Prepping for a recent edition of Business Insider, with colleague Wendy Lee:

Developer Paul Klodt never tried to draw attention to himself, and when I first met him in the 1980s he was generally wary of the media. But one of his colleagues vouched for me, and for some reason we hit it off. He'd help me on stories, and occasionally we'd run into each other or agree to meet at the Monte Carlo Bar in the warehouse district, a popular watering hole with the commercial real estate crowd some two decades ago. 

 

 Klodt had a wry, self-deprecating sense of humor. He wasn't a powerbroker, per se, because he always struck me as something of a loner. But he knew how power moved in the community.

The Twin Cities was undergoing a building boom then, both in downtown Minneapolis and across the suburbs. The big Texas developers had come to town by then, and everyone seemed to be competing to see who could lay the most marble, build the tallest atriums and command the highest rents. They were also driving up the cost of land for everyone, and that annoyed Klodt to no end.

Klodt was not a flashy developer. He built practical, plain-vanilla office buildings, apartment complexes, and hotels and retail spaces, like this one. Architects and others called them ugly. Klodt didn't really care. He generally worked alone, and I don't think he ever took a city subsidy - so maybe he didn't have to care.

The commercial real estate depression of the early '90s took down a lot of those high profile builders. It almost took Klodt down, too, because he had personal guarantees on many of the projects. I remember him describing the negotiation sessions he had with some lenders. Usually, it involved Klodt dropping the keys to the building on the table and saying something like, "It's yours if you want it, or give me more time to work things out."

Klodt became less active in recent years, and strokes in 2009 and 2011 eventually forced him to step back from day-to-day operations at his firm. He died on Friday.

Rest in peace.

As readers note, the headline  on today's column is misleading because the high-paying manufacturing jobs I write about require a post-secondary education, just not a bachelor's degree. Can't blame this on anyone else. I wrote the headline with a BA or BS in mind.

Dunwoody's program is two years long, and some of its graduates eventually end up getting a four-year degree, usually at their employer's expense. Most of the students in Dunwoody's machine tooling programs are 28 or 29. One that I spoke with, Nate Walkington, is 38. He graduates in June but already has a job at a research and devleopment lab at the University of Minnesota.

One thing that didn't make it into the column were some of the reasons fewer young people are even thinking of careers in manufacturing. Based on conversations I've had with business owners and educators over the last several months, they include:

• Social pressure: Kids are under enormous pressure, from their parents, peers and teachers, to apply to and get into four-year colleges. Technical colleges and manufacturing jobs don't have the same status.
• Exposure: Many high schools, under pressure to raise student performance on standardized tests, have dropped Shop as a subject area. Those that still have it likely haven't updated their equipment to keep pace with changes in manufacturing technology.

Other reasons? 

Brightcove, a Cambridge, MA tech firm that provides a cloud-based video platform (customers include The New York Times), hopes to raise $55 million in an in initial public offering that is anticipated to occur this week.

Brightcove's founder, Jeremy Allaire, is a Minnesota native (from the Winona area) who graduated from Macalester. In the mid-90s he founded a Twin Cities company, with his brother J J Allaire, that created the web development tool ColdFusion. He moved the company to the Bay State to be closer to investors. He later sold it  to Macromedia.

Brightcove has raised more than $100 million in venture capital, but has yet to turn a profit. Revenue topped $60 million last year, up 48 percent from 2010.

(Disclosure: I worked for a Twin Cities p.r. firm in 2009-2010 that did some work for Brightcove. I've had no contact with Brightcove since the spring of 2010).

The letter from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg surely ranks among the most fatuous CEO missives in recent history, easily outdistancing Google's "Don't Be Evil" mantra.

For all the talk of improving human connection's, Facebook's business model depends squarely on advertising.  As one math genius out of Harvard put it memorably in a Bloomberg Businessweek story last year:

 "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

That said, like Google before it Facebook is one of those transformative businesses. It is the prime mover of the Web 2.0 world, and the fortunes of dozens if not hundreds of other companiesare closely tied to its success.

Will its growth continue at the same pace? No, though it's anybody's guess at this point as to when it will slow. But slow it will, as Google and Amazon have learned.

 A recent column about Buffets confirmed some people's worst perceptions of private equity. "Vulture capitalists" was a common refrain in the comments and emails that poured in following the column's appearance.

So, here's a counter-take on private equity that goes 180 degrees in the other direction. In this world, private equity is a purifying agent that makes the American economy stronger. To justify that position, author Reihan Salam trots out the sainted Steve Jobs:

And yet when Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he returned as an angel of destruction. He fired over 3,000 employees, a move that helped swing Apple from a $1.05 billion annual loss to a $309 million profit. He shut down Apple’s manufacturing facilities and outsourced almost every aspect of production. He swung the axe pitilessly, since he was convinced that survival requires leanness. And in the 14 years after Jobs returned, employment levels at Apple soared. Apple’s manufacturing work force was eventually replaced by engineers, support staff, and — in a move that would have surprised many in 1997 — a vast army of retail employees. The destruction was a prerequisite for the creation, and for the transformation of a wounded technology firm into one of the world’s most valuable public companies.

Here's the problem with that analogy: Jobs was in it for the long run. He didn't take a salary, just stock options. He didn't pay himself a series of special dividends that drained the company of cash even as he piled on debt, payments that either caused or hastened his company's insolvency.

That was a central allegation in the lawsuit that Buffets' bankruptcy trustee's filed against Caxton-Isema. It's probably the reason why the firm agreed to cough up almost $23 million to settle the case.

I don't think anyone begrudges an investor who takes a risk on a failing company, fixes it and flips it for a huge profit. And there are many private equity firms, local and national, that operate this way.

But we've seen other examples like Buffets, where a private equity firm walks away with big profits after mismanaging a healthy firm, or a private equity firm reaps big profits even as it fails to fix around a firm that it bought.

Venture capitalists lose money when they invest in startups that fail. Private equity investors have figured out ways to make money whether or not a company fails.