Chicago Sun Times
February 28, 2000
BY HOWARD WOLINSKY BUSINESS REPORTER
The board of divine interVentures inc., the Lisle Internet operating company, has the face of the new economy--and a little bit of the old.
The boards of Chicago companies once were dominated by the likes of the chairman of a Marshall Field & Co. or an Inland Steel or a Continental Bank.
But the closest divine comes to that are William Wrigley Jr., president of the Chicago chewing gum company; Eric Larson, managing partner of Bank One Equity Capital; Teresa L. Pahl, chief executive, Aon Enterprise Insurance Services, and John Rau, president of Chicago Title & Trust Corp.
Divine has drawn much of its board star power from leaders of high-profile new economy companies. These include Robert Bernard, chairman of Whittman-Hart Inc., the Chicago computer-consulting company that in December agreed to buy Internet marketing adviser USWeb/CKS Corp. for $5.9 billion; Mark Tebbe, chairman of Lante Corp., the Chicago e-business consultant that earlier this month raised $200 million in a public share offering, and Gregory Jones, chairman of uBid Inc., the Chicago online auction house purchased this month by Internet operating company CMGI Inc. for more than $400 million.
Director David Hiller, senior vice president of Tribune Co., would seem to represent an old-line company, but the Tribune has been a major investor in new media and broadband communications businesses.
Board member Michael Birck is founder of Tellabs Inc., the Lisle telecommunications equipment manufacturer. Birck often is cited for being a pioneering tech entrepreneur in Chicago. Forbes magazine lists him as being among the richest Americans, with a fortune of about $1 billion, just ahead of Oprah Winfrey.
Speaking of Oprah, Jeffrey Jacobs, president of her Harpo Entertainment Group, which produces her popular TV show, is a divine board member.
Larry Levy, co-founder of Levy Restaurants, the Chicago-based nationwide food service company, also is on the board.
Andrew J. "Flip" Filipowski is a dropout from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and while he doesn't think much of academics in general, he has included two star business profs and e-commerce experts on his board. They are Steven Kaplan of the University of Chicago and Mohan Sawhney of Northwestern University. Kaplan and Sawhney are principals in Michigan & Oak LLC, which helps promising start-ups develop quickly.
Craig Goldman, a director of CMGI, a model for divine, is on the board. CMGI has invested $1 billion in Chicago start-ups recently, including a small piece of divine and purchases of uBid and Yesmail.Com.
Two giants of the new economy, Dell Computer Corp, the computer maker, and Microsoft Inc., the operating system maker, are major divine investors and have directors on the board.