BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : SEPTEMBER 27, 1999 ISSUE
COVER STORY -- E.BIZ -- THE E.BIZ 25 Lawton W. Fitt LAWTON W. FITT GOLDMAN, SACHS & CO. Position: Managing director Contribution: Has quarterbacked dozens of Internet IPOs, including those of Yahoo! and eBay. Ambition:To find the magic price point that satisfies ipo stock issuers and investors equally. Chief executives tend to get the credit when startups go public and the stock blasts through the ozone layer. But they owe a huge debt to those who work behind the scenes on Wall Street. Nobody deserves more accolades than Lawton W. Fitt, managing director of Goldman, Sachs & Co. (GS), who quarterbacks more tech IPOs than anybody else. This year alone, she has greased the skids for more than 22 tech IPOs, including E-Toys (ETYS) and Juniper Networks (JNPR), raising more than $2.7 billion. That made Goldman the tech-IPO champ. Silicon Valley execs say Fitt keeps a lid on IPO prices, and Fitt, 46, agrees that pricing is her most difficult task. ''My job is to find the point of balance between the issuers and investors where everybody feels the price is fair,'' Fitt says. ''I want them to be equally happy or equally unhappy.'' Right now, in spite of a high-tech IPO slowdown, there are a lot of happy capitalists and not many complaints. Fitt expects the action to pick up again soon--though not with the speculative fury of early this year. ''This is not a bubble,'' she says. ''Five years from now, there won't be Internet companies because everybody will be doing business over the Internet.'' So much the better for Goldman Sachs. By Steve Hamm _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					RELATED ITEMS The e.biz 25: Masters of the Web Universe COVER IMAGE: The e.biz 25 Commentary: The Great Equalizer? Not by a Long Shot TABLE: Who's Lagging in the Net Age [empire builders] Jeffrey P. Bezos AMAZON.COM INC. Stephen M. Case AMERICA ONLINE INC. Timothy A. Koogle YAHOO! INC. [the innovators] Louis H. Borders WEBVAN GROUP INC. Jay S. Walker PRICELINE.COM Margaret C. Whitman EBAY INC. Glen Meakem FREE MARKETS ONLINE INC. James H. Clark MYCFO INC. Christos M. Cotsakos E*TRADE GROUP INC. [bankrollers] Masayoshi Son SOFTBANK CORP., JAPAN Robert C. Kagle BENCHMARK CAPITAL Lawton W. Fitt GOLDMAN SACHS & CO. L. John Doerr KLEINER PERKINS CAUFIELD & BYERS   Bernard Arnault LVMH MOET HENNESSY LOUIS VUITTON   [the visionaries] Mary G. Meeker MORGAN STANLEY DEAN WITTER John Hagel III MCKINSEY & CO. William Joy SUN MICROSYSTEMS [the architects] Louis V. Gerstner Jr. IBM CORP. Pehong Chen BROADVISION INC. David C. Peterschmidt INKTOMI INC. Kevin J. O'Connor DOUBLECLICK Ellen M. Hancock EXODUS COMMUNICATIONS [the pace setters] David S. Pottruck CHARLES SCHWAB CORP. John T. Chambers CISCO SYSTEMS Michael S. Dell DELL COMPUTER INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

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