There was actually a really interesting experiment at the tail end of the dotcom boom -- the WR+Hambrecht (San Francisco) "OpenIPO". Essentially it was a dutch

There was actually a really interesting experiment at the tail end of the dotcom boom -- the WR+Hambrecht (San Francisco) "OpenIPO". Essentially it was a dutch auction (I think) for IPO shares, and open to the public. Google was the big success. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIPO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIPO VA Linux did some interesting stuff with their IPO (so did RedHat, I think), where community members got access above what the public received, too.