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The Interviews - Part 9 - Vc's and Investment Bankers

8/9/2018

 
This is the ninth in a series of 11 videos produced by the Smeal College of Business at The Pennsylvania State University. This one focuses on the IPO run-up.

March 2000 - Fortune

2/21/2015

 
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Burning Up: Warning: Internet Companies Are Running Out of Cash—Fast
When will the Internet Bubble burst? For scores of Net upstarts, that unpleasant popping sound is likely to be heard before the end of this year. Starved for cash, many of these companies will try to raise fresh funds by issuing more stock or bonds. But a lot of them won’t succeed. As a result, they will be forced to sell out to stronger rivals or go out of business altogether . . .

Barron’s, March 20, 2000
Neoforma.com Chief Bridges Old and New Economies
Robert Zollars is not your stereotypical Silicon Valley chief executive. Before taking over the top three posts at Neoforma.com . . . he spent nearly 20 years working his way up the corporate ladder of the healthcare products industry . . . After less than a year at the helm of Neoforma.com, he took the company public. It now boasts a hefty $3.3 billion market capitalization . . .

Forbes Magazine, March 28, 2000
Neoforma.com to Acquire Eclipsys
Neoforma.com Inc., operator of an online medical marketplace, agreed to acquire Eclipsys Corp., a healthcare software and services provider, and a related company for stock totaling $2.72 billion.

Associated Press, March 30, 2000
Over dinner one evening, I glanced up from my plate, assumed an air of casualness, and said to Anni, “We made twenty million dollars today.”

I just had to say it, once...

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February 2000 - Fame

2/19/2015

 
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What the Heck is Healtheon?
Jim Clark set out to build an Internet start-up that would revolutionize healthcare . . . Clark, never one to admit mistakes easily, concedes his vision was perhaps “a bit” too big and the industry more resistant to change than he had imagined . . .

Fortune, February 21, 2000
I was lost in the place between external validation and internal detachment. Between elation and dread...

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January 2000 - The Premier - Part 3

2/18/2015

 
More bumps to drive our paranoia ahead of the IPO...

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January 2000 - The Premiere - Part 2

2/17/2015

 

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January 2000 - The Premiere - Part 1

2/16/2015

 
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IPO
Market close on day of Neoforma IPO at NASDAQ headquarters on New York’s Times Square. From left: Chris Bing, Wayne McVicker, Fred Ruegsegger, Bob Zollars, Jeff Kleck, Kali Coffman & Amanda Mogin. Photo: Alan Perlman
Neoforma.com IPO Takes Off
While many stocks were sold off on Monday, the initial public offering of Neoforma.com (NASDAQ: NEOF) performed like a typical high-flying, shot-from-a-cannon, business-to-business IPO . . .

E-Commerce Times, January 25, 2000
I was sitting in my office, futilely trying to focus on the business unit plan I was editing, when Stephen—who had a tendency to boast about the important, successful people he knew—walked into my office, sat down in a chair, leaned forward and said, “Hey! I just realized that, in a few weeks, you’ll be the richest person I have ever known!”

What an odd thing to hear someone say!...

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December 1999 - Starving Artist

2/13/2015

 
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Top Five Deals in October - Neoforma.com $70.5 million
. . . One of those business-to-business ventures only its customers ever hear about, Neoforma.com is an online marketplace for medical supplies. What’s a real business doing on this list? . . .

Fortune Magazine, December 1999
Tenet, Columbia start Internet ventures
. . . Eager not to miss the dotcom train, Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. and Tenet Healthcare Corp., the nation’s two largest for-profit hospital companies, separately launched e-commerce procurement companies last week . . .

Modern Healthcare, December 20-27, 1999
Reality was increasingly out of sync.

In spite of many setbacks in getting the IPO documents filed, our advisors still felt that there was a chance we could host our public offering sometime in early December. 

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November 1999 - Compatriots

2/12/2015

 
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VerticalNet and Neoforma.com Announce Exclusive Multi-year E-commerce Agreement
VerticalNet, Inc. the Internet’s premier portfolio of business-to-business vertical trading communities and First Mover in the space, today announced a strategic alliance with Neoforma.com, Inc., a leading provider of B2B e-commerce services in the market for medical products, supplies and equipment . . .

Neoforma Press Release, November 22, 1999
I hadn’t exactly expected to metaphorically run toward each other in slow motion, arms outstretched, through a field of flowers on a sunny day. I just thought that we had been watching each other fondly from afar for so long that something slightly magical might happen between us when we first met...

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September 1999 - The Ramp - Part 3

2/11/2015

 
More fun pre-IPO drama...

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September 1999 - The Ramp - Part 2

2/10/2015

 
More about the absolutely crazy pre-IPO frenzy. Things get rather nasty...

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September 1999 - The Ramp - Part 1

2/9/2015

 
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. . . Of the two start-ups [Neoforma and Medibuy], Neoforma has the more technically sophisticated website . . . Neoforma seems to have better technology and stronger managers than its rival . . .

Forbes Magazine, September 1999
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Money brought everything to the surface.

Everything had been set up. The pieces were falling into place. The press was talking about us. Investors were buzzing about us. Wall Street was in a frenzy of excitement. Money was breeding money, and its offspring were fertile at birth...

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July 1999 - The Cast - Part 2

2/5/2015

 
The last big position we had to fill was someone to lead our engineering organization...

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June 1999 - The Star - Part 3

2/3/2015

 
Here's the rest of The Star. Things get a bit surreal and intense...

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April 1996 - The Prequel

11/20/2014

 
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Neoforma opens corporate offices in Mountain View, California.

April 1, 1996
Yahoo IPO closes at $33 after $43 peak
Yahoo’s much-anticipated entry to Wall Street began with a bang this morning at $24.50 per share and hit a high of $43 before closing at $33. Yahoo opened at about 8:45 a.m. PDT and shot up to $43 an hour later, which equals $1 billion for the company . . .Yahoo has been the talk on Wall Street and Silicon Valley since it filed for the offering last month, the most closely watched high-tech IPO since Netscape Communications made market history in December . . .

CNET News.com
April 12, 1996
There was no master plan. A series of chance encounters planted the seed that was to become Neoforma.

Neoforma’s first offices were located just a few blocks from my house in Mountain View, California, a suburban town near Stanford University and just south of the halfway point between San Francisco and San Jose. 

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March 1996 - Inking It

11/18/2014

 
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Neoforma incorporated.

March 6, 1996
It was an inauspicious start.

Neoforma’s official beginning can be traced to a day more than three years earlier than our IPO filing. At the time, I would never have predicted the scale and intensity of the course we were about to take...

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    About Me

    I am an architect, writer, and serial entrepreneur. 

    I'm also a dichromatic tritan, which means I'm one of between 150 and 1,500 people in the US with this rather extreme form of colorblindness. I write about how colorblindness has profoundly affected my life's path on my other blog: dichromat.com

    My surreal journey as co-founder of Neoforma (formally NASDAQ: NEOF, later acquired by GHX) is the basis for Starting Something, a multiple award-winning book, used in many biz school entrepreneurship classes:

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