Hambrecht & Quist was an investment bank based in San Francisco, California

San Francisco, California

San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

 noted for its focus on the technology and internet sectors. H&Q was founded by William Hambrecht

William Hambrecht

Bill Hambrecht is an American investment banker and chairman of W.R. Hambrecht + Co. which he founded in 1998. He helped persuade Google to use an Internet-based auction for their initial public offering in 2004, instead of a more traditional method using banks and other financial companies to...

 and George Quist in California, 1968.

H&Q was an early player in the technology sector, underwriting IPOs for Apple Computer

Apple Computer

Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...

, Genentech

Genentech

Genentech Inc., or Genetic Engineering Technology, Inc., is a biotechnology corporation, founded in 1976 by venture capitalist Robert A. Swanson and biochemist Dr. Herbert Boyer. Trailing the founding of Cetus by five years, it was an important step in the evolution of the biotechnology industry...

, and Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...

 in the 1980s. In the 1990s, H&Q also backed the IPOs of Netscape

Netscape

Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...

, MP3.com

MP3.com

MP3.com is a web site operated by CNET Networks providing information about digital music and artists, songs, services, community, and technologies. It is probably better known for its original incarnation, as a legal, free music-sharing service, popular with independent musicians for promoting...

, and Amazon.com

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

.

Competition in the investment banking industry in the late 1990s limited H&Q's ability to grow as an independent firm, and in 1999 Hambrecht & Quist was acquired for $1.35B by Chase Manhattan Bank

Chase Manhattan Bank

JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., doing business as Chase, is a national bank that constitutes the consumer and commercial banking subsidiary of financial services firm JPMorgan Chase. The bank was known as Chase Manhattan Bank until it merged with J.P. Morgan & Co. in 2000...

. H&Q was originally to be renamed "Chase Securities West" but ultimately was renamed "Chase H&Q" after marketing research revealed the H&Q brand name was still valuable. This unit eventually lost the H&Q name and is currently part of JPMorgan Chase. The H&Q name lives on in the closed-end healthcare funds managed by Hambrecht & Quist Capital Management in Boston.

After leaving H&Q, founder Bill Hambrecht popularized the "OpenIPO

OpenIPO

OpenIPO is an innovative auction process pioneered by the investment bank WR Hambrecht + Co for distributing stock in an initial public offering to individuals and institutions through an efficient and equitable process. It is a modified Dutch auction process which allows shares of an initial...

" model, in which Dutch auction

Dutch auction

A Dutch auction is a type of auction where the auctioneer begins with a high asking price which is lowered until some participant is willing to accept the auctioneer's price, or a predetermined reserve price is reached. The winning participant pays the last announced price...

s allowed anyone, not just investing insiders, to buy stock in an IPO, potentially raising more money for startups. Among the companies that adopted this model were Overstock.com

Overstock.com

Overstock.com , also known by its shortcut, O.co, is an online retailer headquartered in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, near Salt Lake City. Founded in 1997 by Robert Brazell, under the name D2: Discounts Direct, it was a pioneering online seller of surplus merchandise which, upon its failure in 1999,...

, Ravenswood Winery, and Salon Media Group 

See also

• WR Hambrecht + Co
  WR Hambrecht + Co
  WR Hambrecht + Co. is a full service investment bank with headquarters in San Francisco and offices in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Tokyo. It specializes in using its unique auction process called OpenIPO to compete with the traditional methods of larger and more established banks. Recently,...
  
  , an investment bank founded by William Hambrecht
  William Hambrecht
  Bill Hambrecht is an American investment banker and chairman of W.R. Hambrecht + Co. which he founded in 1998. He helped persuade Google to use an Internet-based auction for their initial public offering in 2004, instead of a more traditional method using banks and other financial companies to...
  
   after acquisition of H&Q
• H&Q Asia Pacific
  H&Q Asia Pacific
  H&Q Asia Pacific is an Asian private equity firm founded in 1986 by Ta-lin Hsu as a branch of the investment bank Hambrecht & Quist. It is one of the oldest and most established private equity firms in the Asia-Pacific region. The firm has managed an aggregate of over $2.1 billion in committed...
  
  , a private equity firm focused on Asian markets