You Can Own This Man
Looking for that next great penny stock that will boost portfolio to the stratosphere?
Look no further than Mike Merrill.
As told by Abraham Hyatt in the November issue of Oregon Business, Merrill works at Panic, a Portland-based software company that produces software for Macintosh. But soon, he will put out an IPO offering 100,000 shares at $1 a piece for a piece of himself: Mike Merrill.
What’s the point? Besides working at Panic, Merrill is one of the founders of Urban Honking, a blog community of writers, visual artists, and musicians he founded along with Steve Schroeder and Jona Bechtolt in 2001. After a slow start, the blog craze kicked in Urban Honking took off.
But what Merrill is perhaps best known for is the web “reality show,” Ultimate Blogger, where bloggers take on a variety of different topics and challenges and battle it out for fabulous prizes. This competition has attracted attention from the likes of CNET and The Guardian.
Merrill sees his IPO as an opportunity to fund projects such as Ulitmate Blogger. The vehicle he created for monitoring his stock, kmikeym.com, went online this summer for a test run, and shares closed up $.04.
A sign of things to come? There won’t be SEC filings or tax forms with Mike Merrill: just a group of people who will buy stock based on their belief in him and what he’s doing. The stockholders will have a say in which projects Merrill chooses to take on. If you want to cash out, you need to find a person who will put a monetary value on how well they believe Merrill is doing with his projects. At least, I think that’s how it works.
Merrill admits in the Oregon Business article what he’s doing is “bringing business principles to an art-style project.” It will be interesting to see how it works out. But you gotta hand it to the guy.
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