Word: pixar
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Jobs makes the point that Pixar, like other IPO overnight successes, was really anything but an overnight success. "The things that I've done in my life have required a lot of years of work before they took off," he says. He and Wozniak started work on Apple in 1975. "So it was really six years of work before we went public. And Pixar has been 10 years...
Jobs insists that he isn't in it for the money. "The thing that drives me and my colleagues at both Apple and Pixar," he says, "is that you see something very compelling to you, and you don't quite know how to get it, but you know, sometimes intuitively, it's within your grasp. And it's worth putting in years of your life to make it come into existence...
Bender's euphoria is understandable; not all start-ups enjoy the same prospects. The IPO game can be perilous for less well-prepared entrepreneurs and for the investors who snap up their shares. For every highflyer like Netscape Communications or Pixar Animation that has enriched its owners almost beyond counting, there are dozens of losers that have dashed their founders' dreams. Smith Micro Software, for example, jumped from $12 a share to $14.50 a share amid the frenzy of the IPO market when the Aliso Viejo, California, maker of software for modems went public last Sept. 18. Since then...
Despite the risks and the possibilities of failure, start-ups benefit the entire country, argues John Doerr, chairman of Kleiner Perkins Caulfied & Byers, a Menlo Park venture-capital firm that has helped finance dozens of new companies, including Netscape and Pixar. Doerr says Kleiner Perkins clients have created 150,000 new jobs in the past five years alone and have reinforced America's technological edge. "Some people refer to [IPOs] as a game," Doerr says. "But the notion that an entrepreneur can have a big idea and gain financial independence for his family is at the very heart...
...investment bankers select candidates for IPOs only after careful scrutiny. "We turn down many more companies than we take public," Case says. But Case had few doubts about either Pixar or Netscape, whose executives he had known for years. Hambrecht eagerly teamed with fellow bankers to buy up all the offered shares of both companies and then staged nationwide "road shows" to tout the stock to big investors like mutual funds. The tours generated so much excitement that Netscape, which had been tentatively priced at $12 to $14 a share, went public at $28. Hambrecht's profit for co-managing...