It came up again yesterday, which is only natural. In meeting after meeting, everyone wants to know. “So… how did you come up with that name?” Alright, I’ll tell you.
“Dreamtigers” is the title-story of a volume by the late Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges, in which the author relates how, his favorite animal being the tiger, he always wishes to conjure one up in his sleep. Occasionally he is able to do so, but finds that this “dreamtiger” varies and is at times majestic or otherwise skinny, and sometimes is more truly an elephant or a turtle and really not a tiger at all.
DreamTigerEquities is a merchant banking firm that specializes in emerging media and related technologies and services. Given the nature of our field, we spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs. The story by Borges, we believe, is not only a fitting analogy to the entrepreneurial experience, wherein one conjures up a tiger that, without any exception and sooner than can even be expected, becomes something other than the animal originally imagined, but is symbolic of the media industry in whole. This sector in which Google teams up with newspaper publishers, NewsCorp develops online video content for the Wall Street Journal, CBS trickles out of radio stations but creates a new radio format based on the popular Last.fm Internet music platform… this may well be the tiger some dreamed about a few years ago, but will soon enough be another beast entirely.
The important thing, we believe, for entrepreneurs, investors, media companies, and other industry constituencies, is not to predict the elephant or turtle or, by some miracle, the actual tiger, but to recognize the elusiveness and embrace an environment that, in all aspects – consumer trends, technological evolution, competitive dynamic – gives rise to opportunities that only this special era in this unique industry can give rise to. The described environment is not only what makes the media sector, together with its vast assortment of technologies and services, fascinating and exciting, but is precisely the thing that creates possibilities and breakthroughs which no other industry can as continuously sustain.
So… how did we come up with that name? It almost seems like some other would have been a vague understatement.
