IPO

“Now, because it takes so long, it's very hard for us to know you know, what the current crop of companies or even the crop of companies eight or 10 years ago what their outcome will be. But my guess is it's going to be five Maybe six percent. It's just a much,…”

“If you go back to nine in the 19 nineties, And look at what percentage of the first fundings in the nineties ended up going public. It was 14%. So basically one in every seven companies that got a dime of venture financing went public.”

“And you look at just in the past gosh, I mean, the past three years 2013, 20 14, 2015, and the interesting thing is that the majority of the IPOs in each of the That period where were biotech companies, which historically is only about 20% of the money, but ma…”

“On average from seed to IPO, the tenure of company or how long it takes has actually gone up. It used to be Around five to seven years, and I think it's actually north of nine now.”

“Being a little bit more creative about getting to cash flows, and once you have said cash flows, thinking about options like debt, thinking about options like crowdfunding, options like dividends, are going to become much more common conversations, because the…”

“My belief on acquisitions and IPOs for that matter, exits of any kind is that they are not about exiting. The entire point is to become more successful at your mission.”

“They send over a billion emails a day. They've been profitable this year and they're an IPO candidate in in 2017.”

“And our strategy at DFJ growth really targets companies that have more of a three to six year Horizon to IPO.”

“So you'll see, I think, flat and down IPO rounds. Maybe up to 50% of the companies that are out there.”

“I think that an IPO for a truly successful company is just a state change. It actually doesn't really mean anything too much to the company overall. It's just a way to get money.”

“I think that IPOs are going to look very different in 10 years, if not go away entirely, or go away is hard, but, you know, change into a form that really doesn't look like today. You know, the public equity markets and the private equity markets are going to …”

“Well, our belief strongly is that there is no exit to a company. The most enduring companies are just going through a financing event and will continue to build on.”

“I think SPACs are here to stay, and we're going to see a lot of companies using that as a alternative to IPOs and direct listings over the next several years.”

“You can put a SPAC together in two to three months in terms of the acquisition part and going public versus taking six, seven, eight months to really get a company ready for an IPO.”

“Pre-SPAC, the real decision, I think, came down to, do you want to raise more money right now? And if you don't, then a direct listing is better than an IPO.”

“To date, a lot of the companies that have gone out via SPAC are more speculative than ones that would take a traditional IPO route, and you could measure that by their level of profitability or their level of immaturity from a revenue standpoint, some of which…”

“That's really the role of the CEO and the board to choose wisely, but all of them have their merits and they're harmonizing a bit Where the differences are quite small at this point, and very nuanced.”

“So for us, because the company did not need to raise money, right? I mean, we've raised very little over the years. We had that primary round we did before doing the direct listing, which was done for A number of reasons, but otherwise we didn't need to raise …”

“And it's a business that I think it's, it has some sort of potential for disruption.”

“Really today it probably has to be closer to two hundred million because that's when you can really IPO, right? Approaching two hundred million. So you've got a decade to get to two hundred million”

“In the old days, the rough rule is we could raise, including A, B, C, D, E, F, G H I and J rounds. You could raise a hundred total, right? Then that kind of grew to like three or four hundred million as the IPOs got bigger at the peak. And now we're probably b…”

“Company side, people, I think, think of a little bit differently philosophically, but at the same time, they know that there's not going to be an IPO in the next two years, and A lot of those constituents are smaller, they're high net worths, they're individua…”

“And so my hope is that in a few years we have more examples. And so it will open the door for smaller IPOs, but more IPOs. And so I think that will happen. The best of them will do that.”

“But twenty-twenty-four will be rich with IPOs, and it will be a good year with solid multiples. Solid multiples.”

“A couple of my early investments went on to IPO. And so we're extremely successful, but then during the six month lockup window went almost to zero. And I couldn't exit almost anything.”

“The price at which you go public is completely irrelevant. Almost nobody sells at the price of the IPO. Everybody's locked up. And in the end, it just matters at the point sort of like when lockups are over, when somebody wants to sell, et cetera. So the price…”

“If you're gonna go public, I think you've gotta be cashflow breakeven. I think you have to have, you know, 30% plus growth, which is probably what high growth is right now. You've gotta be moving towards a rule of 40 or 50 with slanted more towards growth than…”

“And let's just pick on Clubhouse since you raised it. If you had taken a deep breath, looked at an offer, said, huh, from an IPO readiness perspective, where is this company? The objective answer to that question is no fucking where light years away.”

“And you know, who's done that? Really well is USB. Fred, very selectively. And they've obviously had big IPO winners, and they've had some IPO winners where they've sold some in advance.”

“When Apple went public, when they went public, they raised nine million dollars in the IPO.”

“We're like, 14 years to IPO.”

