For me, more than any other sign of how smooth the IPO transaction has become is the culture clash that didn't happen between high tech and high finance. It used to be that these scruffy-bearded, sandal-wearing engineers would ride in their VW vans up to San Francisco, where they would take the elevator up into the world of summer-worsted pinstripes and gel-slicked hair.

Now the engineers follow the stock market closely, and half of them hold puts and calls on tech indexes. Every third sentence out of an engineer's mouth these days uses the phrase "value proposition." The investment bankers rarely wear anything fancier than polo shirts over khakis, and they can talk for hours about developing object-oriented software on the Solaris 2.4 platform versus Windows NT 3.51. The subcultures are gone.

I walk into a conference room and I cannot tell which are the bankers, which are the lawyers, and which are the entrepreneurs. High tech and high finance haven't met halfway, it's more that they've both gone all the way. It's not a culture clash, it's a culture mash.