Wall Street's investment banking titans don't like being told what to do. Not by federal or state regulators. Certainly not by two barely thirtysomething Silicon Valley nerds.
So it was perhaps miraculous that Google Inc.'s unorthodox initial public stock offering last week ever got off the ground -- let alone that the shares ended the week at $108.31, up 27% from the $85 offering price.
It's early to declare winners and losers in this unusual chapter of American capital raising, but one winner does seem clear: the marketplace itself. It went its own way, defying Google's expectations as well as those of people who wished the company ill.
Investors who are long-term bullish on technology stocks also might be able to declare a victory, of sorts. Google proved that people still can become very engaged when the topic is a major tech company's relative investment merits. When's the last time a non-tech company stirred these kinds of emotions?
Designed from the start to buck convention -- most important, by inviting all investors to bid for the shares, instead of allowing Wall Street bankers to parcel them out to their best (read: richest) clients -- Google's IPO was asking for trouble.
It got it too, first in a wave of bad publicity over management missteps leading up to the sale. You don't, for example, give an interview to Playboy magazine that could run just ahead of your IPO date. You're supposed to be very careful about what you say publicly in the pre-IPO period, lest investors misconstrue your words, or even get them right.
But there were Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in the latest issue of Playboy, just days before the IPO was to come to market. At the Securities and Exchange Commission, eyebrows must have been arched, and not because of Miss September.
Google's phenomenal success since its founding in 1998 has been based in large part on its ability to think, and do, differently. That's how it approached the Internet search function, and that's how it says it runs its business in general. Their corporate motto, as much of the planet by now knows, is: "Don't be evil."
Wall Street, by contrast, is a place of tradition and convention, especially when it comes to protecting its fees for banking services, and when it comes to keeping its best (read: richest) clients happy.
By the time the Google bidding process opened Aug. 13, many of the 28 brokerages that had agreed to take orders from investors were wondering what they had gotten themselves into.
