If the biker theme and screaming Sugar Ray fans at last week’s Roth Capital Partners stock conference weren’t enough of a hint, unrestrained excitement over quirky, unproven startups was a clearer indication that in today’s tech economy, even stodgy old Wall Street can loosen its tie once in awhile.
Last Monday’s rains did little to dampen the enthusiasm of the conference’s150-or-so presenters, who showed off their business plans at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel in hopes of piquing investor curiosity.
The event drew attention from the popular stock research web site TheStreet.com, which called the event “spectacular” and remarked on how much things have changed since small- and micro-cap conferences drew mostly “crummy stocks and fallen angels.”
“It was like being at a rock concert,” said Amy Schofield, vice president of marketing for OhGolly.com Inc., a Huntington Beach company that participated. “This thing was a who’s who of the investment community.”
Schofield, who worked for several Silicon Valley companies before moving to Balboa Island last year, said the event had all the buzz of similar Silicon Valley events, before the Bay Area became too exclusive.
One of the biggest trends she noticed at the conference was the focus on the fast-growing business-to-business segment, which is expected to tower over the more familiar Amazon.coms and Yahoo!s of the business-to-consumer market.
According to Forrester Communications, business-to-business e-commerce will grow to $2.7 trillion by 2004, compared with $184 billion for business-to-consumer retail.
Part of the conference buzz, no doubt, can be attributed to the mix of companies.
For the first time, the 12-year-old conference invited private companies to participate, a move designed to woo investors looking to get in on the ground floor of a future tech luminary.
Indeed, the days of automatically dismissing “penny stocks” and new market entrants appears to be ancient history as investors scramble to find the next undiscovered dot-com or budding biotech star.
“Investors are looking way below the radar screen,” said Byron Roth, chief executive of Roth Capital Partners, which hosted the event. “In this market, anything can be a winner.”
As expected, participants saw a rebirth in interest for biotech stocks, which have been all but ignored over the past few years as Internet companies monopolized investor awareness.
“Last year, we literally were asking people to sit in on the presentations because the poor biotech guys had nobody to talk to,” Roth said. “This year, it was more like the Studio 54 effect,investors were lined up outside the door.”
Though most of the biotech participants traveled from San Diego, Roth said there probably will be some spillover into Orange County if the sector takes off.
And the Internet sector, an Orange County strength, shows few signs of slowing, with a variety of network equipment makers, dot-coms and wireless telecom companies,expected to be the next wave of data communications,participating.
“We’ve never had a higher percentage of Orange County companies participating since I’ve been here,” Roth said. n
