Byron Acohido/USA TODAY in "The Getty family is back in business":
"With nothing specific in mind, and only a list of criteria generally describing a business with good prospects for steady, long-term growth, Getty and Klein examined, and ruled out, various real estate and manufacturing ventures.
What most people don't know is that the company exists because Mark Getty, grandson of J. Paul Getty, grew restless with a life of passive investing and philanthropy. So he took a blank sheet of paper, talked relatives out of some seed capital, and shaped a profitable half-billion-dollar-a-year enterprise that has revolutionized how media companies get access to digital images for commercial use.
In 1995, Getty took a stab at wresting control of his family's destiny. He cajoled his father, Sir Paul, and uncle, Gordon, into fronting him $20 million to build an unspecified business based on the same philosophical underpinnings his grandfather used to build Getty Oil. To get the seed capital, Getty "used a mixture of arm twisting and emotional blackmail, all the usual things that happen in families," he says. "I was very eager to re-establish a position where we had the same knowledge and expertise, and therefore the same position in an industry, which we had lost.
More interesting: "Sales of stock photography supplied by freelancers make up about 80% of the company's annual sales."
And: "The company spent $78.6 million in 2000 and $72.7 million in 2001 on shedding duplicate staff, facilities and systems, and building out an impregnable central database and a state-of-the-art Web site honed for e-commerce." We know that Oracle had given special support to Getty for the database, but the exact split of the numbers for shedding and for building the database would be interesting... .
How did Mark Getty figured out that he together with Jonathan Klein would need 20 million? Not 18? Not 22? Just the entrepreneurial kind of estimating? What would have happened with only 10 million?
[Text quoted from USA TODAY, Byron Acohido, "The Getty family is back in business"]
