Thursday, May 7, 1998

CobWeb Goes Public
by Jon Gold ([email protected])

It was a wild day of trading on Nasdaq today, when Internet startup, CobWeb Inc. issued an IPO. The stock opened at $13 and quickly quintupled to $65 per share before closing down slightly at $63. "This exceeds all expectations," said the President and CEO, Roger Rogerson. "I mean, we don't even have a product yet. All we have is a name and a vague idea about doing something with the Internet." Trading under the symbol CASHIN, CobWeb is valued at nearly $300 million. Not bad for a company formed by three recent college dropouts and the former vice president of a Sillycon Valley computer company.

Starting with nothing but a dream, the three computer majors, Ray Smoot, Jason Snarlitz, and Dylan Freemont, found a willing mentor in Rogerson. Rogerson got them organized enough to put together a proposal that landed them $2 million in venture capital from Kleiner-Perkins. They immediately took their $2 million to the underwriters and started the involved process of going public.

"This is our dream," said Snarlitz, "We took nothing -- thin air and some paperwork -- and turned it into a company worth $300 million bucks. We've really accomplished something here. All those liberals who complain about the evils of capitalism and how hard it is make it in this country ought to shut their yaps and pull up their bootstraps like we did."

"It's nice to know that hard work is still valued in this land of ours," added Smoot. "This is very exciting."

"It's cool," said Freemont, "We're already working on our first product announcement!"

Rogerson offered these final words at their press conference: "The Internet is a great place for startups and we're proud to be able to make our contribution to this wonderful new medium -- even if we don't know yet what it is that we'll be contributing."

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