“At the IPO less than 12 months is excellent. 12 to 15 is good. 15 to 20 gets concerning above 20, it's gonna be a real problem.”

“I would say in the growth stage, more often they wait too long, particularly as they're ramping up in, in the couple of years prior to IPO, because it's almost always Needed for a strong public company to have some sort of diversification.”

“If an IPO is good, usually, 90% of the meetings that you have one-on-one and a good IPO will convert into an order.”

“So I have great respect for Bill Gurley. He's a very, very smart guy incredibly talented, but this one thing I think he, I don't agree with him, you know I think he's over-focused on One day stock pricing. Ah, now listen, if the stock doubles, that's obviously…”

“If they're buying the stock at the price that it doesn't go up, only goes up 10%, they're gonna dollar-weighted average, so they're not gonna go buy the stock. So you're gonna have a supply belt that, you know demand imbalance, they will probably sell the stoc…”

“If you give Fidelity a million dollar allocation, they will dump the stock, you know. They might disagree with that, but, you know, a million dollar, you know, ultimately, if you have to think about it, if you're a portfolio manager, right, you're owning 30 na…”

“You start with the price that you have a 98% conviction that you can price it at that range, and then you go up from there, and that depends on the demand and the feedback you get from the investors.”

“I'm really hopeful. I think next year will be a good year for IPOs.”

“Liquidity has been a major problem and especially during the four years of Biden and it just coincided with really bad policies and, you know, a derf of M&A lack of IPOs I think that's gonna change in the next four years.”

“We have a company in our portfolio, It's about two years away from IPO. It's appointing bankers right now. One hundred fifty million net, one hundred sixty million net revenue right now on a run rate basis.”

“The bar for an IPO today in the US is north of 200 to three hundred million.”

“No, there will never be an IPO.”

“I don't buy into that. I think price it as high as you can price it.”

“90% of B to B companies at IPO have a founder CEO at the top. 90%.”

“In my limited experience, like 10 X actually isn't enough because those are soft commitments and people put in over allocations to make sure they can get it, and you really want to be like, 30 X oversubscribed to pop hard, which I don't know if that's your, wh…”

“IPOs by number are up 62 and a half percent this year, apparently, based on data I saw today, right?”

“2002 to 2004. You had more dollars raised in the public markets from IPOs than you did from 2022 to 20 24. And with an asset class, 10 times the size.”

“You're exhausted, but the day you go public is going to be one of the top two or three days of your life. It is an amazing day.”

“So, first of all, you're making the decision on the price and who the investors are the night before the IPO.”

“I think, in, by and large, we tend to hold pretty much everything until IPO.”

“Rory's point, I mean, look, I mean, what, 80% of IPOs trade down, right?”

“Of the 15 IPOs year to date, 10 of them have almost no AI story, right?”

“I still, I'm skeptical it'll be an amazing replacement to IPOs, but it definitely is less egregious and less misaligned than the last time.”

“The SEC has really tight laws about what you can say about an IPO. Really, really tight, and you can't make any future leading statements at all. But bizarrely enough, SPACs are exempt from that, so you're allowed, because it's a merger, so you're allowed from…”

“This is a real honest, honest to goodness American corporation, a different kind of American corporation, but they can go public with this. They've gotten out of the straitjacket. So that's the big, and it's big news. It means, you know, what, for example, it …”

“You now have to assume that that 400,000,500 million is the threshold for an IPO.”

“What you just saw is the rehabilitation of the IPO. I'm going to call it the end of stay private forever.”

“IPOs are very binary, right? Either folks get super greedy. And they're genuinely massively oversubscribed or they barely get done at all. So I just think that is overstated by the media that there's existential IPO. Until, until it shows up in the numbers, I …”

“Going public is not a financial event. It's a branding event. It's a, it's an occasion where you tell your customers, your partners, your employees, your future employees, I'm here to stay. That's IPO. Cause typically it's not a financial event. It's not a liq…”

“In a world where there's no right time to go public, you can't time the market. Just go public, you take the capital you raise, and you build forward”

“If you look at IPOs today, you can't IPO with less than five hundred million in revenue.”

“The base rate return on IPOs, not from the day of the IP, not from the day of pricing, but from the first day's closing price, which is typically way above it, the base rate return on that is negative. One, six months, 12 months, one year. Yeah, two years, rig…”

“As you prepare to go public, the number of people who call you and try and sell you stuff is insane. Just suddenly developing a presentation, Which should cost 20,000 dollars is a 200,000 dollar project.”

“I think the IPO nominally will be a dud. I don't think it will trade up dramatically.”

“I just think we don't think about the velocity of cash enough, and what I mean by that is like, you know, yes, there might be another double, but if I have to wait five years, and then the IPO, and then an 18 month lockup, Jesus, give me 50% of that now, and I…”