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Headline: Robert Lessin: CEO, Wit Soundview Source: Euromoney Date: July 2000 Author:Antony Currie Running a company is hectic at the best of times, but the last two months have been especially hectic for Bob Lessin. So much so, in fact, that the only time he has available for an interview is while he gets his hair cut at a barber’s shop around the corner from his office in New York’s Silicon Alley the area around Union Square. He has his luggage with him as he is about to leave for the airport, and he has a photographer walking around with him to get snaps for a book he is writing. Since April Bob Lessin has overseen the introduction of Vostock, the firm’s electronic platform for issuing secondary offerings making Wit the first e-underwriter to enter this space; has negotiated the acquisition of west-coast rival E*Offering; and at the same time struck up a partnership with E*Offering’s parent, E*Trade, making it the sole distributor of Wit’s IPO and secondary offering output. And to cap it off, Lessin has just been made sole CEO of the group. His former co-CEO, Ron Readmond, retired soon after the E*Offering/E*Trade deal was struck. He had come out of retirement in 1998 to lend, in conjunction with Lessin, some heavyweight presence to an ambitious yet at the time miniscule business. He only intended to stay for a year. As for Lessin, at just 45 he has no intention of retiring just yet. Having made his name at Morgan Stanley he became vice-chairman at Smith Barney, leaving in 1997 to set up his own internet fund. But less than a year later he took a call from Andy Klein, Wit Capital’s founder, and accepted his offer of running the company: a company with an unusual heritage. Its forerunner was the Spring Street Brewing Company, a microbrewery in downtown Manhattan that Klein owned a piece of. In 1995, Klein decided to try and raise money for the brewery online, succeeded, and then wondered if making a secondary market for the stock online would be feasible. So Wit Capital was born. But only since Lessin and Readmond arrived has the business really taken off. High-profile names don’t always succeed in bringing in business, but these two have transformed the company beyond recognition.They have helped to attract the talent necessary to be taken seriously, such as head of internet research Jonathan Cohen and Europe CEO Edward Annunziato. Early last year the two negotiated an investment from Goldman Sachs, which now stands at about 15%, and took the company public. But Wit still lacked scale. It had less than 100,000 accounts, a negligible west-coast presence for a tech-focused bank, and the distribution deal it had with 22 brokers was not easy to manage. “Just getting the plumbing sorted so that they were all properly connected was a big challenge,” says Readmond. The E*Trade alliance sorts out the latter problems, and the acquisition of Connecticut-based boutique Soundview Technology at the end of last year doubled its research capability. In June the company was officially renamed Wit Soundview Group. With most of the pieces of the puzzle added including setting up in Japan and Europe Lessin’s challenge is to make it all work. He feels that the market environment is just right. “So many deals have been pulled as a result of the crash in tech stocks,” he says. “Sales forces at the big banks are saying no to deals. But we have some of the best relationships and research on the street. If we could open up the IPO market, that’d be really something. “My instinct is that we can. We’re bi-lingual,” he says, meaning that he thinks Wit is a blend of the old and the new economies. “But we have to tread very carefully.” |
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