Category Archives: IPO
Green Shoots for Small IPOs?
After killing off the small IPO with nefarious rules that are little recognized for their pernicious behavior, the Congress passed the JOBS Act with the hope of jump-starting the small IPO. While we await regulations from the SEC – and the early indications have not been promising – there seems to be some progress being […]
Square Rounds Out the Faceplant Storyline
A big concern in the VC community after the series of disasters beginning with the Facebook IPO fiasco was whether we had seen the end of the recent increase in IPOs and eagerness to pay $1B valuations in private companies. A key test of that worry has now been successfully passed: Square was able to […]
What Facebook Should Have Done
I would like to expand on my Five Lessons from the Facebook Fiasco IPO. Lesson 2 is there is a reason why IPOs have been done in a way which gets a 20% or so first day pop. It is not banker greed nor giving a free benefit to the institutional buyers (who can flip […]
Liquidity Cometh
Ari Levy and Lee Spears of Bloomberg Newsroom write clearly about the impact of the Facebook public offering, offering little in the way of condolences for those buying at $42 in the opening confusion. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-21/facebook-ipo-spawns-new-wave-social-media-angels-tech.html Instead, they rightly focus on how liquidity, locked up for years in quiet ponds (some bigger than others), is soon […]
Something Funky Happened at the Facebook IPO
Facebook: Fakebook, FailBook, FacePlant, pick your favorite euphemism for the epic fail tepid offering on Friday. It hasn’t failed, yet, although perception here seems to have become reality – no pop, fail. The first half an hour of trading was a mess, and some retail trades ordered right away didn’t get filled until after hours. […]
The Facebook IPO is No Netscape Moment, and Shows the Need for a Small IPO Market
The digerati are obsessively focused on the imminent filing of the Facebook IPO. The hope is that it becomes the next Netscape Moment. They also thought LinkedIn might be, but in our view, that IPO reflected a pent up demand for tech IPOs, not a seminal spark to a new boom. This chart shows that […]
TechCrunch Tokyo: Venture Revolution Keynote
Bullpen was asked to TechCrunch Tokyo 2011 both to keynote and to join a panel. This event was crowded – over 600 attendees, a combination of eager found entrepreneurs and senior management at leading Japanese companies like NTT, Sony, etc. Booths out front touted new ventures, and the sushi at the networking event was great! […]
The Promise of Secondary Markets
At our upcoming Venture Shift conference in NY, we will discuss the impact of secondary markets on venture finance. We ran a similar panel this summer at our SF event to a lot of interest. There is a tremendous promise to SharePost and SecondMarket and other secondary sales exchanges. They already are providing liquidity to investors […]
Timing the New Tech Boom: Is It 1997 Already?
The recent downturn in stocks has spooked some investors. Tech IPOs like Zynga are now threatened with delays, and the excitement surrounding the recent IPO window opening has given way to skittishness. It doesn’t help that the Groupon filing has been amended to remove some sketchy accounting constructs, to a chorus of catcalls. We should […]
Zynga is the Real Deal
Social IPO Season is picking up momentum. The first slew of IPOs have had issues, some of which we have discussed: Demand Media – sketchy accounting, dependency on Google Pandora – pays too much to music industry LinkedIn – lots of members, low engagement and revenue growth Groupon – losing boatloads to grow, sketchy accounting, […]
