Montgomery Securities and Hambrecht & Quist, both from San Francisco, seemed so anxious to do business with us that I never even contacted Robertson Stevens, the last firm, which was also from the Bay area.

H&Q invited us to their investment conference at the Pierre Hotel. Their analysts and bankers came to visit us and told us they were enthused. Dan Case, the chairman (and brother of AOL’s Chairman Steve Case), took time out from his conference to meet with us at a conference room at the Pierre. They gave us a H&Q briefcase and coffee cups. Things certainly looked good here. We felt important.

I didn’t drink from their coffee cup, though. Nor did I drink from any of the dozens of other coffee cups various firms had given me. To me, coffee is something personal. If you drink from a cup with someone’s name on it, it’s like you’re married. This isn’t something to be taken lightly. You better be sure.

Sure, Case had seen us, but he hadn’t come out to our office. He hadn’t invited us to dinner. And the analyst—well, he liked us, but he didn’t seem to know much about us. He hadn’t really asked the hard questions. He’d only spent a couple of hours with us and just said he was satisfied. This wasn’t necessarily real love; it might just be infatuation. Like a nervous suitor reading meaning into every action, looking for any innuendo, we wanted reassurance that we were wanted before we committed ourselves.

As time went on, it started to look better and better. More guys from Montgomery came. They started calling Cowen to lobby them. They just tried harder than H&Q. I was ready to choose Montgomery, but one thing was bothering me. Tom Weisel, the legendary founder and chairman of Montgomery Securities, still hadn’t asked me to lunch. I needed more reassurance; I needed to be fed. Then came the invitation. A catered lunch in our honor with the entire senior executive corps of Montgomery at their offices atop the Transamerica building in San Franciso. That settled it. Montgomery would be our second underwriter. It was now time to get down to the real work of preparing for a public offering.

Due diligence went smoothly enough. There were some questions about our database’s ability to keep up with our swelling customer base, but this was solved by hiring the chief database guy from a big Fortune 500 firm. Under the watchful eye of Maria and Skadden Arps, things were going like clockwork. And then weird stuff began to happen.

First, Cowen came to me and said that they were working on another deal taking Vocal Tec public. Vocal Tec was like us, a pioneer in the field of Internet telephony. Their products, however, were designed to connect two people already on the Internet with each other. You just paid for the Vocal Tec software and the call was free. Our system connected someone on the Internet to someone on a real phone. The software was free, but you’d have to pay us for the call. We didn’t see any conflict. Neither did Cowen. Vocal Tec did, though. Cowen either had to drop their lead deal with us or lose their secondary position on a much higher profile Vocal Tec deal to Lehman Brothers.