IPO

“To get the attention of the global major dealer banks, you've got to be offering them a transaction on which they can make at least five million dollars, and you start doing the arithmetic on the economics of an IPO, and you're up in the nine figures to do an …”

“If you look at the data, look at the NVCA data, the proportion and the value per transaction of M&A has kind of gone up as the number of IPOs for venture-backed companies has gone down and stayed down.”

“And it used to be that they go public early on the curve, and there's way more growth to come, and now they're going public when they're almost at the end of the curve, and so if you buy it in the IPA, well, you've kind of got all it's ever going to be.”

“Look, it's sometimes a seven to 10 year run before you're looking at an IPO, and now you're forcing kind of a present value equity form that has tax implications on employees and it's, you know, you're not seeing the exit event as”

“Public investors aren't actually anchoring themselves on previous rounds of valuation, and they don't have visibility into what the business looked like at that, at those points in time, and also what the business forecast looked like at that point in time.”

“To evaluate the quality of an IPO based on whether it priced above or below the range, whether it had a pop on day one is, is largely meaningless.”

“Founders who hire on cultural fit are less likely to see their startups fail, and they're more likely to make it to IPO. And then after IPO, their firms grow at a much slower rate than the ones that hire on skill or potential.”

“Time the IPO for your business and your team, including your board and investors. Don't time it around the market, time it around at the right time for your business.”

“It takes very long time to find a very good person for you, and so you don't want to rush that the way I did it right before the IPO.”

“That first quarter after your IPO is an incredibly critical quarter. So I know I'm sitting there saying have the long term and everything else, but when you are preparing for your IPO, you're giving analysts essentially a forecast of your business for the next…”

“If you don't, for my perspective, you don't have the next four quarters in the bag, you know, Don't even think about it because it's so interesting. The long-term performance of the company in terms of value is so predicted by the first quarter performance.”

“A lot of the things we talked about with RSUs versus options, the foreign and a price your dilution, all those things are going to change most rapidly, in most cases, right as you go public, right in that stage. And You know, you hire somebody 12 months out, s…”

“A lot of times what I've found is the CEO They haven't done this before, may not be aware that the Section 16 B officers will have their comp published, and if there was some back office, you know, back alley dealings and special side things, if that's not cle…”

“The IPO has this misnomer that it's like super challenging and tricky and yeah, there's some complexity to it, but what's really hard is your first earnings call as a public company.”

“Where the conflicts potentially come up is, you know, they've got kind of two clients, right, which is you're their client for this transaction, but, you know, a firm like Fidelity or T. Rowe Price or BlackRock, who is a, The institutional investor who buys sh…”

“I'm not trying to be a company. We're trying to really create a network where other businesses can build a business and not worry about rally being a traditional company that's trying to you know, earn revenues and do an IPO at some point and eventually potent…”

“Sarbanes-Oxley in the early 2000 which was passed in the wake of Enron. That was the intent to stop Enron. So what it actually did stopped IPOs. So the number of public companies has just declined, the number of IPOs has declined, and tech companies started go…”

“For four years, it was just a desert. A bunch of companies silently died. The state blocked IPOs. They're blocking M&As. It was just an all-out anti-tech assault.”

“Usually the VCs would want to talk to the press, and some of them had been clients, at the IPO time. So they wanted to basically have no risk. But then when the company goes public, it's like, hey, I did that, right?”

“We are on the precipice of some of the largest IPOs ever.”