3c hapter - Index of

The Do- It- Yourself Public Offering 191
offerings. In part, it is driven by necessity, as traditional capital
sources have dried up for small companies. Investors, meanwhile,
are looking for investment alternatives that fall somewhere
between anemic savings accounts and an increasingly volatile stock
market, and that perhaps align with their values and interests.
Drew Field is a securities lawyer and DPO trailblazer who handled
many of the early direct offerings, including Real Goods and
Annie’s, and authored a book on DPOs. In his view, the “infectious
greed” of the 1990s derailed interest in such deals, and the
subsequent dot- com bust scared off many of the small investors
who would be inclined to invest in a direct offering. After that, he
says, “there never seemed to be the political will to connect individuals
with small investors, nor did individuals have the same
drive to invest in these fi rms.” Field, who is now retired, believes
that a shift in investor sentiment from a Wall Street mentality to
“a sense of community, ownership, and common objective,” such
as we seem to be experiencing in the aftermath of the latest fi nancial
calamity, could change that.
Social(ist) Networking
On an early autumn morning, at a low- key coffee shop in Manhattan’s
Nolita neighborhood, I sat down with Chris Michael,
an intense, dark- eyed young man who may just be the next DPO
pioneer. Michael tells me about his plan to open a worker- owned
diner in central Brooklyn, a gritty, underserved area that has not
shared in the prosperity of neighboring brownstone- lined enclaves.
The diner is just the fi rst step in a broader worker cooperative
empire Michael envisions.
Raised in a New Jersey suburb just over the George Washington
Bridge by left- leaning parents, Michael grew up with a keen awareness
of social injustice. He wryly tells of boyhood summers spent
at a Jewish socialist camp, where activities included singing antiwar
songs and role- playing as slaves on “Exodus Day.” But he has only
recently become passionate about political and economic systems.
His goal is to create a worker cooperative model that builds local
wealth and can be used by other communities.