To help in what turned out to be a major scam, MarchFirst created (at least one) a company called BlueVector. It was supposed to be an investment arm of MarchFirst. However, in subsequent lawsuits, the bankruptcy trustee alleged that BlueVector was really created to be part of a practice called "roundtripping". As a subsidiary of MarchFirst, BlueVector got funds from MarchFirst. BlueVector would then turn around and use those funds to "invest" in different companies (often start-ups). The recipient company would then "hire" MarchFirst to provide technology consulting services. The result of that was that MarchFirst was able to record sales revenues on its books and in reports to stockholders. Of course, the "sales" were really to a company that MarchFirst had created via the BlueVector intermediary. As an analogy, imagine giving your kid some money, they give it to their buddy, who then pays it to you for picking them up from the mall, and you count it as income when applying for a credit card.

BlueVector was run primarily by two individuals - Joe Josephson and Michael Tunstall. These two had a history of working together from their days at Credit Suisse First Boston, which coincidentally managed the merger of Whittman-Hart and USWeb into MarchFirst. While running BlueVector, Josephson and Tunstall helped the company fund other companies like Talk2.com (of which Bert Young was the CFO) to the tune of $43 Million, WynWyn.com, Cybrant, and Centerbeam (which was founded by Sheldon Laube, who was the same individual that had founded USWeb).

As most anyone should recognize, an exercise in "roundtripping" is eventually going to fall apart - you can only churn the money so much before people either start to notice or the amount dwindles because it just continues to pass through the same hands with some being siphoned off here and there for legit expenses that can't be avoided. In the case of MarchFirst, it did indeed come to an end in 2001 when they declared bankruptcy. And thus, our cast of characters were scattered about.

New Destinations
From BlueVector, Joe Josephson went on to investment bank Lazard Freres in their San Francisco office. Though you rarely find any mention of it in recent bio's of Josephson, it appears that sometime in 2004 he left Lazard and briefly joined The Sandi Group as a senior advisor (cached page here). Shortly after that, both he and his old business partner/friend Michael Tunstall turned up at ThinkEquity Partners, a "research-centric institutional investment firm" to share the position of managing director and head of the Mergers & Acquisitions Group. Josephson continued his stellar record of long-term employment by lasting until December 2004 when the current head of Mergers & Acquisitions for ThinkEquity, Paul Pittman, took over. A few months later, he registered the Syntax Partners domain name:

Domain Name: SYNTAXPARTNERS.COM

Created on.........:Tue,Jun 14, 2005
Expires on...........:Sat,Jun 14, 2008
Record last updated on..:Tue,Jun 14, 2005

Administrative Contact:
Joseph Josephson
<snip>
Email: jjbluevector@aol.com

Reunion Time
So now we come back to our current situation. We have three major figures from ill-fated MarchFirst involved with The SCO Group. We have Bert Young as CFO for SCO and now we have both Joe Josephson and Michael Tunstall serving as advisors for this latest round of "funding". This raises the question in my mind as to whether the group has learned from their MarchFirst days and think they have figured out a way to "roundtrip" using investor funds instead of sales? I see some parallels, especially given that the "new" investment is coming from "old" investors in SCO that are already related to SCO.

The other issue that this raises in my mind is the fact that Josephson and Tunstall have backgrounds in mergers and acquisitions. When Young became CFO of SCO, there was lots of speculation regarding the type of "services" he was bringing to SCO. With the reunion of Young, Josephson, and Tunstall, one has to wonder what new "services" are in the mix for SCO. Could we see SCO "acquire" some other company with that move trumpeted to the market as evidence of SCO's strength (I'm thinking something related to the mobile push)? Another alternative might be some other company "acquiring" or "merging" with SCO (but I do not mean something like Novell or IBM buying out SCO like the shills/trolls over at the Yahoo! SCOX board like to chirp). I find this scenario a little harder to imagine as I think McBride's ego would get in the way.

Finally, we all wait to see what kind of SEC filings will be made related to this round of investment. Of course, everyone is trying to figure out which SCO Board member is one of the investors (according to SCO's site, the current Board members are Ralph Yarro, Darl McBride, Ed Iacobucci, Darcy Mott, Duff Thompson, Kent Millington, Omar Leeman, and Daniel Campbell). Likewise, we wait to see which institutional investors kicked in some more money.

Thanks for reading!
Jeff