Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Former Microsoft Deal Guy Bruce Jaffe Lands at IPO Candidate Glam

Bruce Jaffe, last seen cutting deals for Microsoft, has a new gig: He’ll be CFO at Glam Media.

The Web publishing heavyweight has already been on the shortlist of tech/media companies in line for an IPO, though the company won’t comment on anything connected to a possible offering. But you can connect the dots here: If you are going out to the public markets, it helps to have a guy with doctorate from Redmond.

Then again, you could have said the same thing about Stephen E. Recht, Glam’s current CFO, who helped bring Shutterfly public way, way back in 2006, and joinged Glam in 2007. Recht will stay on with Glam through the summer, the company says.

Glam’s new hire put in more than a dozen years at Microsoft, including a stint as CFO at its MSN unit. Most recently, Jaffe ran its corporate development group. Glam points out his experience with the $6 billion aQuantive deal in 2007 as a highlight, but there are plenty of Web folks I talk to who argue that Redmond blew billions on that one.

Jaffe left Microsoft (MSFT) in early 2008. Since then he’s been running his own consultancy, working with clients including… Glam. Jaffe’s name did pop up as a possible Yahoo (YHOO) hire after Carol Bartz reshuffled the ranks last year.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik