Back Blogging

Over the past several weeks, I have not blogged much as a result of my discussions with Instinet Inc. (The corporate parent of Instinet brokerage companies). Now that Instinet has issued a press release announcing their entrance into the management access market with the roll out of Meet the Street LLC I want to tell the world what a great deal this is.

As many of you know, I have been developing a unique web-based management access platform designed to place the planning and meeting allocation power directly in the hands of the IRO. I have shared demonstrations of the application with many IROs and I have received great feedback and generated a fair amount of excitement within the market.

The development of the platform has been both challenging and fun. However the platform's success depends heavily on the depth of the investor pool that signs on to use it. A deeper pool of investors will help attract more issuers to the platform by strengthening Meet the Street's ability to book full roadshows.

Instinet represented the perfect partner for Meet the Street. Its brokerage subsidiaries trade with approximately 1,400 institutional investment firms in the United States and have a strong global reach with eight international offices. Instinet has a 40 year+ track record of utilizing technology to help bring efficiencies to the institutional investment process, while promoting neutrality and anonymity which matches up nicely with Meet the Street's business plan.

With the deal comes some changes. I have been given the title of Co-President and I will be sharing leadership responsibilities with my Co-President Mike Dolan. Mike and I have know each other for about three or four years now and he is a great guy and very capable executive.

Over the past few weeks Instinet has begun cross introducing the Meet the Street platform to its client base and the concept has met with strong enthusiasm among professional investors. We are going to continue to promote the adoption of the platform over the next several weeks and once a critical investor adoption threshold has been realized, we will open the network to issuers so that they can begin booking their own non-deal roadshows over the platform.

I am very excited about Meet the Street's next stage of growth and I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you along the way.