The return of the small/mid-market IPO: Will this be the year?
Video series presented by Grant Thornton and the San Diego Venture Group
This Grant Thornton Thinking video series focuses on the needs of small businesses to raise capital and on the many barriers present in our current market structure. Excerpted from the February 2011 San Diego Venture Forum interview between David Weild of Grant Thornton – Capital Markets and former vice-chairman of NASDAQ and capital markets icon Bill Hambrecht, founder of Hambrecht & Quist and Chairman of WR Hambrecht + Co, these discussions demonstrate that while the IPO market showed some life in 2010, still in question is the ability for small and mid-sized U.S.-based companies to go public.
 |
 |
Watch discussions excerpted from the February 2011 San Diego Venture Forum
- Perspectives and Overview (10:23)
- The Auction Process (8:29)
- Auction Markets, Bulge Underwriting Firms and Auction Technology (7:04)
- IPO Distribution, Social Networks and Institutional Participation (10:39)
- Shaping Policy on Capitol Hill (7:13)
In this informative series, Mr. Hambrecht provides an overview of the structural changes that impacted Hambrecht & Quist and influenced the development of the auction market at WR Hambrecht + Co. He offers his insights on current market trends and makes recommendations on what it will take to open the window for small IPOs. Mr. Weild contextualizes these observations with a review of the long-term decline of the IPO market.
About the speakers:
Mr. Hambrecht and Mr. Weild have testified recently before the U.S. House of Representatives regarding Regulation A (the Small Company Capital Formation Act of 2011). View their respective testimony at Hambrecht testimony-December 2010 and at Weild testimony-March 2011. Mr. Weild’s written statement is available at Weild statement-March 2011.
Bill Hambrecht is Chairman of WR Hambrecht + Co, which he founded in 1998. He helped persuade Google™ to use an Internet-based auction for its 2004 IPO, rather than a more traditional method whereby banks and other financial companies find buyers. Mr. Hambrecht is credited with popularizing the OpenIPO® model, using Dutch auctions to allow anyone — not just investing insiders — to buy stock in an IPO and potentially raising more money for start-ups. He has helped Overstock.com, Ravenswood Winery and Salon.com, among others, with this type of IPO. He is notably one of the first major investors to recognize the value of technology and biotech companies, helping to take Apple Computer, Genentech and Adobe Systems public in the 1980s with his predecessor San Francisco-based company, Hambrecht & Quist. Mr. Hambrecht and his former partner co-founded Hambrecht & Quist in 1968 and backed the IPOs of Netscape, MP3.com, and Amazon.com.
David Weild oversees Grant Thornton LLP’s Capital Markets Group, which provides strategies and insights into today’s global capital markets. He is the founder of Capital Markets Advisory Partners and the former vice-chairman and executive vice-president of The NASDAQ Stock Market, with oversight of the more than 4,000 listed companies. Prior to NASDAQ, Mr. Weild spent 14 years at Prudential Securities in a number of senior management roles, including president of eCommerce, head of corporate finance, head of technology investment banking and head of equity capital markets in New York, London and Tokyo. He also worked on more than 500 IPOs, follow-on offerings and convertible transactions, and was an innovator of new issue systems and securities underwriting structures, including the use of Form S-3s to mitigate risk for small capitalization companies raising equity and convertible debt capital.
