Fred Wilson, who I think has taken more vacations in the last year than Michelle Obama (off the top of my head, for Fred: Buenos Aires, Vail, Paris, someplace in Italy), hopes the Skype IPO will be the one to “get things going again.” Maybe. But when early investors (the smart/lucky money) are selling, someone else needs to be buying (mainly retail investors, via mutual funds). According to the Investment Company Institute’s most recent data, retail investors have been pulling their money out of domestic equity funds by the billions, even as the market has rallied over the last month.
Incidentally, this brings to mind a classic post by Mark Cuban, about the roadshow he and his co-founder participated in in the run-up to the Broadcast.com IPO. Key excerpt:
Prior to the road show, we put together an amazing presentation. We hired consultants to help us. We practiced and practiced. We argued about what we should and shouldn’t say. We had Morgan Stanley and others ask us every possible question they could think of so we wouldn’t look stupid when we sat in front of these savvy investors.
Savvy investors? I was shocked. Of the 63 companies and 400-plus participants we visited, I would be exaggerating if I said we got 10 good questions about our business and how it worked. The vast majority of people in the meetings had no clue who we were or what we did. They just knew that there were a lot of people talking about the company and they should be there.
The lack of knowledge at the meetings got to be such a joke between Todd and I that we used to purposely mess up to see if anyone noticed. Or we would have pet lines that we would make up to crack each other up. Did we ruin our chance for the IPO? Was our product so complicated that no one got it and as a result no one bought the stock? Hell no. They might not have had a clue, but that didn’t stop them from buying the stock. We batted 1.000. Every single investor we talked to placed the maximum order allowable for the stock.
On July 18, 1998, Broadcast.com went public as BCST, priced at 18 dollars a share. It closed at $62.75, a gain of almost 250 percent, which at the time was the largest one day rise of a new offering in the history of the stock market. The same mutual fund managers who were completely clueless about our company placed multimillion orders for our stock. Multimillion dollar orders using YOUR MONEY.
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