Richter: IPO price is completely irrelevant due to lockup periods
Dominik Richter · Dominik Richter: You Only Have Two Options With VC Funding | E1089 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Dec 1, 2023 · at 46:34
Dominik Richter, founder and CEO of HelloFresh, reflects on why HelloFresh took the opportunity to go public in 2017 rather than waiting to optimize its valuation.
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“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 at which you go public doesn't matter. It's all about grabbing the window.”
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More from Dominik Richter
Richter: US market competition is 10x tougher than in Europe
“Everything that you know about competition will be 10 X what you'll find in the US.”
Richter: Launching a HelloFresh competitor today would be absolute insanity
“Now, if I look at that from the outside, it would be absolute insanity to launch a competitor to us as of today, given that for 10 years we worked through a lot of these complex problems.”
Richter: VC-backed founders seeking long-term control must go public
“If you want to keep being in charge for a long time and you have raised venture, in the end, you need to go public. That's pretty clear.”
Richter: Most DTC startups should raise angel capital, not VC
“I do think there were a lot of companies that ended up being venture backed when the better path would have been to raise an angel angel round, trying to get to profitability and actually scale the business to a 102 hundred million in revenue.”