by Kyle Stone and Kevin Connor

Our research project on the Bay Area’s ten largest corporations was fully funded on Spot.us in early October and has come to a close, but with it we’ve built a lasting resource that we hope will continue to pay dividends for watchdog efforts in California.

We focused on identifying and profiling the most powerful and influential executives, managers, board members, employees, associates, and lobbyists affiliated with each company. In the course of the project we compiled data on over 400 people, added close to 5000 relationships connecting them, published ten in-depth profiles and stories (one of which was picked up by Alternet and Felix Salmon of Reuters), and created several network visualizations.

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Lobbyists Groups Hired in 2009 ($80,000 or more):

• American Continental Group
• Cassidy and Associates

Board of Directors: Noteworthy Members:

• Reed E. Hundt: according to an official Federal Communications Commission biography, Hundt was named Chairman of the FCC by President Clinton and was sworn in by Vice President Gore in1993, a position he filled for five years.  A graduate of Yale Law School, Hundt also served as a business analyst for Latham & Watkins, and continues to serve as an adviser to McKinsey & Company.
• John J. Donahoe: President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay, the online marketplace conglomerate which now owns PayPal, Skype, Half.com, and 28% of Craigslist.
• Susan L. Decker: President of Yahoo! and member of board of directors at Berkshire Hathaway.
• James D Plummer: long-time professor and dean of the engineering school at Stanford University.  Plummer also served on the board of the International Rectifier Corporation, the director of which is Robert S Attiyeh, who served as Senior VP and CFO of Amgen, Director of McKinsey and Company, and Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.  (Another board member at International Rectifier named Thomas Lacey served as a GM for Intel and Vice President of Sales and marketing between 1998 and 2003.)
• Frank D. Yeary: Current Vice Chancellor of UC Berkeley.  Interestingly enough, this guy’s biographies seldom reference his 24-year career as a financial banker and merger executive for Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Salomon Brothers, and the Carlyle Group.

Philanthropy

• Intel Corporation Contributions Program gave $66,622,752 in 2008
• Intel Foundation gave $36,186,253 in 2008

Top Five Government Contracts in 2009:

• $662,852 – Department of the Navy
• $377,556 – NASA
• $91,075 – Department of the Air Force
• $32,560 – Department of the Army
• $6,720 – Environmental Protection Agency (Source: USASpending.gov)

NNDB Visualization

Intel Map

Last October, in a stunning turn of events at the height of the Wall Street crisis, Wachovia backed out of a deal with Citigroup and agreed to a $15 billion merger with Wells Fargo — the biggest bank merger ever. The Charlotte-based Wachovia had recently collapsed under the weight of its own mortgage portfolio and Citi had come to the rescue, offering a rock bottom $1/share that Wachovia accepted in order to avoid bankruptcy. A few days later, Wells Fargo swooped down with an offer worth seven times as much, and Wachovia gladly accepted.

The Wells Fargo deal confused most observers, infuriated Citigroup, resulted in weeks of intense legal wrangling, and ultimately went through. It was an odd marriage, pairing a Charlotte-based bank that had financed the sun belt’s housing bubble with a San Francisco-based bank that had largely avoided it.

How did the two banks come together? What was the real story behind this deal?

As it turns out, a Birmingham, Alabama-based construction aggregate supply company appears to have played a key role in this merger. Last week, I blogged about this bizarre discovery (part of our Spot.us research project) without offering too much detail. Today I’ll make my case.

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Yesterday, using basic features of LittleSis, I discovered that the key matchmaker in the biggest, most complex bank merger in the history of Wall Street was a construction aggregate supply company based in Birmingham, Alabama.

Strange as it may seem, the evidence strongly suggests that individuals associated with this company leveraged their networks to bring the two banking giants together against all odds, with tremendous consequences for shareholders, homeowners, and taxpayers.

I turned this up as part of our Bay Area research project. It’s been one of the more gratifying research experiences I’ve had on LittleSis, because it demonstrates the power of the platform to expose hidden, surprising connections that bring significant depth and fresh life to news stories (this merger is still quite relevant today). And my findings should raise questions about whether the merger was an example of cronyist self-dealing at the expense of bank shareholders.

I am going to detail my findings in a Valdis Krebs-inspired blog post (including network graphs), but first:

Please consider making a $10 or $20 donation to our Spot.us pitch. This kind of work is being supported by that pitch, and we are very close to our fundraising goal!

