getAbstract Summary: Get the key points from this book in less than 10 minutes.

Drew Field wrote this book in 1997 to encourage entrepreneurs to bypass Wall Street and float their shares directly to individual investors. In hindsight, we can see that almost everything that Field predicted in the book was wrong, but it is precisely due to the enormity of his mistakes that this book is relevant now. Field's premise was that brokers were ignoring equity issuance and individual investors in favor of big-ticket, M&A-style transactions and institutional deals like securitizations. This shift had created an imbalance in which struggling entrepreneurs were cut off from the capital that they needed to get their businesses off the ground. Of course, what happed in reality was exactly the opposite: A boom in venture capital and the stratospheric rise of the IPO market created an equity bubble of epic proportions, and many start-ups that should never have made it past the garage door raised hundreds of millions of dollars. All of this brings us to the present day, when an IPO backlash has dashed the funding hopes of many public wannabes. To the founders of these companies, getAbstract asks: Direct Public Offering, anyone?

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