They don't wear suits and ties. They established a nine-hole golf course -- Pipeline Pines, par 20 -- weaving among their cubicles and down their office halls. They work long hours on an Internet-based product that is not yet on the market.
And within a year or two, they may be millionaires.They are the approximately 35 officers and employees of Campus Pipeline Inc. in Salt Lake City. Their dream is to provide a product that improves higher education for the world's students and teachers. In the process, investors who appear ever more desperate and greedy for Internet stocks could make these mostly 30-something men wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.
The numbers don't lie. The list of the ten biggest first-day gains by U.S. initial public offerings in the stock market is dominated by companies with ".com" in their names. For example, theglobe.com rose 606 percent on its first day of trading last Nov. 13. MarketWatch.com jumped 474 percent right off the bat on Jan. 15. And as recently as Jan. 29, Internet company Tut Systems had a first-day gain of 219 percent.
These facts do not escape Campus Pipeline officials Jeffrey Jones, co-founder and vice president of sales and marketing; Chad Muir, chief development officer and general counsel; and William Borghetti, co-founder and chief technology officer.
"We're all very young, very aggressive, and we really love this," Borghetti said. "We have a high moral cause in improving education, and we're attracting world-class talent. . . .
"We're aware of what (an initial public offering) could mean to us for net worth. But what keeps me coming to work is the challenge."
That challenge began in 1997. Borghetti and Jones worked in the same building and started formulating an idea for a product that could work with a college's existing computers to provide everything from class registration to e-mail to grade posting via the Internet.
They found start-up money, left their jobs and incorporated Campus Pipeline in July 1998.
Like a pipeline that carries liquids or gases, Muir said, Campus Pipeline is designed to carry a stream of personalized information directly to the user.
Borghetti said many colleges and universities already have e-mail systems and Web pages, but they cannot bring everything together. With Campus Pipeline, a student can log in once and have access to e-mail, check news reports tailored to his interests, buy a book, scan movie listings and register for a course.
And because it works with a school's existing system, Borghetti said, it will provide better access at a low cost.
Muir said colleges will have the option of either paying a large licensing fee to Campus Pipeline to use the system or paying a much smaller fee and letting the system pay for itself through the use of sponsors.
Jones said the latter proposal will be on a public television model. For example, Jones said, the school's e-mail site could show a message that says, "E-mail brought to you by Amazon.com," or some other sponsoring company.
Muir said it is the company's "noble purpose" to bring revolutionary technology to colleges at an affordable price.
But because the higher education market is tough to crack, Campus Pipeline needed a little help, he said. The company found that assistance when it formed a strategic relationship with Pennsylvania-based SCT Corp., which provides software to about 1,200 colleges worldwide.
SCT's initial investment of $2.5 million gives it a 20 percent equity interest in Campus Pipeline, according to an SCT press release. The relationship also includes a marketing agreement.
Borghetti said SCT has contacts with universities, knows how to market to schools and already has established technical support.
"We wanted the 800-pound gorilla that could help us thump the competition," Jones said.
He said eight schools already have signed up for the initial release of Campus Pipeline's software in April. More than 20 more want to be "early adopters" when the product has its broad commercial release in June.
With all of its contract requests, Jones said, Campus Pipeline already has more than 350,000 people ready to use its product, and it has not even started national marketing campaigns.
Muir said those numbers could grow to 100 schools and 750,000 users within a year of the product's release.
Those user numbers are what might translate into dollar signs for Campus Pipeline.
Borghetti said the company will be an attractive investment because it can gain new users in groups of 10,000 to 50,000, while other companies have to add people one at a time.
Muir said Campus Pipeline also will score high in the "stickiness factor," which measures how often users visit a Web site and how long they stay.
"We will be the honey of the Internet," he said.
Muir said the loyal user of a current Internet service logs in about four times per month.
"For Campus Pipeline, we are convinced, given the must-use features of the pipeline, they will log in four times per week," he said.
Those are the kinds of numbers that will attract both sponsors and investors, Muir said.
He said he already has talked to some underwriters about taking the company public, and they are excited about its prospects. Although he will not predict a date for Campus Pipeline's IPO, Muir said he thinks the company can be ready "sooner instead of later."
"It's tough to have the discipline to wait longer before going public when you know you can," Muir said. "But we're going to maximize our value, because everybody associated with the company has equity (in it)."
"We could make a lot of millionaires," Borghetti said.
Ken Hansen, senior vice president of D.A. Davidson & Co. in Salt Lake City, agreed that is possible. In his 40 years working with stocks, he said, he has never seen anything like the flurry of activity that surrounds Internet initial public offerings.
"It's just flabbergasting to me to see these prices and how they are totally unrelated to the fundamentals that we've been trained to look for in investments," Hansen said. "It's just all the story, and not the earnings."
David Nelson, an investment executive for Dain Rauscher in Salt Lake City, said Internet stocks shoot through the roof because people want to buy their potential.
"What is so interesting about our economy is that we are kind of leaving the industrial age, and we are going to a service-based economy," Nelson said. "The Internet plays into that, so the potential is almost unlimited. The problem is trying to pick the few companies that will survive. Who is the General Electric of the Internet world?"
Therein lies the danger of Internet IPOs, Hansen said. What happens to the people who buy an Internet stock at its high point, only to discover later that they did not find the new GE?
"If they've got good fundamentals, if they've got a breakthrough and a good innovation, (the stock) deserves to go, and it will go, and they'll make money," he said. "But there are so many coming along that are just trying to jump in. . . . I can promise you that there are going to be a lot of people that are going to get their heads handed to them. It's going to be painful, and they're going to get hurt."
Both Hansen and Nelson said it is impossible to know what the future holds for Internet stocks, but they think the hot market for Internet IPOs will continue for a while.
With that in mind, the leaders of Campus Pipeline are bracing for their ride on the market express.
"We are warriors on a mission," Muir said, "and that means there are equal parts fear and excitement."