Category Archives: IPO
The Groupon Rorschach Test
Valley People poured over the Groupon IPO filing like the NYT over Palin emails, looking for clues. They saw what they wanted to see. It ranged from “Ponzi Scheme!” and “Swindle!” to the ironically witless “no, it’s like Amazon and other dot-coms.” They meant to justify Groupon because Amazon ran years of losses before become […]
Is LinkedIn the “Netscape Moment”?
A quick scan of commentary on LinkedIn shows mostly “it’s 1999 again” posts with comparisons to the pets.com of that era. It is as if they see any first-day pop as bubblicious and forget that Netscape had a similar pop well before the dot-com bubble brewed. The LinkedIn IPO looks awfully similar to Netscape, and if […]
The Barbell Strategy Shakes Things Up
I mentioned in a recent post the “barbell” strategy of Andreeson Horowitz, which has been followed by some other venture firms, notably including Kleiner Perkins. The barbell strategy is to invest early like a super-angel, and to jump in late like an accelerator fund in pre-IPO deals like Facebook. This week the WSJ celebrated the […]
Incredible Revenue Growth Means It Is Not “1999″ Yet
Last time, the dot-com boom was driven by a frenzy over gaining eyeballs. Valuations went through the roof well before revenues. This time the hot companies are growing real revenues remarkably fast. The WSJ noted how much faster the leaders like Groupon and Zynga have raced towards $1B in revenues, much faster than in prior […]
1995 All Over Again
1995 was one of my favorite years. Silicon Valley had been in a funk for over a decade, with a fading memory of the last tech bubble, the PC IPO craze that flamed out in 1983 but launched some really great companies. The peace dividend from the fall of the Berlin Wall had impacted engineers […]
The Social IPO Lineup
Here at Bullpen we always look to see who is on deck. After Demand Media, the lineup for Social IPOs includes LinkedIn, Pandora, Zynga, Groupon and eventually Facebook. Next up to bat is LinkedIn, which is now trading at a $3B valuation. Yes, trading, even though it is not yet public. Markets fill gaps, and a […]
Social IPO Hunting Season
The new wave of tech is the Social Mobile Web, and its leading companies are lining up to go public. We haven’t seen such a lineup since 1995, when Netscape went out and rang the bell on the dot-com mania. Further back, this happened in 1980 when Apple went out (in an overall poor market […]
