And you may know that we eventually grew a business and pulled off a little IPO. OK, it wasn't so little. With Bob's tender assistance we attracted more than $200 million from large VCs, Paul Allen, Cisco, Microsoft, and the NASDAQ, peaking at a $3.5 billion market cap.

I was invited to share the HSAC story with my cronies at Venture Connectors the other day. (Thank you, Kevin Eigelbach, for the Business First recap.) Most of the Venture Connector folks know that a Midwestern tech IPO like ours would be just about impossible in today's tightfisted funding game. But back in the late go-go 90s nothing seemed impossible and plenty of things that probably were truly impossible got funded anyway.

While I'd like to believe that good science and MBAs with impeccable business plans lead to good public company formation, the ugly truth taken from the dot.com bubble is that commerce is a chip for the craps tables of the capital markets where a very clubby crew controls access. In my own 1999 post-disco world, that gang included a bellicose Lehman investment banker (who dropped F-bombs at the beginning and end of virtually every sentence) and a Seattle cool-smoothy who wore $1000 sweaters while fronting for a celebrated multi-billionaire.

At Venture Connectors I described how the bubble burst and fortunes were lost when young companies like ours, driven by Wall Street to spend fast and furious to lock in "doors passed", and which looked good for investment analysts, were abruptly abandoned by the bankers controlling the cashbox. HSAC's stock fell in stride with our peer group, though we eventually sold the company to Charter Communications, which happily still maintains several hundred tech jobs in the Ville.

The dot.com business models like ours were not the flawed villain of the carnage that followed ¬- that title belonged to those fickle financiers who indiscriminately pulled the funding plug on hundreds of public and private tech companies that were successfully executing their plans exactly as agreed. The public never turned away from tech; in fact, most residences get their high speed internet through their cable, just like we sold it and the rest of the internet is thriving as forecast.

The dot.com and internet bubble burst because the boys and girls who trade money for a living played out far too many hands in pursuit of fees, pulled their own money off the table, and then left investors to pick up their gambling debts. Do you really think they missed a meal? Not surprisingly, you can trace the bursts in the biotech and real estate bubbles to the same uncommitted fleet-footed speculators.

But before we give up all hope, a sea change awaits. This new year brings with it Equity Crowdfunding (ECF), which promises to disintermediate and democratize public fundraising, leaving Wall Street in the dust - at least so far as small business is concerned. In the brave new self-policing world of ECF, where financing fees are less than what a Wall Streeter spends on dinner wine, the initial public offering, the IPO, will rise again.

No it won't happen overnight, and sure there will be issues, but ECF swings open the door to direct public involvement in company formation and growth. Initially the funding caps will be low ($1M/yr), but as the grand experiment matures, expect the limits to rise and participation of everyone from the hourly worker to the one-percenter to swell.

Personally, I'm happy to see it. Start-ups and growing ventures need a new way to secure capital without vacillating moneychangers controlling all the cards. And I'm especially interested in making sure that Louisville entrepreneurs and investors of all types get a prime seat at this funding game table. At OPM we're learning all we can about ECF and have begun convening involvement from local business and government leaders. Stay tuned.