I spent last week investigating Apple for our project Who’s Behind the Bay Area’s Top Ten Companies?, which we’ve posted as a pitch on Spot.us.

Good thing I researched Apple — number eight on our list of the Bay Area’s top 10 companies — because I’ve spent this week probing Google and there are a myriad of connections between the two. It’s well documented how quickly and easily Silicon Valley employees move between competing companies, but there are a high number of people moving between Google and Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Facebook. There are also a large amount of Google employees who have started out as consultants at McKinsey & Company. Check out Google’s interlocks page for more specifics, but here’s some of what I uncovered.

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After about six weeks of drawing interest, building new friendships, and researching our brains out, we’ve managed to collect 27 donations from organizations and individuals who are rallying behind the Bay Area Research Project.  The result?  We’re inspired, and working harder than ever to close the funding gap, and publish our final research.

Why Donating Is Important

Hitting the $800 donation goal is more than a matter of pride for us.  Achieving our goal proves that ground-up, community-oriented projects are viable means for LittleSis to sustain itself in a future where grants and traditional sources of funding are scarce.

Cool Stuff We Have Already Done

If you haven’t donated yet, take a look at what we’ve already produced from our research:

• Northern California Elite: Interlocks – OK, so wealthy, successful Californians businesspersons share corporate connections.  But did you know that many sit on government boards and University Trustee Boards?  Can you guess which politicians they donate the most money to?
• In-depth company profiles on: McKesson, Apple, Chevron, and Hewlett-Packard
• Eyes on the Ties Visualizations

How to Donate

Visit our pitch on Spot.us, and click I’ll Donate $20. Don’t worry – you can donate as much or as little as you’d like.  Even $5 helps.

Tell Us What You Want

Is there something specific you’d like for us to research?  Email us and let us know.

I’m going to start posting a locality-specific version of the NameWire (let’s call it SFNewsWire) in order to shed light on recent activity and happenings affecting the Bay Area organizations we’re researching with Spot.us.

• AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah partners with IBM for Green Data Center (Routers.com)
• Lloyd Dean, CEO of Catholic Healthcare West, expressed optimism about upcoming healthcare reform. According to Dean, the mostly favorable reception from business, the buy-ins on access and costs from insurance and drug companies are among the “evolutionary” forces that have come to outweigh the “minority opinions” – dissenting voices from the GOP and elsewhere. “Look how far we’ve gotten,” he said. (SFGate.com)
• San Francisco’s Sunday Streets program is now a permanent weekly event, Mayor Newsom pronounced. (Twitter.com/andrewross)
• Chevron backs ‘Energy Citizens’, an oil industry movement aimed at derailing climate-change legislation. (SFGate)
• Robert Lloyd, most likely successor to Cisco CEO John Chambers goads channel partners to wallop HP ProCurve (NetworkWorld – thanks to JZukfor the link)

In an era where the traditional means for funding journalism projects have all but evaporated, David Cohn has a sharp sense of where the future of journalism is heading. As the founder and ringleader of Spot.us, David’s ideas have materialized into an open source platform that has pioneered an innovative, original model of”community funded reporting”:

Through Spot.us the public can commission journalists to do investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories. All donations are tax deductible and if a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, your donation will be reimbursed. Otherwise, all content is made available to all through a Creative Commons license. It’s a marketplace where independent reporters, community members and news organizations can come together and collaborate.

We dig it so much that we have launched a LittleSis project on Spot.us.  Titled “Who’s Behind the Bay Area’s Most Powerful Companies?, we’re leveraging synergy between the Spot.us and LittleSis communities to investigate and articulate the networks of wealth and influence that sustain the most powerful companies in the Bay Area.  Specifically, here’s what we’re hoping to cook up:

1. A database containing in-depth profiles on at least 25 Bay Area organizations, 100+ executive board members, and 1,000+ inter-connections with affiliated organizations and personnel.
2. A visualization (map or interactive graph) depicting the most noteworthy connections
3. 2-3 news-style reports and informational press releases related to our findings.

We Need Your Support. Our ability to complete this project directly relies upon small donations from supporters of LittleSis fans, like-minded organizations, and individuals with a vested interest in the Bay Area Community.  Visit the pitch page on Spot.us for more information.