Chapter 4, the conclusion of Furboy: Inside the greatest Silicon Valley startup (9-12 months).

Our Story to Now:I had persuaded Silicon Valley that Furboy was the next computing platform. Now I had to convince Wall Street that he was not a toy, he only looked like one. (Click variously for Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 of my saga.)

Furboys were in such great demand that eBay went down every time a new Furboy was posted. The growing pains were enormous, and the public markets were begging for our listing. No room for error here, everything must be cautiously strategized. Too bad I had no time to think of everything.

We were done upgrading the installed base of Furby/Game Boy hybrids. It was time to move on to Version 3.0 and manufacture new Furboys ourselves from scratch. We licensed the entire Guangdong province in China for production and paid a modest licensing fee to both Hasbro and Nintendo, despite my legal beagles at Wilson Sonsini telling me I could do it without paying any fees. In a strange twist, Gary Reback of WS was hired by unnamed companies to call for congressional hearings into our future potential monopoly. This guy moves fast. But we move faster. It's funny, Nintendo is a company that has specialized in playing cards for over 100 years, and I tried to explain to their president, Mr. Yamauchi, that I hold all the good cards, and he holds a few worthless ones, but that I could bring new life to his drab franchise.

Legal fees were Furboy.com's single largest expense. I needed more capital and the only prudent move, of course, was to go public. Bankers were calling, but at first, they just didn't get it, not the size and scale and magnitude of this thing. But they got it quickly enough, because they are paid to get it or pretend to get it. I suggested that we would have 100 million Furboys in circulation quite soon, so they began to trip over themselves suggesting various ways to get to multi-hundred-million- and billion-dollar valuations.

My math was simpler: At $1,000 per user (cable is valued at $4,000 per subscriber) times 100 million forward users, the value is $100 billion.

The IPO would raise money, but it would also allow me to go out and buy things I needed, like the Guangdong province (if only it was publicly traded). But seriously, I would fold in Hasbro and Nintendo and I was thinking of perhaps DreamWorks as well, to do the animated film and milk all the ancillary rights. I got some of these ideas from Steve Jobs, who used to get it, but he kept going on and on about his desire for imported Italian marble for the new Pixar headquarters and the emptiness of the brick they ended up with, weird for a guy who supposedly gets everything.

So the parade of bankers began. They have a different manual than the VCs, but they all read out of the same book. Prestige, analyst coverage, aftermarket support, global M & A, tech conferences, the hot IPOs they could get me shares of, the list drooled on. My thought was, the first guy to look me in the eye and say they wanted my business because if I made a lot of money, they would make a lot of money. Call it like it is.

No one did, but the parade began, and each firm tried to differentiate any way they could. Frank Quattrone bought everyone at First Boston a Furboy, but he low-balled me on valuation, apparently the first time he has ever done that. Just the thought of all these Furboys jabbering away on traders' desks made me chuckle. Morgan Stanley sent the Queen Mary. She offered to write a book on Internet Furboys. Goldman Sachs passed because they thought Microsoft would be offended. Bill Hambrecht offered an open IPO, but he couldn't guarantee $1,000 on the open. (I set Furby.com up with 25 million shares, of which 20 percent or less would be sold to the public.)

I was strongly considering backing into a shell. A few day-trader friends offered advice on how to get this thing to go from $10 to $1,000 almost overnight, therefore guaranteeing me an interview on CNBC's Squawk Box, where I could then launch the company. I think Haines, Kernan, and Faber will all eventually be replaced by Furboys!

I wanted the stock at $1,000 for a few reasons. First, it would make me the first Internet company with a $1,000 stock (kiss my Graham and Dodd, Warren Buffet, why should you be the only one with a high stock?). Second, I could keep announcing stock splits every time I wanted the stock to go up.