
It Ain’t Easy Making Money in Open Source: Thoughts on the Hortonworks S-1
It took me a week or so to get to it, but in this post, I’ll take a dive into the Hortonworks S-1 filing in support of a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of their stock. While Hadoop and big data are unarguably huge trends driving the industry and while the future of Hadoop looks very bright indeed, […]

A Look at the Zendesk S-1 (IPO)
I thought I’d take a quick read of the Zendesk S-1 today, so here are my real-time notes on so doing. Before diving in, let me provide a quick pointer to David Cummings’ summary of the same. My notes: 40,000 customers in 140 countries 2012 revenues of $38.2M 2013 revenues of $72.0M, 88% growth 41% […]

Workday IPO – The company that Oracle won’t acquire?
The most interesting parts of the Workday S-1 may be the lengths they’ve gone to to thwart a hostile takeover. Here’s a quick summary of those items.
Facebook’s Next Business Model
VC Chris Dixon muses in a recent post that Facebook has yet to uncover a business model that will support its IPO valuation and drive future growth in that valuation. As he puts it: Facebook relies on an old internet business model: display ads. Display ads generally hurt the user experience, and are also not […]

The Facebook IPO
So Facebook is about to do the expected. It filed for an IPO yesterday and the clock is now ticking on what will be one of the largest offerings in history. I don’t know how things will compare but Ford’s IPO in the 1950’s and UPS’s offering a few years ago might be bigger pound […]

The New, New Bubble
The cover story in the current issue of FORTUNE deserves consideration. Normally I would include a link but the magazine appears to still be into selling ink on squashed tree. Steal a copy from your dentist’s office. Mark Zuckerberg is on the cover bursting a bubblegum wad in one of those slomo pics they used […]
Founders: The Bubble Clock is Ticking
The incredible valuation of the LinkedIn IPO can only be interpreted as one signal: the Bubble Clock has started ticking. So long as it continues to run, we will live in a reality distortion where valuations are insanely high, capital is cheap, and smart businesses can leverage that to hyper growth. When it stops, we’re […]
The Bubble Has Begun With the Most Expensive Stock In America
It’s official, the current Bubble has begun with LinkedIn’s IPO. It was declared the most expensive stock in America even before doubling which means its now clearly way past Bubble territory. Exciting stuff! LinkedIn’s PE is 62 times Apple’s, 50 times Google’s, but less than 4 times Salesforce.com’s. Wow, AAPL and GOOG look like Value […]

IPO Bound: SciQuest Roadshow Roars Ahead
It’s been a while since Ariba has had company in the public marketplace, as they are the only pure-play focused procurement vendor on the NASDAQ (other public companies such as Concur focus on auxiliary areas). In fact, you’d have…

The Public Markets and Venture Capital
Last week I wrote about the “VC shakeup” in response to a piece in HBR by the same name, in my response to a comment left by my friend Jason Lemkin I wrote: A big problem here is that the state of public markets makes IPOs extremely difficult and with M&A among already public companies […]