My friend Dave Kansas has a new job

I went to high school with a guy named Dave Kansas. We were good friends even after I beat him out for the honor of being the worst starting point guard ever on any varsity high school basketball team.

He went on to become a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. One night more than a decade ago we were having dinner at a restaurant called John Harvard’s Brew House in Cambridge. I still remember the conversation well. Dave Kansas described to me a new job offer he had just received to run a start-up investing web site. This was a time when the web was still quite new and Kansas wasn’t sure he was interested. I encouraged him to give it a shot. The worst that could happen, I argued, was that it would go bust and he could get his old job back at the Wall Street Journal. He decided to take the job. That website was theStreet.com, and Kansas became a gazillionaire (at least on paper and at least for a while) during the internet boom. He eventually left theStreet.com to go back and run the Money and Investing section of the Wall Street Journal.

Now, Dave Kansas has a new job that looks pretty interesting running a partnership between Barry Diller’s IAC and Dow Jones for a new personal finance web site. Given his past accomplishments, Kansas is one guy you don’t want to bet against, unless the bet is whether he is going to make a free throw.