Capital Business launches amid car wreck

Dan Beyers, the editor of Capital Business, the new weekly business newspaper being launched by the Washington Post, writes Monday about how the distraction of starting the publication caused him to wreck his car.

Beyers writes, “Gary Shapiro, president and chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association in Arlington, remembers a time back in the mid-1980s when he and the late Ron Brown, who would later become commerce secretary, were sitting on a bus in Tokyo listening to David Rubenstein talk about his vision for a merchant banking firm that would one day become private equity giant Carlyle Group. At the time, the three men were all lawyers, fighting to protect the legality of the videotape recorder.

“‘Ron and I laughed at David, thinking he was just being fanciful,’ Shapiro said. ‘But then he did it.’

“Capital Business plans to tell many more stories like that in the weeks and months to come, for it strikes me that one of the things uniting our diverse business community is the entrepreneurial spirit stirring in companies big and small. The upheaval brought on by the recent economic downturn has a way of focusing the mind and encouraging people to consider new possibilities.

“I pulled my wounded car into my downtown parking garage and smiled at the look on the attendants’ faces.

“‘What happened?’ one asked. ‘Are you okay?’

“I shrugged my shoulders.

“Never felt better.”

Read more here.