MOONSHOT KILLER COMPANY W.R. Hambrecht + Co., Founder, Chairman and CEO NET WORTH $500 million AGE 63 E-MAIL billh@wrhambrecht.com BIO Silicon Valley is filled with early retirees--entrepreneurs, venture capitalists
and investment bankers who have made their money from technology and are kicking
back. Not Bill Hambrecht. He reinvented the business of taking companies public
30 years ago when he co-founded Hambrecht & Quist in San Francisco--thousands of
miles from Wall Street but close to the programming whizzes who were creating new
companies.
Last year he cut his ties with H&Q. And he dropped plans to dabble in venture
capital. Instead, he found a new business plan--transforming the initial public
offering from art into science. He reasoned that the phenomenal first-day gains
so many Internet IPOs saw were a product of a bad process. So W.R. Hambrecht +
Co. introduced OpenIPO, a new "Dutch auction" technique that in theory turns
those first-day gains into cash for the company going public, not for lucky
traders. BEST LINE "The Internet ... is revolutionizing lots of distribution streams, and
I think it will revolutionize ours." FORWARD TILT Ravenswood Winery and Salon.com went public through Hambrecht's
auctions, but a third OpenIPO offering, GreatFood.com, postponed its auction in
May, citing stock-market conditions. With investors less inclined to propel new
Internet stocks to nosebleed heights, could Hambrecht be fixing a system that's
not broken?
