Related Stories"Come play!"
Shana Fisher emails this challenge from her eighth-floor perch at IAC headquarters, a sleek, white Frank Gehry jewel on Manhattan's west side. Her office is immaculate, with four white leather chairs, a pink door, and a magnificent view of the Hudson River. Not that she notices on this Friday afternoon. She's trying to navigate a blue marble across a virtual obstacle course without getting bumped off into the clouds.
"No mercy," warns one of her opponents, a hard-core gamer in Eugene, Oregon.
"As usual," she fires back.
Fisher, 37, is senior vice president of strategy and mergers and acquisitions at IAC, Barry Diller's Internet conglomerate. She's playing a beta version of MarbleBlast Online, created by her latest find, GarageGames.
Fisher has become a star at IAC by ferreting out undervalued companies and emerging markets. In 2005, she engineered the nearly $2 billion purchase of the all-but-forgotten search engine AskJeeves, now Ask.com, which Diller describes as the glue holding together his dozens of disparate brands. "It's Barry's company, but she was the driving force on the deal," says Ask.com executive vice president Mark Stein.
Earlier this year, PC World even named her one of the most important people on the Web. At No. 14, she ranked ahead of
Fisher's acquisition acumen is especially critical now, as IAC recasts itself as a smaller company, more focused on the emerging Internet businesses that are her specialty. (See "The New IAC ") Fisher's latest move is a foray into the nearly $40 billion video-game industry. In September, IAC announced that it had obtained a majority stake in GarageGames, a deal reportedly worth about $80 million. The Eugene-based outfit has developed the technology to bring 3-D multiplayer, Xbox-quality action games to the Web browser. Fisher is convinced it will be a game changer, creating an untapped market worth about $2 billion a year.
"This is one person's vision," says Diller. Fisher has a "willfulness" that he admires, perhaps relates to. She's "not duplicable," he says. "She has both true intelligence and curiosity, and she also has the energy and ability to claim her space at a crowded table."
"She has both true intelligence and curiosity, and she also has the energy and ability to claim her space at a crowded table."
Growing up in Philadelphia, Fisher thought she'd be an artist, like her father. At Hampshire College in Massachusetts, she triple-majored in sculpture, philosophy, and linguistics. But her budding art career soon took a backseat to a budding interest in Web design, which led to a job at
Microsoft taught Fisher how to go after a new market, build a product, and run a project team. When she moved on to Allen & Co., the New York investment bank, she learned how to analyze industries and develop conviction by investing her own money as well as the firm's. That, she says, creates a "different shopping experience."
At IAC she applies the same exacting standard. "She's good at building a compelling case," says Ask.com's Stein. "Once she believes in something, she is like a bulldog."
Fisher adamantly believes in GarageGames. The company spent two years developing high-end 3-D game technology for Web browsers in secret--"a very, very, very hard problem," she says--before IAC came along and provided the resources to launch a game portal.
She also believes in 27-year-old Josh Williams, GarageGames's CEO. They met over brunch in Manhattan in the fall of 2006, while Fisher was on maternity leave. Williams says he expected "a New York shark," but found a disarmingly down-to-earth deal maker who shared his passion. It was almost eerie, he wrote later on his blog, how an outsider had developed the same vision that GarageGames had.
"This," Fisher told him, "is my other baby."
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