To: Leroyt who wrote (2 ) 11/21/1998 7:34:00 AM From: WEBNATURAL Respond to of 86
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.