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| The IPO Maven Startups and other big deals, 2002-2007 |
| IPOs are my favorite business stories. Behind each one is a great innovation or a con, and sometimes both. Unlike mergers and LBOs, which at bottom are just financial maneuvers, a startup represents a stab at changing the world and making a buck besides. Put another way, it mattered a lot when E*Trade and Ameritrade forced the price of stock trades down by almost 90 percent by automating the business and empowering little guys. When E*Trade tried to buy Ameritrade later, it didn't change much. IPOs are fun, challenging stories, first of all, because you have to figure out if a company's innovation really is any big deal. Then you have to figure out if it can make money, and last you have to gauge the mood of the market and whether the executives involved in the deal are trustworthy. None of these is easy. All of them are interesting. I've covered the tech IPO market since about 2002, and I've been on the scene for most of the big tech and new-media IPOs since. I was a Deadline Club finalist for Google IPO stories, may have killed the 2002 and 2003 Orbitz IPOs (their CFO flew to New York to make that argument once), and did the first major-media stories about high fliers like VistaPrint, Blue Nile and Athenahealth. On Athena, I nailed their pre-IPO valuation within $400,000 -- and predicted it would soon double -- all before their first SEC filing. Athena would become the best-performing tech IPO in seven years in initial trading, despite generating almost no press attention other than from Fortune and me. Google Stories. Here, here, here, here here and here. There were some others that we did the week of the IPO, but this so-called "Googleblog" daily feature was the anchor of the Deadline Club entry. (It lost to a story from TheNation.com that claimed to prove President Bush ditched National Guard duty in the 60s to avoid cocaine testing, the sourcing of which was as dubious as the 60 Minutes II report the Nation story defended at length). Athenahealth. Here, here, here, here and here. Note how Jim Cramer caught on four months after my Bloomberg story. By then, of course, most of the money had been made. Orbitz. Here for 2002, here and here for 2003. They cancelled the deal the first time, then cut its value for the second try. After they priced above the new range, the last piece reminded people why they shouldn't buy it. It fell $8 a share intraday on the initial day of trading. Provide Commerce, the other e-tail deal that day, went up $2. That's impact. Buy.com. IPO was postponed two days later and later cancelled. Blue Nile. Put them in a cover story right before their IPO - and before a similar Barrons' story. Shares quintupled in three years. Grading the Class of 2004. We did a market wrap on the startup IPO market's one good year since the tech bust, which we predicted here in a piece that beat the WSJ by several weeks and was much smarter and more accurate than the Journal was about the level of risk likely to accompany the warmer IPO market. The June story was accompanied by a report-card piece on 12 of the 25 Web-related companies that were in registration then. The notable thing about this story, which isn't that long or flashily written: Every single prediction held up. Every deal we liked soared, either as an IPO or, in one case, after being acquired by Time Warner before going public. Every one we didn't like got cancelled or else crashed in post-deal trading. 12 for 12 isn't a coincidence. |