www.newsweek.com/id/87276
Get and Share Sponsored by Email To A Friend Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link. Your Email Address Recipient's Email Address Separate multiple addresses with commas Send INVESTMENT BANKER BILL HAMBRECHT'S old and new offices are two miles--and several worlds--apart. His former digs were in San Francisco's financial district, at Hambrecht & Quist, the investment bank known for taking companies like Apple and Genentech public. It does business the traditional way, passing out often bargain-priced stock in newly public companies to the foie-gras-and-caviar crowd. It wants to level the playing field for initial public offerings by making such shares available to all--even the Twinkie crowd. When your average investor hears about those hot technology IPOs that surge seconds after they start trading, he turns green with envy. That's because only the investment banks and brokerage houses that underwrite the deal, their best customers and other insiders get the stock at the initial-offering price. The masses buy at higher prices after the stock starts changing hands. With a stock like eBay, which soared from an offering price of $18 to a high of $54 on its first day of trading, the insiders stand to reap huge rewards; With his new company, which formally launches this week, the 63-year-old Hambrecht will give individual investors a fair crack at IPOs. He'll distribute the shares of the high-tech companies he underwrites via a ""Dutch auction'' on the Web. But one week later, friends started getting his phone calls pitching the online IPO scheme. ""He stayed retired for about eight minutes,'' says Henry Bienen, president of Northwestern University. Hambrecht seeded the firm with $10 million of his own money. com, a company will post either the number of shares it wants to sell or the amount of money it wants to raise. Investors submit bids online: how many shares they want, and what price they are willing to pay. Specialized software then performs a reverse auction, working down to determine the price at which the company's request is satisfied, and all investors pay that price. Hambrecht's primary pitch is that their shares will fetch a higher price online than the artificially low one set by traditional underwriters. But if he's successful, rivals could simply copy the model. ""Everyone has a Web site,'' says Jim Feuille, head of investment banking at Volpe Brown Whelan. But be-ware: IPOs are still among the market's most unpredictable bets.
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