Henry Blodget on the age of Internet publishing | Big Think

Henry Blodget on the age of Internet publishing

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The founder of the blog “Silicon Alley Insider” talks about how technology transformed the investment world and his career as an online writer.

This series brought to you by Dell and digitalnomads.com

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Henry Blodget:

Henry Blodget is co-Founder, CEO, and editor in chief of Silicon Alley Insider, a blog about Internet business trends and technology research. Blodget is also president of Cherry Hill Research, an industry analysis and consulting firm. Henry has recently contributed to The Atlantic, Slate, Newsweek International, The New York Times, Fortune, Forbes Online, Business 2.0, Euromoney, New York, Financial Times, and other publications. He is the author of The Wall Street Self-Defense Manual: A Consumer's Guide to Investing. He has been a frequent guest on CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.

From 1994-2001, Henry worked in corporate finance and equity research at Prudential Securities, Oppenheimer & Co., and Merrill Lynch. He ran Merrill's global Internet research practice and was ranked the No. 1 Internet and eCommerce analyst on Wall Street by Institutional Investor and Greenwich Associates. He was later keelhauled by then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

Henry went to Yale. He was born and raised in New York.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Henry Blodget: Henry Blodget, Silicon Alley Media.

Question: How did you start Silicon Alley Insider?

Henry Blodget: I had been blogging myself for a couple of years. I’d been a journalist for about five years and actually had done it a long time ago before, when I was on Wall Street, but a friend of mine in New York, Kevin Ryan, who was the CEO of Doubleclick in the old days, basically had an idea to do a site focused on New York and it seemed like a great opportunity to start a company and relatively shortly thereafter we realized it was going to be much broader than that, and we started to focus on the whole industry.

Question: How has mobilizing technology changed the way you work?

Henry Blodget: Five to ten years, it’s incredible. I go back, so go back a little more than ten years. When I first started working on Wall Street companies published their financial information. What did we have to do? We’d go to the library and we might get microfilm or we might get a CD ROM. We’d print out a stack like this for every financial file, then we’d go back to the cube and so forth and companies would have conference calls where they might publish a press release, and if they did they would fax it to the analyst, or they might just call a couple of analysts and say “Here’s what the results are,” and publish those in your models. No information available to investors and so forth.

You fast forward to today where an incredible amount of information is available at every investor’s fingertips, and you have companies doing their calls, sometimes in videos, sometimes online. You have all financial information available instantly online. You have fully featured spreadsheets. The vestment world has changed so much, and then obviously looking at the way professionals work within that where you now have fully featured mobile devices that are basically convenient mini-computers that you can work on and phone on and email on and so forth

Question: Where do you most frequently work?

Henry Blodget: I do what I do often on a couch at home with my computer open and my computer pretty much is my office. And when I go to the office, I’m thankful to say that my office finally almost a paperless office. There’s been this myth of the paperless office forever and every year just more and more trees get killed and more and more paper is created. In my office fortunately, now that I haven’t aggressively given out a physical mail address, I am now finally not getting much physical mail anymore, so there’s not a lot of paper around. It’s very clean. But my office really is my computer. That’s it. It goes everywhere and it’s supplemented by a smaller mobile device, but with that and the connection to the Internet, wireless connection, that’s all I need anyway, and hopefully that will only get more ubiquitous as we go forward.

Question: How is technology changing the concept of office?

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