And then they say, “Well, we think $18 is a good price.”Īnd he says, “Well, hold on a second, if you sell my shares of Apple to your best clients for $18, aren't they going to be super happy when they can turn around the very next day and sell them for $24 or $26 or $28?” And in that moment, Steve Jobs, who's obviously a brilliant designer and a brilliant business mind around hardware technology, saw right through one of Wall Street's systems in a way that a lot of people weren't doing. And they tell me that they think I could price it for $20 to $24 or even $26.Īnd the Morgan Stanley investment bankers are sort of quiet. And Steve Jobs listens, and then he says, 'But hold on, I've been talking to people, too. The Morgan Stanley bankers proceed to tell Steve Jobs how they are planning to price Apple stock, that they've talked to lots of investors, and they think they can price it around $18. I mean, Steve Jobs is sitting in a building in San Francisco's Financial District, meeting with bankers at both Morgan Stanley, who are the big investment bank at the time handling tech IPOs, and with Hambrecht & Quist, a much smaller sort of boutique investment bank. I talked to people involved with some of the biggest IPOs of the last 100 years or so, including Ford Motor Company and Apple Computer, and Steve Jobs seemed to have seen right through the conflict of interest that has sort of come to represent the IPO market for a lot of people. I soon learned that the IPO market has a rich history, and things hadn't always been done this way. On the back of some coverage I did for Insider, I got interested in going down the rabbit hole of how that particular deal fell apart and how the IPO market worked, but I came to learn that the entire system had been built up in a way that didn't necessarily advantage startups and technology entrepreneurs. In the last few years, around 20, the WeWork IPO going off the rails really made me think there was a lot going on under the surface that I didn't quite understand.

Spotify plans to go public