I sat next to Jim Cramer last night at a dinner put on by some mutual friends. I hadn't seen Jim in a while so it was a great opportunity to take a trip down memory lane. In 1996 or early 1997, my prior firm Flatiron Partners led the first round of outside financing for TheStreet.com. I joined the board and eventually became Chairman before stepping down a decade ago.
When I first met Jim, he was running a hedge fund and blasting posts from his trading desk. This was 1996 and what he was doing was unprecedented. He was publishing in real time his thoughts on what was going on in the markets. On some days, Jim would post three or four dozen times.
As Jim and I reminisced about those days last night, I said to him "you were tweeting and blogging a decade before anyone else was doing that." He nodded, "yeah, that is what I was doing".
But we didn't know that. The money our firm invested went to hiring a team of journalists and we saw ourselves as the Wall Street Journal of the web. That was a mistake. The Wall Street Journal is the Wall Street Journal of the web. What Jim was doing was something way more native, way more powerful, and way more important. But we missed it.
TheStreet.com has gone on to build a niche financial publishing business that is a solid and profitable company. But it could have been the Twitter and Blogger of Wall Street. That's what it was at the start. But we didn't know what we had.
