Goldman Sachs expects to find riches in Seattle

Goldman Sachs Group plans to open a Seattle office by the first quarter of next year to capitalize on the private wealth and investment-banking business from the Northwest's technology boom.

Jim Milligan, a managing director in the firm's San Francisco office, said Goldman expects to staff the office with about 20 money managers initially, to be followed by municipal- and corporate-finance staff in a few years. The firm, which has two money-management employees in temporary quarters, is looking to lease about 30,000 square feet of office space, probably downtown, Milligan said.

"Seattle is a very important technology belt," taking precedence over other technology centers such as Austin, Texas, and Denver, where Goldman is considering opening offices, said Milligan.

The move to Seattle is part of a West Coast expansion by the fifth-biggest U.S. securities firm, which is transferring analysts to its Silicon Valley office in Menlo Park, Calif., in anticipation of more share sales by Internet companies.

Seattle would be the 16th U.S. office for New York-based Goldman, the No. 1 underwriter of stock sales in 1999.

Seattle is a growing market for financial services, thanks to the thousands of millionaires and dozens of start-ups spawned by Microsoft and other companies.

Goldman already has strong ties to the area, having arranged the 1986 initial public offering (IPO) of Microsoft and the 1997 IPO of RealNetworks. The Port of Seattle also is a Goldman client.

During the past six months, Goldman handled the $470 million IPO of Kirkland-based mobile-telephone-service provider Nextel Partners and the $110 million IPO of Seattle start-up Cobalt Networks.

In coming months, Goldman will help arrange stock sales for Mercata, the Bellevue provider of online services to help buyers obtain group discounts on products and services; Rivals.com, a Seattle network of sports Web sites; and 360networks, a Vancouver, B.C., company that's building a fiber-optic network to handle telephone and Internet traffic.

360networks plans to raise as much as $828 million in its IPO. The company's chief executive is Greg Maffei, the former chief financial officer of Microsoft and current chairman of Expedia, the online travel-booking company spun off by Microsoft last year. Goldman co-led Expedia's IPO.