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Skip Navigation LinksHome :: Back Issues :: John St John

May 2000

John St John


Chief executive, EO




John St John does not yet look a typical internet entrepreneur. The day we met he was in a sober grey suit and looked more like the successful investment banker he recently was. His excuse was that he has just been on UK digital TV network The Money Channel, plugging EO, a portal that will enable retail investors to buy new issues and private placements in early-stage companies online (the initials stand for "electronic offering").
When we visit EO's soon-to-be-kitted-out office just north of Piccadilly Circus, my sense of dot com propriety is soon restored. The other 15 or so start-up employees, including chairman Michael Whittaker, are all wearing jeans, and during our conversation they spend much of their time trying out a mini scooter (a device designed among other things for speeding busy executives to airport terminals). The scooter, St John explains as we go downstairs, is made by a client of EO's parent company New Media Spark, an incubator for technology start-ups.
It was a former banking friend, Jacob Kinder, (one of the partners of New Media Spark some months earlier) who first told St John about the job at EO. St John remembers thinking: "Do you think I'm crazy? Why would I want to leave one of the big global investment banks to come and work for something that doesn't exist?" At the time St John was co-head of global equity capital markets at Lehman Brothers, and had seen a tenfold increase in revenues in a little over a year.
"But then the more I got into it," he recalls, "the more I realized that the world is changing very quickly in this area, and that there are very big opportunities with the changing technology. New-issue distribution is something I've been doing for the past 10 years, and
it seemed a great challenge to basically redesign the way in which new issues of equity operates."
John St John was born in 1963 in Shipston-on-Stour, Gloucestershire, the son of an army officer. After a peripatetic childhood (his parents moved 24 times in their first 21 years of marriage) he went to Eton, where he rowed for the eight, then University College London to read philosophy.
He thought about joining the army but with three elder brothers already in the City he soon decided that merchant banking - where "you didn't need to take any exams and you got paid the best" - would be more rewarding. His first job was at Baring Brothers, doing corporate finance ("everything from privatization pitches and bond issues to overseas advisory work").
In 1988, he moved to Kleinwort Benson and by the early 1990s he was concentrating on debt structuring and tax-based work, helping to design new types of bond finance for such companies as Pubco and Trustco. He became involved in pitching Kleinwort's expertise in international equity offerings to other companies overseas, and in 1993 oversaw one of the first book-built offerings in continental Europe for Finnish paper company Metsa Serla. This was followed by a string of IPOs and privatizations across Europe.
St John was appointed to the board of directors of Kleinwort Benson Europe in 1995, but left the following year for a new job as head of the equity capital markets at Salomon Smith Barney. After increasing his team's head count from three to 28, and helping to multiply revenues tenfold (the firm rose from number 22 to 10 in the league tables), he moved again at the start of 1999 to another team-building job at Lehman Brothers.
St John is of course not alone among bankers who have been lured over the fence to the world of the web. Over the next year or so, he expects to hire "several hundred" more, who will be paid, like him, a combination of salary and equity (his own salary he says is the same as it was at Lehman Brothers).
In attracting bright talent, St John may hope to benefit from the mild sense of frustration that he detects in banking. "Investment banks have slightly outgrown their culture," he says. "They were born as partnerships and premised on a culture whereby individuals could make as much money as they could if they were entrepreneurs in a very successful entity. But at the size they are now, it's increasingly difficult for them to continue to generate the reward structure or interest or sense of joint ownership. The promotion structure now means you have to go through a very long haul working your way up a corporate ladder. One of the great attractions of the internet environment is that it is so much more entrepreneurial. There is a sense in which a lot of the territory is uncharted. So for people who are a little bit more adventurous and want to establish new models of doing things, it offers very interesting challenges."
Potential recruits may also be persuaded by St John's optimism about the new venture. EO, he argues, possesses a "massive competitive advantage" through its link to Globalnet Financial.com (another company in the same group), Europe's largest financial services portal with 30 million page views a month. "There is no single retail financial services institution with a pan-European customer base. But as soon as we go online, we can deliver an issuer distribution right across the continent," he says. St John portrays EO as a partner rather than a competitor for investment banks, brokers, new issuers and investors: "We're more like a stock market than an investment bank."






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