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How the Inventors of Dragon Speech Recognition Technology Lost Everything
First time accepted submitter cjsm writes "James and Janet Baker were the inventors of Dragon Systems' speech recognition software, and after years of work, they created a multimillion dollar company. At the height of the tech boom, with investment offers rolling in, they turned to Goldman Sachs for financial advice. For a five million dollar fee, Goldman hooked them up with Lernout & Hauspie, the Belgium speech recognition company. After consultations with Goldman Sachs, the Bakers traded their company for $580 million in Lernout & Hauspie stock. But it turned out Lernout & Hauspie was involved in cooking their books and went bankrupt. Dragon was sold in a bankruptcy auction to Scansoft, and the Bakers lost everything. Goldman and Sachs itself had decided against investing in Lernout & Hauspie two years previous to this because they were lying about their Asian sales. The Bakers are suing for one billion dollars."
I thought Goldman Sachs were the good guys?
billions! It's so much money even the singular takes an "s"!
Mostly random stuff.
IN BIZARRO WORLD
Imagine that, Goldman Sachs involved in swindling people.
Will wonders never cease.
If corporations are people, then they're responsible for the relationships between the different thoughts in their heads.
Couldn't they claim diminished responsibility due to multiple personality disorder?
Blank until
"After consultations with Goldman Sachs,..."
That's your problem right there.
Isn't the burden of having all that money and the guilt over how it was acquired really punishment enough?
For example, a bank should not be allowed to combine with another bank. Mergers should only take place between different types of financial institutions as God intended.
If you're a first time entrepreneur ... you're gonna get raped.
By someone named Gold Man-Sacs no less!
Let's see, names for our new "financial business":
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
im a little confused as to what you would actually consider 'stealing'.
my favorite definition is from Jennifer Aniston's character in Office Space.
you take something thats not yours. and then it becomes yours.
You forgot my favorite:
Takeda, Monet, and Runne
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I do believe the phrase he was looking for is "palsy walsy"
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Whether it was wishy-washy or palsy-walsy, the point is that there was hanky-panky going on.
Who owns Scansoft, who apart from GS are the other big winners from this transaction? They got the world's best speech rec software for a fraction of its true value - I wonder who they were advised by?
A mysterious company called Soldman Gachs, who have since gone out of business after a fire that destroyed all of their files.
More like Hanky-Paulsy
No bailout for the Bakers', I guess.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body