William R. Hambrecht (with Sally)
March 5, 2001 William Hambrecht was one of the first investment bankers to seize upon the Silicon Valley boom back when it was little more than a distant rumble. In the early 1980s, his firm, Hambrecht & Quist, helped take Apple Computer and Adobe Systems public. In the 1990s, it backed the public offerings of Netscape, MP3.com, and Amazon.com. Chase Manhattan bought Hambrecht & Quist in 1999 for $1.35 billion, but by then Hambrecht had already left to start W. R. Hambrecht and Company, another high-tech investment bank. There he has continued to back dot-coms like Salon, Winetasting, Salesforce, and Asiacontent. He has also served as a liaison between the high-tech industry and the Democratic Party, playing a prominent role in a White House Conference on the New Economy last spring. At the meeting, he predicted that the average price of automobiles would drop at least $3,000 in the next few years, thanks largely to online auctions. Hambrecht has also invested in the trend towards turning public schools over to for-profit companies. According to Business Week, he has invested at least $6 million in Beacon Education Management, which operates 24 charter and district schools in five states. During the campaign, Al Gore pledged to triple the number of charter schools nationwide. -- Michael Scherer | | |
