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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Douglas V. Fant who wrote (32579)	1/30/1998 12:42:00 AM
From: Gary Korn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

Doug, Thanks for the note. I'm not at all good at technical indicators, but I do appreciate the updates. I also do like that prior post, wherein it was noted that TIAA/CREF had actually increased its position in ASND (at least as of 9/30/97) to 5.2MM shares. These people tend to invest for the long term, and with that perspective, they sometimes take what some would consider to be gambles. I recall the big gamble that they took on the Mall of America (largely financed by TIAA). Aat the time, there was some criticism of the size of the investment by TIAA. I understand, now, that the Mall is big success and the debt payments are solid. Perhaps CREF has the same kind of relatively long term commitment to this stock that is most consistent with the pitch being delivered by Ejabat/Ashby: Wait for 2H98 for double-digit performance. Gary Korn

To: Douglas V. Fant who wrote (32579)	1/30/1998 12:55:00 AM
From: Gary Korn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 61433

I received the following story about how ASND started and grew and I thought some might find it of interest. Thank you, very much, to the contributor: When Ejabat won the Stanford Business School alumni association entrpreneurial company of the year award, he spoke of ASND's three lives. In its first life it developed and sold ISDN boxes--it reached $1 MM in sales and discovered that it had achieved 100% market saturation. At that time, ASND reconfigured and added to this technology, which resulted in its second life--inverse multiplexers, which enabled customers to install video conferencing equipment using dial-up lines, avoiding the need to install expensive, separate dedicated lines. This is the company we took public at Morgan Stanley in 1994 at a market cap of about $200 MM. There was no mention of the word "internet" in our prospectus. As the internet ramped up, we thought that if we "added a modem bank here and a terminal server there", the result would be a product that all the ISPs would need to build out their service networks. By mid-1996, 2 years after the IPO, Ascend had become the fastest company in history to go from IPO to $10 billion in value. Gary Korn P.S. I think that ASND's 4th life was started with the acquisition of CSCC. Mory doubtless would add it at his next award ceremony.