Going Public
How Silicon Valley Rebels Loosened Wall Street's Grip on the IPO and Sparked a Revolution
-
-
4.3 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
A behind-the-scenes tour of the high-stakes world of IPOs and how a visionary band of startup executives, venture capitalists, and maverick bankers has launched a crusade to upend the traditional IPO as we know it.
GOING PUBLIC is a character-driven narrative centered on the last five years of unparalleled change in how technology startups sell shares to the public. Initial public offerings, or IPOs, are typically the first time retail investors can own a piece of the New Economy companies promising to rewire economic rules. Selling IPOs is also one of the most profitable businesses for Wall Street investment banks, who have spent the last 40 years protecting their profits. In an era when algorithms and software have made the financial markets more efficient, the pricing of IPOs still relies on human judgment.
In 2018, executives at music-streaming service Spotify sought to upend the status quo. Led by a trim and understated CFO, Barry McCarthy, and a shy but brilliant founder, Daniel Ek, they took a wild idea and forged something new. GOING PUBLIC explores how they got comfortable with the risk, and how they lobbied securities watchdogs and exchange staff to rewrite the regulations. Readers will meet executives at disruptive companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, venture capitalists, and even some bankers who seized on Spotify’s labor and used it to knock Wall Street bankers off the piles of fees they’d been stacking for so long.
GOING PUBLIC weaves in earlier attempts to rethink the IPO process, introducing readers to one of Silicon Valley’s earliest bankers, Bill Hambrecht, whose invention for selling shares online was embraced by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they auctioned their shares in 2004. And it examines the recent boom in blank-check companies, those Wall Street insider deals that have suddenly become the hottest way to enter the public markets. GOING PUBLIC tells stories from inside the room, and more.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Campbell, Business Insider's chief financial correspondent, delivers a thorough if dry history of the initial public offering and its evolution as tech companies became a bigger chunk of the market. He begins with technology companies' IPOs during the '60s and goes on to profile such luminaries as Bill Hambrecht of Francis I. DuPont & Co., an investment banker who popularized the OpenIPO model in the late ‘90s, which allowed the public to purchase shares "more equitably." Campbell discusses how the market changed when Spotify listed shares directly on the exchange in 2018, which "fashion a new role for investment banks that kept them at arm's length," and Slack later modeled its listing after Spotify's. Things culminate at the end of 2020 with DoorDash's IPO, which closed 85% higher than the IPO price, and the SEC's approval of the NYSE's proposal to allow companies to raise money with direct listings, paying fewer fees to investment banks. Campbell's heavy on the details, and he meanders from company to company with little in the way of narrative or drama. Readers who aren't already in the finance world can safely take a pass on this one.
