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Pastimes : All Clowns Must Be Destroyed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RocketMan who wrote (24219)	4/8/2000 3:49:00 PM
From: Giordano Bruno	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42523

Incubator. Frankly, until a couple of months ago, what the word conjured up for us was one of those little devices, vaguely like glass enclosures used to house model ships, that hospitals employ to help premature babies along until they're able to fend for themselves. Then, leafing through a newsletter devoted to happenings in venture capital -- called Venture Update, fittingly enough -- we discovered that incubator is now a very proper noun for anyone who helps along an infant outfit until it can feed gurglingly on public money. There are, it turns out, dedicated incubators, set up to supply all the immediate needs of a fledgling company or even a pre-fledgling entity, something that's still a gleam in some entrepreneurial eye. These "professional" incubators, in return for their loving care, expect a very healthy slug of the baby outfit's equity. But what really intrigued us is that there apparently are oodles of freelance, solo incubators. Landlords, for example. Generous souls, as landlords tend to be, who are not unwilling to lease space to a budding business type with a catchy idea; in exchange, they expect stock in an amount sufficient to compensate for the cash rent they're forgoing and, of course, the possibility of a real payday should the budding business blossom into an IPO. Then there are equipment lessors. High-tech start-ups in particular often need a wealth of costly gizmos. Seemingly, it's not uncommon practice for providers of everything from computers to laboratory paraphernalia to strike a deal with an impecunious but promising infant company in which the latter gets the equipment and the lessor gets stock. Those peculiar contemporary jack-of-all-trades known as consultants will also offer their advice, expertise or whatever it is they have to offer fledglings (in the interests of full disclosure, we should 'fess up that, to borrow from George Bernard Shaw, we've always felt that those who can't do, consult). And, they, too, take stock in lieu of cash. This scarcely exhausts the list of incubators, but you get the idea. The incubators thus represent a potential addition, and possibly a sizable one, to the swell of shares flooding into the market. Not exactly what the doctor ordered with the supply of stock already beginning to submerge the demand for stock. -Abelson