Goldman Banker With Year’s Top Tech Quarry

Anthony J. Noto, a former Army Ranger and pro-football executive, may seem an odd fit among the cerebral recluses and flashy moneymen of the tech world.

Yet Mr. Noto, a 45-year-old Goldman Sachs tech banker, has proved himself a keen observer and trusted banker of Web pioneers. Now Mr. Noto and Goldman have won the most coveted tech banking assignment this year in leading the initial public offering of Twitter.

It is a sweet victory given that its archrival in tech I.P.O.’s, Morgan Stanley, has led the market debuts in Facebook, LinkedIn and Kayak, among others.

The problems with the Facebook offering last year â€" first-day trading troubles and an early slide in the stock price â€" took some of the luster off Morgan Stanley, and its star tech banker, Michael Grimes, possibly to Goldman’s benefit. (Morgan Stanley, however, has been the lead underwriter on eight of the 10 biggest tech I.P.O.’s since Facebook.)

Still, there are contrasts between Mr. Noto and Mr. Grimes, a charismatic gadget lover who lives in Silicon Valley, while Mr. Noto has chosen to remain in New York and avoid much of the Silicon Valley scene.

Mr. Noto forged a number of relationships during the first Internet boom, when he was an analyst with Goldman. One was with ChannelAdvisor, an e-commerce company based in North Carolina.

A decade later, Mr. Noto returned to North Carolina as a Goldman banker to help take the company public â€" an assignment that was won with his first pitch.

“He’s kind of like the Don Draper of I.P.O.’s,” Scot Wingo, the chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, said about Mr. Noto. “Part of a good I.P.O. pitch is confidence, and succinctness, and when he says those words there’s a certain amount of gravitas. As a nerdy computer guy, I respect that.”

A football fan from an early age, Mr. Noto was starting as quarterback for the high school team while he was still in middle school. He chose to attend West Point not because he wanted to join the military, but because he longed to be a leader. Nonetheless, he went on to serve as a member of the elite Rangers.

Upon leaving the Army, he worked as a brand manager for Kraft Foods, then received a master’s of business degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. After a brief turn at Lehman Brothers, Mr. Noto joined Goldman in 1999.

As a young analyst, he wrote glowing reports about some of the biggest flops of the Internet bubble, including Webvan and eToys. Investors who took his advice lost small fortunes. After some of those misses, colleagues within Goldman took to calling him Anthony “No-Dough.” CNBC, meanwhile, called him Anthony “Don’t Know.”

But Mr. Noto persevered, continuing to recommend tech stocks even after Silicon Valley had been humbled. His judgment improved, and he was named the best Internet analyst by Institutional Investor magazine for several years in a row.

“I honestly think I’m the kind of person that is driven by fear of failure rather than striving for success,” Mr. Noto told Wharton magazine in 2009. “I tend to go to bed scared and wake up terrified.”

By 2004 Mr. Noto had made partner at Goldman, a rapid ascent, especially given his early misses. He left to become chief financial officer of the National Football League, returning to Goldman to help lead the bank’s tech and media group just before a potential league lockout.

It was an audacious move, and some questioned whether he would be able to fit in with a technology industry that had come a long way since the dot-com bubble. Mr. Noto, a standout linebacker in college, does not possess the sort of big personality that might have made him a natural fit among the outsize egos of Silicon Valley’s traditional bankers.

“I know more about his family than the kind of car he drives,” Mr. Wingo of ChannelAdvisor said. “He’s not a flashy guy.”

But over the last three years, Mr. Noto’s understated approach has begun to pay off. Goldman’s share of the technology I.P.O. market, erratic in the years after the crisis, has been more consistent of late. This year, the firm has led the successful public offerings of a number of tech companies, including Marketo, Tableau Software and Silver Spring Networks, placing it atop the league tables for the year to date.

Now Mr. Noto faces his biggest test yet. In managing the Twitter offering, he will be bringing a ubiquitous but financially unproved social network to the public markets. In doing so, Mr. Noto and his team at Goldman must account for valuation expectations, the cash needs of Twitter and investor appetite for shares.

When Twitter began preparing to go public early this year, it interviewed a number of banks. Twitter’s chief executive, Dick Costolo, and its chief financial officer, Ali Rowghani, developed a strong rapport with Mr. Noto. Like Mr. Noto, the senior Twitter executives are operational types who prefer to fly under the radar. Helping matters further was the fact that Mr. Noto and Mr. Rowghani are both big fans of the Dallas Cowboys.

By April, Twitter had selected Goldman as lead underwriter, guaranteeing it a hefty fee and a large allocation of shares. Rounding out Twitter’s syndicate are Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. Two boutiques, Allen & Company and Code Advisors, are providing Twitter with advice.

Also working in Goldman’s favor was the perception, inside Twitter, that the bank understood the company. Goldman features a Twitter widget on the company intranet, uses the service on its trading platform, and even advertises with Twitter.

Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference this year, Mr. Noto emphasized the importance of an investment bank’s role in helping a company draft its S-1 document, which Twitter filed late on Thursday. “You’re really solidifying, for the entire investment community, the foundation of how to think about the company,” he said.

Mr. Noto and his Goldman colleagues declined to comment. But others who know Mr. Noto say he is well suited for the job.

“I’ve known Anthony since 1997 and have always greatly respected him,” Spencer Rascoff, the chief executive of real estate Web site Zillow, said in an e-mail. “He is a trusted adviser to leading technology executives because he is a humble whip-smart straight-shooter.”

Since returning to technology after his time at the N.F.L., Mr. Noto has enmeshed himself in new technology. He is a regular user of Twitter, sending out public messages about football, venture capital and Internet companies.

On Quora, the question and answer Web site, he asked, “Is there a mismatch between private and public valuations for Internet companies?”