Allen & Company
Strategic Concepts & Mechanics
Primary Evidence
"Herb was accessible to everyone but the press and the social set. He rose before 5:00 a.m., had dinner at 6:00 p.m. sharp, and was in bed by 9:00. One time I was at his Wyoming ranch when a phone call made me half an hour late to the cookhouse. Three courses were lined up at my place setting. Herb looked at me and said, “When I say 6:00, I mean 6:00.” He was smiling, but I took his point. Herb was a model of integrity. After Sumner Redstone broke a promise and engaged another investment bank, he sent Allen & Company a token check for $1 million. I was in Herb’s office when it arrived. He took out his scissors, cut the check into tiny pieces, and returned them to sender. Herb was supremely loyal. He never forgot a birthday and gathered old college pals to dinners and on biking trips. After one friend got sent to Leavenworth for a white-collar crime, Herb visited him twice a year."
"Financial theorizing held little interest for Ross Perot, however. Like other billionaires who grew up far from New York, such as John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Warren Buffett, he was skeptical of Wall Street. One of the few investment bankers who impressed Perot was Charles Allen of Allen & Company. Perot paid him the supreme compliment by saying that like his own father, Allen had “the style of the great cattle traders.”27 In the end, Perot awarded the underwriting mandate to the most opti¬ mistic firm of the lot. R. W. Pressprich and Co., which he had never heard of until then, assured him that EDS could be launched at 100 times earnings."
"We first met in 1983 at a media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, run by Allen & Company’s namesake founder, Herbert Allen. One of the few get-togethers I looked forward to attending, it was private, with no press, so it gave a me a chance to learn from CEOs outside the cable-TV industry. Mostly, the setting was undeniably peaceful: hiking trails, horseback riding, and fly-fishing against an endless horizon of grassy peaks and picture-perfect valleys."
"It was only a few months after I’d bought into QVC that Enrique Senior, an investment banker at Allen & Company, called to say he had a big idea for me, one that needed total secrecy. He wouldn’t say anything more over the phone and wanted me to come over to his office. Intrigued, I canceled my next meeting and went over there. He took me through a slide presentation about the growing value of QVC and its possibilities—the most exciting of which was that we should… wait for it… buy Paramount."