Richard Parsons, chairman and former CEO of Time Warner, visited the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth yesterday to meet with students and give a public lecture on "Entrepreneurship in the Digital Age."  There is no one who has been closer to the interface between the old and new economies over the last decade, and his remarks did not disappoint.  The theme of the talk is well summarized by this passage from the story in this morning's issue of The Dartmouth:

Parsons also spoke on how the Internet has lowered the entry barrier for new ideas, leaving the marketplace “wide open for entrepreneurs.” While investment capital for new ideas has spread since the 1990s, he said, technology has simultaneously made that capital less necessary.

There I was, sitting at the kitchen table, sifting through the goodies left by the mailman earlier that day, when I happened upon the following solicitation from Chase:

Take a look at the box highlighting how much the monthly payment is on a $10,000 loan with a stated APR of 5.74%. If I could make loans like that, I'd bail out Bear Stearns myself. Is there no one working at that bank who could figure out that the $10k should have been $50k?

Or are they all doing market research leading them to the conclusion that co-branding with US Airways is the best way to improve their business model?

Quite literally. Here's Alpha Magazine's list of the ten hedge fund managers with the highest personal earnings in 2007:

*Earnings include managers' shares of fees as well as gains on their own capital.

So how did they do it? This article in The Washington Post explains: