I couldn’t agree with Semil more. My generic advice for companies heading for an IPO, as enumerated here, is to build in plenty of potential upside by tamping down expectations for future financial performance and to price IPOs at least 20-30% below the market clearing price, thus attracting the highest quality, longest term, institutional shareholders and signaling the desire to retain these shareholders for a long time to come.
As featured in TechCrunch. Stanford-born and Seattle-based Tableau Software (ticker symbol: DATA) enjoyed a tremendous debut on the public markets on Friday, closing on its first day of trading at over $50/share, up over 60% from its $31/share IPO price.Read More…
As featured in Fortune Term Sheet. Over the past 4 months I’ve written 8 posts in the “Going Long” series. As those of you who’ve been reading this material on GoingLongBlog.com and/or Fortune Term Sheet know, I’ve focused on advice forRead More…
As featured in Fortune Term Sheet. Life for newly public and soon-to-be public venture-backed tech companies Marin Software, Marketo and Tableau is about to get much tougher. When these companies go public, their shareholder base will begin to shift fromRead More…
As featured in Fortune Term Sheet. As a growth stage entrepreneur committed to going long and building a big company, your focus should always be on moving forward, looking down the field and thinking long term. That said, most successfulRead More…
As featured in Fortune Term Sheet Founders are the best start-up CEOs. The same passion, focus and audacity required to get a company off the ground enables founders to be successful start-up leaders. After all, when a start-up company isRead More…
Kokkari in SF played host tonight to GGV Capital’s Spring CEO Dinner. Tonight’s event focused on “Going Long.” We had an incredible set of entrepreneurs join us to hear advice from Ted Wang, the Fenwick partner who advises Facebook, DropboxRead More…
Today Domo, the leader in the provision of cloud-based executive management and intelligence platforms, announced a $60M financing led by GGV Capital, with participation from Greylock, IVP, Jeff Bezos and others. We’re very excited to be leading this round, andRead More…
As featured on Fortune Term Sheet These days, for the typical ventured-backed tech company, the duration from founding to IPO is a full 8-10 years. There are no overnight success stories. It’s a serious accomplishment representing a ton of workRead More…
As featured on Fortune Term Sheet As a junior banker at Goldman Sachs in the early ‘90s I was weaned on the conventional wisdom that growth companies were ready to go public when they reached $100M in annualized revenue (ie,Read More…