3c hapter - Index of

The Do- It- Yourself Public Offering 187
to build a new plant and expand their distribution, setting the
stage for a $5.8 million national IPO the following year.
In the DPO prospectus, amid the boilerplate risk discussion,
the straight- talking founders insisted on adding a line, in plain
English and all caps: “If you can’t afford to lose it, don’t do it.” As
Cohen and Greenfi eld recount in their book, Ben & Jerry’s Double
Dip: How to Run a Values- Led Business and Make Money, Too: “It’s
one thing to fail and lose the capital of a bunch of investors we’d
never met. It’s anther thing to lose our neighbor’s hard- earned
$126. So the public offering gave us an extra incentive to do well
fi nancially, to make sure our neighbors’ investment in us was to
their advantage as well as ours.”
Safe to say they succeeded.
A Brewing Revolution
No one currently tracks direct public offerings, but as a benchmark,
358 companies raised $454.8 million through DPOs in
1996. 3 Still, DPOs are hardly mainstream. Most investors, entrepreneurs,
and even lawyers know little about them, if they’ve
heard of them at all. But why would they? After a spurt of popularity
in the latter decades of the 20th century, direct public offerings
have fallen off the radar.
What is holding this potentially valuable capital- raising solution
back?
If the Small Business Investment Act cleared the way for
a wave of direct offerings, the widespread adoption of the Internet
in mid-1990s was poised to crack the market wide open. Suddenly,
it was much easier and less costly to market shares and distribute
invest ment information.
One of the fi rst people to grasp this fact was a corporate
lawyer- turned- microbrewer named Andrew Klein. On a trip to
Amsterdam in the early 1990s, Klein became enamored with
a traditional Belgian- style wheat beer, or witbier, and decided to
try his hand at brewing his own back in New York. In 1993, the
Spring Street Brewing Company was born. Microbrewing was in
its infancy in the United States, and Klein’s Wit beer developed