us the information; we’ll take care of it.” And we told them discreetly, “If anything
gets screwed up, we take the bullet. We’re here to help you.”
Then we just kept adding functionality and functionality. And the government
helped us too. We had three big breaks with the SEC.
The first was in the early ’90s when the SEC put out a comfort letter saying
alternatives to the printed quarterly report should be considered, including
800-based telephone numbers. That’s essentially like the SEC jumping up and
saying, “Go, go, go!” That’s about as aggressive as they get. We had asked for a
comfort letter because some of the clients were saying, “We don’t even know
what the SEC says about this.” And the SEC said, “We won’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’
but we think it’s an interesting idea.”
Regulation FD came along in 2000. It had pros and cons, but, for us, it
opened things up tremendously. And then, of course, Sarbanes-Oxley came out
a few years ago. All of those things basically said that it’s much more important
to communicate with shareholders uniformly and democratically. Because,
believe me, even when I was at Alliant, and in the early ’90s, it was very
exclusionary—who could attend conference calls, for example.
Ron Gruner 435
Mark Coker, the founder of BestCalls, played a very important part in
breaking that whole thing open. Back before Regulation FD, conference calls
were by invitation only, for institutional investors. Unless you had a significant
share in a company or were a recognized security analyst, you did not get an
invitation to participate in a conference call.
Regulation FD changed all that. Basically it said, if you’ve got material
information as a public company, you’ve got to get that out to everybody,
including the individual investor that might have a hundred shares. So that
opened up the conference calls. And because it wasn’t possible to have a conference
call with 10,000 people on it, webcasting (fortunately that technology
was becoming available) made that possible. At the same time that some people
may be talking on the telephone, that conversation was being webcast live to
anybody that wanted to listen to it. So that was a major market that opened up
to us.
Livingston: Did you know any of this was going to happen?
Gruner: No, of course not. In the early ’90s, I just felt that there was an opportunity
to somehow use technology to find a way to better reach out to shareholders
and save money for companies. That was the basic concept. Just like
10 years before that, when I started Alliant, I said, “There’s this whole new

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