Middle Market Deals and how to buy, sell and raise capital from $5 to $500 million

1. I'll plug your blog every day for a week after the game.
2. I'll buy you lunch at whatever place you choose in the State of Utah.
3. I'll post a video of myself singing the BYU fight song on my blog and on YouTube.

Note:  Paul Allen alerted us to the currency of this topic today, inspiring this post.

Dutch Auction:  A dutch auction is a long standing financial auction format, used for generations to price treasury auctions because it is such a fluid market.  Utah company Overstock.com was among the very first companies to go public using this method in 2002. 

Investment Bank W.R. Hambrecht has been the market champion for this style of public offering.

Basically, the offering works by soliciting from all interested investors, a price at which they would be willing to buy the offering.  These prices are then ranked in order to determine how low the bank has to go to sell all of the shares offered.

I recognize that I showed up late to the Web 2.0 party.  I launched my blog only about 32 days ago.  That said, without understanding all that has been going on, I like to think my wait was somewhat strategic (see my post about choosing to blog for the Know More Media network).

I just read on Mark Evans's blog that Six Apart, the company that produces the Movable Type software that I'm using to post this blog, just raised $12 million at a pre-money valuation of $80 million. (See Tim Stay's post.)

Whether or not that it is a fair valuation, it marks a real maturing of the Web 2.0 economy.  The new Internet is changing radically and changing the way we do business.

Recently, I was on a conference call with a group of venture capitalists reviewing deals as candidates for a venture conference.  We discussed a deal being pitched by a fellow known in Utah as "Paul Allen the Lesser" to distinguish him from Microsoft's Paul Allen.  (In his home town of Utah County, once home to both Novell and WordPerfect, he is simply Paul Allen.)

Some of the VC's on the call hadn't heard of this Paul Allen before.  One who knew him, however, commented that Paul was as smart an entrepreneur as there is and if Paul was launching another project, he wanted to learn more about it.

May I suggest simply that for entrepreneurs, that's the goal.  Create a reputation that causes smart people with money to say "if he's in the deal, I want to know more."

Maybe we can convince Paul to tell us how one gets to that point!