Finally, the first venture-backed tech IPO in months – but don’t expect many more just yet
A tech startup goes public for the first time in months and gets a big first-day pop in share price. Time for Silicon Valley to break out the champagne, right?
Not so fast.
Enterprise communications startup Twilio Inc. (Chief Executive Jeff Lawson pictured above) today managed to pull off the first initial public offering of stock by a venture-backed company since Atlassian Corp.’s IPO last December, as its shares jumped at the opening and closed up 90 percent on its first day of trading. And that was after the company raised $150 million, pricing its offering Wednesday higher than expected at $15 a share — well above the last private round of $11.31 a share.
But both companies considering IPOs as well as bankers and advisors think it’s too early to call a turn toward a new round of public offerings. “I don’t think there’s going to be a sudden surge,” said IPO expert Jay R. Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida.
At the same time, Twilio’s successful IPO does at least indicate an appetite for institutional investors for tech offerings, even by companies that aren’t yet profitable. That’s likely to get investment bankers busy pushing for more clients to test the waters.
“All those bankers who were waiting for someone else to break the ice have no excuse not to put a toe in the water,” said Lise Buyer, founder and partner in IPO consultant Class V Group.
IPOs are an important driver for the entire technology industry, producing wealth that funds successive rounds of startup creation. But they’ve fallen into disfavor this year, falling to their lowest level since the financial crisis of 2008-9.
That’s thanks to a raft of factors: low interest rates that have driven more public investors such a T. Rowe Price to fund private companies such as Uber, volatile markets and a growth-versus-profits mentality among venture investors and startups that has produced losses of which IPO investors now are wary.
And despite Twilio’s first-day pop, those dynamics haven’t changed much. Some startups are feeling a crunch in venture funding. But the somewhat more established private growth companies — including some of the “unicorns” such as Uber, Palantir and Dropbox that are valued at more than $1 billion — are still finding private markets more attractive.
What’s more, the stock market has been volatile and, with a presidential election and fallout from today’s vote on Britain’s possible exit from the European Union, it’s likely to remain so for much of the year. That’s a risky time for a company to go public.
Tech IPOs last year also didn’t fare well, either. Square Inc. went public in November at a valuation below what private investors had paid, causing some wags to label IPOs “the new down round,” a reference to a funding round that values a company for less than previous rounds. Today, Square’s shares are down about 2 percent from their $9 IPO price.
Staying private
For all those reasons, many private tech companies prefer to remain that way, perhaps at least into 2017. Melissa Knox, executive director of investment banking software at Morgan Stanley, said recently that private tech companies are moving from an exclusive focus on growth to at least showing a clear path to profitability. But that process may take many firms until next year.
Cloud storage and computing firm Nutanix Inc. is a prime example. It filed for an IPO last December but held off, announcing on May 31 that it had raised a $75 million loan in April from Goldman Sachs & Co.
“Because we’re not desperate for money, we’ll do it when the market feels it can appreciate our product — not the Nutanix Systems [products] but NTNX, the symbol,” Nutanix Chief Executive Dheeraj Pandey said in an interview Wednesday on theCUBE (owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE). “We are a seller of a product called NTNX, and the buyers have to be ready.”
That’s why it’s most likely that companies such as Nutanix will wait until late in the year, if not longer. “I doubt NTNX would go short term based on Twilio — they’ll have to see sustained momentum,” said Dave Vellante, co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media and chief analyst at Wikibon. “If the stock doesn’t hold up well or the markets get choppy because of so much uncertainty and the election, they may have to wait, but a summer rally would probably get them to jump.”
Hedging bets
Others appear ready to hold off longer. “We fully intend to be a public company,” Cloudera Inc. Chief Executive Tom Reilly told SiliconANGLE recently. “We’re not dependent on the public markets for financing. It’s not a market that we’d want to enter as a public company right now.”
There’s yet another reason not to view Twilio as a bellwether. Enterprise- and business-oriented software companies often get gobbled up first by bigger software companies before they have a chance to go public, notes Ritter, so Twilio may be something of an anomaly. Indeed, the past few weeks saw several multibillion-dollar acquisitions of enterprise software companies, including one, Blue Coat Systems Inc., that days earlier had filed for an IPO.
Still, there’s no question that many are watching the signs closely and may start jumping in next year. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said last week at the Bloomberg Technology Conference that Andreessen Horowitz recently created a group to help its portfolio companies prepare for IPOs. “There are a bunch of companies that are legitimately getting ready to go [public] and will go,” he said.
They aren’t likely to be the super-unicorns such as Uber and Palantir, however, since they continue to be able to raise as much as they need from private markets. “It’ll be a long time before we see those go public,” said Buyer.
One tech IPO may not clear the logjam, but a few more like Twilio may well unleash the flood the entire technology industry has been waiting for.
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