Part V: Taking Start-ups to the Public

“As the bubble approached,” John Stanton, Chief Executive Officer of a telecom company told us, “there were guys going around Wall Street with freshly printed business cards and business plans for companies they'd just created. Wall Street was raising debt and equity for them at better terms than for companies with existing cash flow, such as my own. For five years, firms didn't have to demonstrate financial capability to Wall Street to raise money. A lot of these not yet ready firms were being funded as early as 1996, and they were time bombs waiting to go off.”