Sunday Stories Behind the Stories
SolarWinds and OpenTable IPOs Post Solid First Week Gains
SolarWinds and OpenTable sold relatively small blocks of shares and as such have a small public float and high volatility. Furthermore, due to the lack of tech IPOs over the last year or so, there was a lot of pent-up demand. That coupled with the fact that a number of potential sellers are locked up for 180 days suggest we might not be out of the woods just yet. I am cautiously optimistic, but the first few days of trading on these stocks doesn’t mean the drought is over.
Secondary Markets Are Gaining Momentum
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on the burgeoning secondary private equity security markets and what it might mean for startups and VCs. These secondary markets have both a tipping point problem and will likely be subject to a winner-take-all scenario. They will need a certain number of buyers and sellers to set the market and the one with the most will probably become dominant (see ebay as an example of this). Tim Draper is looking to elbow in and be that winner by leveraging his connections in the VC community. He calls this model taking companies “prublic”.
M&A as the New (New) Paradigm
Maybe Yahoo! won’t be entirely irrelevant after all. As Google focuses on its margins and, at least for the time being, shuns acquisitions, Yahoo! has announced that they are going to start gobbling up startups.
