(FORTUNE Magazine) – Hey, have you noticed that Goldman Sachs' infotech IPO group has been kicking some serious rump lately? Seems like every time you turn around, they hit another home run. Now, this goes back to the mid-1990s (doesn't that make you feel old?) with Uunet and Yahoo, but recently Goldman has really been cooking. Last fall it was eBay (in the middle of the financial meltdown, when the IPO market completely seized up). They also did Inktomi, DoubleClick, and RealNetworks. And don't forget Red Hat. On deck is Webvan, which could be the next deep drive.

And yet Team Goldman is a much lower-profile operation than comparable groups at other firms. Over at Morgan Stanley you have that leading light Mary Meeker. And at CSFB (for now!), the dealmeister himself, Frank Quattrone. Goldman may not have rock stars, but they sure get the job done.

So as Butch Cassidy asked Sundance (or was it the other way around?), Who are those guys? Well, first off, they aren't all guys! One of the key players is Lawton Fitt, the managing director in charge of the actual IPO process. She is a Bostonian by birth, a Brown grad with an MBA from U.Va. Lawton, if you're wondering, is a family name. (Hey, it's a Boston thing.) Her resume? After a stint in the Peace Corps, it's been all Goldman, all the time. "I'm a Goldman lifer. I've been here for 20 years," says Fitt, who just came back from a rare vacation--sailing off Sardinia. "It wasn't that long ago that we did five deals a year," she says, sitting in her New York office, which is cluttered with Lucite e-tombstones. "Now we're doing five a month." (Guess Mary Meeker's not the only Internet goddess.) Joining me is another member of Team Goldman, Michael Parekh, the firm's Internet analyst. In the new world order of Wall Street, where analysis is less important than salesmanship and knowledge of an industry, an IPO business is only as good as a firm's equity analyst. Any conflict there? Not at all, say the Goldman bankers. They only do deals on which all of them sign off, and if a company doesn't deliver post-IPO, Parekh is free to downgrade it. (As I said, a new world order!) True, Parekh isn't as familiar to the CNBC crowd as Merrill's Henry Blodget, but from Goldman's perspective that might not be a bad thing. "I started covering the Internet in 1993," says Parekh. "And everyone thought he was out of his mind," chuckles the third member of the team, banker Brad Koenig, who's on speakerphone from Menlo Park.

Of course Goldman's fiercest competition in tech IPOs (now about 80% Internets), as in many other businesses, is Morgan Stanley. The Goldman office in Menlo is in the same complex as MSDW. And the Goldman bankers are quick to point out that their counterparts at Morgan Stanley have suffered from turnover lately, while the three Goldmanites have each been with the firm for at least 15 years.

Competitive barbs aside, Goldman really does have something to crow about. Through August '99, Fitt, Koenig, and Parekh had done 30 IPOs (vs. 19 for Morgan Stanley and 14 for Merrill), with deals for Webvan, NetZero, and PlanetRx in registration. Is that too many? "Whatever happens to valuations doesn't change the fact that the Internet story is intact," says Parekh. "It's simply a matter of where the lump is in the python." (Okey-dokey!)

Well, let's just put it this way: As long as there's demand for Internet shares, there will be companies demanding the ultimate seal of approval, a Goldman Sachs IPO.