IPOs
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The Internet is a Public Markets Sector Anew | Jon Steinberg
[This post originally appeared on peHub] The past 10 years have been an increasingly difficult time to be an “Internet Analyst” on Wall Street. I worked on the Sell Side in independent hedge fund research from 2004 – 2007, first doing data acquisition deals and research sales at Majestic Research and then sales at DeMatteo Monness , a broker dealer and expert network. By the end of my time on Wall Street, there were only a few large public, pure-play internet companies: Amazon, eBay, Google, and Yahoo. Four names does not make for an active coverage universe for a buy-side analyst. In fact, by 2007, most hedge funds had merged their media teams with their internet teams.Thanks to monster private financings from Groupon and Facebook, as well as the promise of major IPOs from Demand, LinkedIn, Zynga and others, the predictable “watch out, here we go again” buzz is rising up in the press. This article from Ad Age, subtitled “With Billion-Dollar Dot-com Valuations Back in a Big Way, It’s Time for Alarm Bells to Start Ringing,” is typical of the bunch. With a “we’ve seen this movie before” tone, it points out that most of the successful companies of today had models that were tried ten years ago, and in the main they failed.
No, In Fact, We Haven't Seen This Movie Before - John Battelle's Searchblog
9:40 p.m. | Updated Groupon, the social buying site that spurned a $6 billion offer from Google , is pushing ahead with plans for its initial public offering, a debut that could value the company at $15 billion or more. The company, which just raised a record $950 million from big investors, discussed a public offering with bankers this week, according to two people with knowledge of the deal who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Groupon I.P.O. Said to Value Company at $15 Billion - NYTimes.com
Silicon Valley’s IPO Anxiety « abovethecrowd.com
Posted on November 15, 2010 . Filed under: Internet , Uncategorized , Venture Capital , Web/Tech | Tags: IPO , Silicon Valley , VC , Venture Capital | If you could travel back in time to the early 1990’s and ask Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs and private company executives about their long-term career ambitions, you would hear a constant theme – they all wanted to be part of an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Back then, taking a company public, either as a CEO, CFO, or founder, held an allure similar to that of a young athlete dreaming of making it in the major leagues.
Bill Gurley penned a fantastic post about IPOs yesterday. Go read it . Bill presents a very compelling case that IPOs still have a role to play in the startup ecosystem and he also puts forth some strong data suggesting that the IPO market is coming back and good companies are taking advantage of it.
A VC: Bashing The Collective Wisdom On IPOs
Skype IPO to take stage in 2011: sources | Reuters
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Skype is moving forward on an initial public offering of up to $1 billion, but investors will have to wait until next year before it prices, said several people close to the situation. Despite investor expectations that an IPO would materialize by the end of the year, market conditions and other factors appear to be slowing the offering, said two people close to the situation. The Luxembourg-based software company, popular for its cheap voice and video calls over the Internet, filed a Form S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in August. In October, Skype named Tony Bates, a former senior vice president of Cisco Systems, as its chief executive.
NEW YORK, Oct 8 (Reuters) - Popular U.S. Web video service Hulu is prepared to raise as much as $300 million in an initial public offering likely to be led by Morgan Stanley, according to sources familiar with the matter. Hulu is ready to raise $200 million to $300 million in a deal valuing the company at about $2 billion, and could file a prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission before the end of the year, one source said. Tapping public markets is one of several options under consideration as Hulu, which offers shows such as "Glee" and "Modern Family" over the Web, girds for battle against fast-moving rival Netflix ( NFLX.O ), and better financed big technology companies Google Inc ( GOOG.O ) and Amazon.com Inc ( AMZN.O ). Other options include attracting other media companies to contribute new programming or raising more money from existing partners, another source said.
Hulu prepares IPO amid battle with Netflix | Reuters
Inspired by Steve Blank’s post today about the “lost decade” of IPO’s , I’d like to make some predictions. Let me be clear: Steve is the historian. His posts are born of tremendous research into the secret history of Silicon Valley , and if you haven’t read those essays, you should . By contrast, what I’m about to say is pure speculation.
Lessons Learned: Some IPO speculation
This weekend I was reading a blog post written by Chris Douvos. Chris is an investor in a number of well-known venture firms and writes a blog called Super LP . His commentary always cracks me up, even when he's writing about the finer points of risk curves, financial models and the like. In his post entitled " Keeping the Window Open ," Chris cautions the investor community to not be too overzealous in taking companies public during this time when the gently re-emerging market is so fragile. As he rightfully points out, those companies that go public and then promptly miss their numbers, not only tank their own valuations but also spoil the markets for everyone else. If investors can't trust newly minted public companies to do what they said they were going to do, the markets will simply reject future public offerings as more of the same old head fake.
Fueling the IPO Fire? or Burning it Out? - VentureBlog
No IPO is garnering more attention right now than Facebook’s. Before that it was parade of Zynga, Groupon, Pandora and other major tech IPOs of the social media world. Companies like those are exciting, consumer-oriented and take up most of the tech headlines, leaving the business-focused tech companies in the dust. But of the two, which group is performing better in the market? We started tracking the IPO market in-depth starting last year.
IPO Dashboards — all about ipos
Editor’s note : This guest post was written by Paul Kedrosky , a senior fellow at the Kaufman Foundation who blogs regularly about venture capital and finance at Infectious Greed . Yelp may have just turned down a half-billion dollar takeover offer from Google. Zynga does a crazy-big $180m funding . Not long ago,Twitter took another $100-million in financing , and now we learn it’s . . . profitable . In the immortal words of Walter Sobchak, has the whole world—or least every young and fast-growing technology company—gone crazy?
Are Startups Getting Crazy, Or Just IPO Crazy?
The Top Ten IPO Candidates For 2010
It’s been a long drought for IPOs , but venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs are hopeful that 2010 will be the year they rain down on the Valley once gain. Earlier this year, a handful of IPOs trickled out , such as OpenTable , Rackspace , and A123Systems . But what people are really waiting for is another Netscape moment —an iconic IPO which will whet investor’s appetites and open the floodgates for others to follow. Below is our list of the top ten IPO candidates for 2010 in the technology industry (and, no, it doesn’t include Twitter).Reply.com Files For $60 Million IPO
Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving... → Learn MoreZynga continues to be one of the most widely talked about companies driving the social media revolution, and while it isn’t yet public, there’s much speculation on what it would be valued at if it were public. While it does trade in modest quantities in the illiquid world of private market exchanges at around $9 per share (a market cap of $2.8 Billion), if it were public, I’m confident that the public would value the shares at a market cap of $5 billion or more. While I recognize that most people’s knee jerk reaction is to think it’s 1999 all over again, this value is based on Wall Street style fundamental research (and no, that’s not an oxymoron).
Zynga Would Be Valued At $5 Billion If It Were Public Today
I spent the day yesterday with VCs from other firms. I heard two stories about IPOs that are worth sharing. One VC told me a story about a failed IPO for one of their portfolio companies a few years ago.