Good input. As a college student as well, I wouldn't expect any of my peers to attend something like this for free either.

I believe the key to this, however, lies in a good business model that pays the students for their time and input. Many students are strapped on time, but I'd be willing to wager even more are strapped on cash.

Ultimately, my concern at the moment is not whether students would be interested, but whether startups would be interested. What do you think?

Money and college students always mix well, but it doesn't apply to events like this, which classify as thinly veiled marketing, however informative they may end up being.

Even if you pay ppl $15 to sit for an hour, it won't be worth it to you or the startups involved. Why? Because 70% of that audience would be people who would've come out of interest even if you paid them nothing. The other 30% would be ppl in it solely for the money, texting friends or on Facebook.

I trust you've seen the attention span of students during a lecture - the ratio of interested to distracted is even worse. Money doesn't necessarily trump other factors like basic interest level.

Great points! This is the type of feedback I was looking for.

Looks cool, I'll add it to the list

Has anyone ever purchased stocks early on for a startup that went IPO? Is this a wise thing to do?

"Has anyone ever purchased stocks early on for a startup that went IPO? Is this a wise thing to do?"

There is a lot of academic research on this that you should look at.

Links and elaborate?

I don't know of anything offhand, I just know that it's been extensively studied. One of the terms you might want to search for is "first day pop." If you read through a few of those papers then you should be able to find most of the other important metrics as well.

For a company like LinkedIn with relatively weak fundamentals, one would expect the executives to purposely underprice the stock in order to generate a big first day pop because they are looking for an exit. So if I had money to invest, I'd probably buy at the opening bell and sell at noon. But don't take that as investment advice.

The "first day pop" is largely unavailable to the average person. You're right that underwriters price the IPO for this phenomenon, but it is to entice their clients to buy. The pop is from outsiders (you) buying from insiders.

If you're not dealing in big money, you won't be buying from the underwriter at the IPO price, you'll be buying at the higher price (if you put in a market order), or not at all (if you put in a limit order near the offering price).

That's not to say that investing in an IPO is a bad long-run decision.

You can still buy as soon as the market opens though, as long as you're fine paying a few bucks over the insider price.

> one would expect the executives to purposely underprice the stock in order to generate a big first day pop because they are looking for an exit.

The executives typically are locked not being able to sell on the first day of trading. It also looks bad if they do sell.

It's the investment bankers that want to see a stock shoot up on the first day of trading. It's their clients who are the most likely to hold the stock for an hour and then sell it.

Enabling them to become a better and more effective business. It has to do with better connecting them with their customers.

do you feel that you need time to work out the kinks for a large customer or are you ready to deploy? I think if you have kinks use the first 10B business as a chance to iron out your product to make getting the next (100) 10B businesses easier.

I thought it was because the more par value you put on your stocks, the more its going to cost you during incorporation.

FYI: My company has 10,000,000 stocks valued at .01 a share, it cost $94 total [Delaware C-corp].