Ask HN: Why do companies wait so long to IPO?

2 points by collinglass 8 years ago | 3 comments

I invest in small cap public companies. I'd love to invest in the startups I follow and use. What are the main reasons companies wait so long to IPO? (usually wait until they are $XX billion company)

troydavis 8 years ago |

The gist is that they don't need to anymore. The entire point of going public until about 2010 was to raise money and obtain shareholder liquidity and they accepted tradeoffs to do so, like spending tons of time on reporting and compliance.

It's now possible to raise basically unbounded amounts of money in private placements, and also for existing shareholders to sell into private secondary markets.

Here's more: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-12-02/goldman-i..., https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-03-24/private-c...

This is not investment advice.

If you want to invest in truly small cap tech companies (say, under $400 million valuation), AngelList (https://angel.co/invest/start) is probably the largest market.

If you want to invest in small-ish cap tech companies of the size that might have already been public 20 years ago (say, $400 million-$1 billion valuation), SecondMarket/Nasdaq Private Market (https://www.nasdaqprivatemarket.com/) is probably the largest market.

Hopefully this is obvious, but just in case: this should be a tiny portion of one's investable assets - think less than 5% - and this asset class should be as diversified - ie, include many positions - as any other. Otherwise, these aren't investments, they're lotto tickets. As it is, I think https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-09/retail-vo... is true of late-stage startups too; an individual is very unlikely to form a uniquely informed opinion.

collinglass 8 years ago | |

Excellent thanks for the detailed response!! :)

yourcomplex 8 years ago |

Back track to the dot com era and the mantra of the day was "get big fast." Principles IPO'd and cashed out before things fell apart. While I can't speak to the intentions of individual company's management, today's institutional investors will likely not throw around their money on an early venture as easily as they did in 1998. Also, the more value a company can create prior to IPO, the more equity they can save for the original owners in the long run.