven Seagal was formally handed a passport this week—by Vladimir Putin. Seagal also stars as a mugging victim who turns the tables in a new commercial for the Russian telecom MegaFon.

The Agricultural Bank of China was originally founded as the Agricultural Cooperative Bank by Mao Zedong in 1951.

Telefónica Deutschland is participating in the 5G Connected Mobility consortium—which also includes BMW, Ericsson, Deutsche Bahn, and Vodafone, among others. Its aim is to create and test the infrastructure for driverless and connected transportation. Research will center on a 30-km stretch where the A9 highway and the Nuremberg-Ingolstadt-Munich high-speed train route run parallel.

Yandex not only dominates the search engine market in Russia, but is also a significant player in neighboring countries such as Turkey, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

Now marking its 20th year, Google handles 117 billion unique searches per month—or about 2.3 million every second.