Most August IPOs (30) in Five Years
September 13th, 2005This morning I woke up with three ideas that I believe could be
developed and sold to one of the major search engines within the next
three years. I started wondering if the best exit strategy for an
internet based startup these days is to position yourself to be
acquired by Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. And maybe even eBay. There is
so much capital in these companies and they all seem to be anxious to
do acquisitions. And the IPO market has seemed so sleepy for so long.
But then I came across this article from yesterday's Business Week that says there were 30 IPOs in August,
the most for any August in five years. And it claims the market is just
heating up. Here are some of the tech companies that could go public in
the coming months:
- Vonage: the leading VoIP provider, with more than 1 million subscribers in the U.S. (Business Week story)
- TellMe: voice recognition for customer service calls. Hoovers estimates $19.2 million in 2004 revenue.
- Alibaba: Yahoo paid $1 billion for 40% recently
- eBags: expected to sell 1 million bags in 2004
- Ritz Interactive: online speciality retailer, just filed S-1 with $20.8 million in 2004 revenue
- iRobot (S-1 shows revenue of $94 million in 2004)
- Facebook: raised $13 million in May from Accel; has 3.65 million registered users
They also mentioned Skype, but of course, this article was written before the announcement that eBay is buying Skype.
So in addition to being a great time to start a high-tech company (the best time in history,
in fact), it appears that it might once again become a great time to
harvest a high-tech company, with both M&A and the IPO market
looking quite promising.
Posted in: IPO Watch
September 14th, 2005 at 23:09 PM
Vonage: way to much competition in the VoIP industry already for it to be worth much more than the hype it carries. They don't have their own lines either.
Alibaba: Possibly going to be held back by litigation over companies selling illegal products via the site like fake cigarettes posing as Marlboro.
Facebook: The whole registration system is based on college emails. You can only register with a college email address. Hence, growth is very limited, and attrition rates are likely high with people no longer attending university after four years (if they gradutate).
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