Ryan Jacob: Hey buddy, can you spare 10 bucks?

Not everyone could start a mutual fund with little cash on hand and a couple of underemployed friends and an uncle as board members. But then, not everyone is riding the Internet wave the way that Ryan Jacob is.

Mr. Jacob, the wunderkind who rang up triple-digit returns and a flood of new money running the Internet fund for Kinetics Asset Management, has finally launched his own web fund after waiting months for clearance from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The 30-year-old Mr. Jacob is offering investors a two-week subscription period to get into the fund. Shares can be bought through some of the major discount supermarkets and directly from the company through this Friday for a $10 net asset value. Mr. Jacob will start buying securities a week later.

Though subscription periods are not unheard of, they are not common either. Only a handful of companies have used them, with one of the most successful being Hambrecht & Quist’s IPO and Emerging Company Fund this fall. Most funds are offered using seed money from a parent company so that managers can buy securities right off the bat. Other funds invest the money as they go along.

Most often order periods have been used with funds that have already created a buzz to generate even more hype. But Mr. Jacob insists he had investors’ interests in mind.

“When we filed the initial prospectus, there were a lot of people who were interested in getting into the fund from day one,” he says.

Other observers see it differently. While Mr. Jacob was wrangling with the SEC over mentioning his record with Kinetics in the prospectus — a battle he won — Jacob Asset Management wasn’t raising any cash. That gave him no money to put to work.

“Because this is an incredibly new environment, it’s hard for investment advisers to say `Here’s $10 million,’ ” says Diane Finnerty, a financial adviser with Ventur Capital Management in Locust Valley, N.Y. , whose firm oversees $100 million — a good portion in technology funds.

Mr. Jacob wouldn’t comment about how much money has come into the fund so far, but he calls the $100,000 that he needs to operate “insignificant.”

Ms. Finnerty says that after researching the fund, she’s taking a pass during the subscription period. This week she bought another Internet offering, the Potomac Internet Fund, which aims to beat the Dow Jones Internet index.

From a manager’s point of view, a subscription period can help a young fund get off the ground.

“It’s just easier to commence operations knowing how much money you have,” says Scott Cooley, an analyst with Morningstar Inc.

For example, that was Acorn Funds’ reasoning when it launched two offerings in October 1998, says Alissa Worley, marketing director of the Chicago firm. Acorn Twenty raised $32 million and Acorn Foreign Forty $15 million in 30 days.

“We did it in response to shareholder requests,” Ms. Worley says.

Mr. Jacob for his part, insists that he instituted the subscription period in deference to potential shareholders. Subscription periods are most popular among funds with either star managers who rely on their names or popular investment ideas.

Ralph Wanger, a well-known stock picker at Acorn Funds, certainly benefited from using the order period.

Hambrecht & Quist knew that its initial public offering fund would pique investor interest. It has since announced that the fund will close at the end of December.

“I’ve gotten more than 30 e-mails about this fund,” Morningstar’s Mr. Cooley says of Jacob Internet Fund. “He’s not going to have any trouble raising money.”

Still, Mr. Jacob isn’t sitting pretty, outsiders note. In a further sign that his fund company isn’t flush with cash, Mr. Jacob is paying his fund’s four directors — among them his uncle, Leonard, chief executive of a pharmaceutical company — $4,000, a far cry from the small fortunes some fund companies pay board members.

“We’re a start-up fund,” Ryan Jacob says. “Our board fees are in the range of other small funds’.”