Barron's Jan. 20th,1997 bio is of interest...
Who Needs Venture Capital If Anyone Can Do an
IPO?
Among Mike Weinstein's resume entries - after his stint as a White House lawyer and
before he founded Find Dad Inc. to track down deadbeat ex-spouses - is that of
general counsel for Perot Systems Corp. Which may explain his highly developed
streak of populist fervor, now aimed at the clubby world of investment bankers and
venture capitalists.
Weinstein is these days chief operating officer of a mere slip of a company, Ben Ezra
Weinstein & Co., that went public at the end of December and expects to rack up all
of $5 million in revenues for the fiscal year ending in September. Its headquarters are
the top floor of an all-black building in Albuquerque that looks like Darth Vader's hat.
Its toil-free phone number is VC-GOAWAY. This clearly is a com- pany with
attitude.
It also has a hell of a franchise: Ben Ezra Weinstein is marketing
a software package, CapScape 1.0, that enables an
entrepreneur to create roughly 85% of a prospectus - at a
six-figure savings and in a fraction of the time. And anyone can
do it. Weinstein says the company's beta testers included its
receptionist, a woman with a high school education who
whipped out a complete draft within nine hours. Hiring a lawyer
to tweak the draft and assemble supporting documentation
should cost $8,000 to $15,000, Weinstein says, for a total price
tag one-tenth or less that of a traditional prospectus.
There's more. Version 2.0 will be able to make a prospectus
conform to the blue-sky requirements of all 50 states. Private
Placement Master, due out in mid-April, will create related
offering documents; Personal Market Analyst, expected
mid-summer, will provide tutorials on how to read such
offerings, as well as Qs, Ks and financial statements, and how to calculate various
ratios.
"We're trying to engage in populist capitalism," Weinstein explains. Given such tools
and the ubiquity of the Internet, the age of populist capitalism may well be at hand. |
