Direct Public Offerings

In this summary you will learn

• How the growing power of electronic stock exchanges makes DPOs more accessible
• What nine factors make a company suitable for a DPO
• What questions you should ask yourself if you are thinking of going public

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Why you should read Direct Public Offerings

Drew Field wrote this book in 1997 to encourage entrepreneurs to bypass Wall Street and float their shares directly to individual investors. In hindsight, we can see that almost everything that Field predicted in the book was wrong, but it is precisely due to the enormity of his mistakes that this book is relevant now. Field’s premise was that brokers were ignoring equity issuance and individual investors in favor of big-ticket, M&A-style transactions and institutional deals like securitizations. This shift had created an imbalance in which struggling entrepreneurs were cut off from the capital that they needed to get their businesses off the ground. Of course, what happed in reality was exactly the opposite: A boom in venture capital and the stratospheric rise of the IPO market created an equity bubble of epic proportions, and many start-ups that should never have made it past the garage door raised hundreds of millions of dollars. All of this brings us to the present day, when an IPO backlash has dashed the funding hopes of many public wannabes. To the founders of these companies, getAbstract asks: Direct Public Offering, anyone?

About the Author

Drew Field,  a securities lawyer and CPA, has provided direct share marketing advisory services since 1976. His articles have appeared in more than ten banking journals in the U.S. and in Management Review, Business Horizon and San Francisco Business Times. He has been published or cited in in Inc., U.S. News and World Report, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Chronicle