Going Public: How Silicon Valley Rebels Loosened Wall Street’s Grip on the IPO and Sparked a Revolution

by Dakin Campbell

A behind-the-scenes tour of the high-stakes world of IPOs and how a visionary band of startup executives, venture capitalists, and maverick bankers has launched a crusade to upend the traditional IPO as we know it.

GOING PUBLIC is a character-driven narrative centered on the last five years of unparalleled change in how technology startups sell shares to the public. Initial public offerings, or IPOs, are typically the first time retail investors can own a piece of the New Economy companies promising to rewire economic rules. Selling IPOs is also one of the most profitable businesses for Wall Street investment banks, who have spent the last 40 years protecting their profits. In an era when algorithms and software have made the financial markets more efficient, the pricing of IPOs still relies on human judgment.
 
In 2018, executives at music-streaming service Spotify sought to upend the status quo. Led by a trim and understated CFO, Barry McCarthy, and a shy but brilliant founder, Daniel Ek, they took a wild idea and forged something new. GOING PUBLIC explores how they got comfortable with the risk, and how they lobbied securities watchdogs and exchange staff to rewrite the regulations. Readers will meet executives at disruptive companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, venture capitalists, and even some bankers who seized on Spotify’s labor and used it to knock Wall Street bankers off the piles of fees they’d been stacking for so long.
 
GOING PUBLIC weaves in earlier attempts to rethink the IPO process, introducing readers to one of Silicon Valley’s earliest bankers, Bill Hambrecht, whose invention for selling shares online was embraced by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they auctioned their shares in 2004. And it examines the recent boom in blank-check companies, those Wall Street insider deals that have suddenly become the hottest way to enter the public markets. GOING PUBLIC tells stories from inside the room, and more.

Genres: Business

336 pages, Hardcover

Published July 26, 2022

Reviews

[Joysbookreview · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is hard to read. As an IPO attorney trying to follow through each deals in chapter, I found the author tries to make it interesting, but not sufficient enough to understand what is the deal, how it is challenging. The point well made is that the Company and underwriters have been pushing the system to make money raise easier, IPO faster through different negotiations, channels. Some recent years deals like Spotify, Snowflake, Slack are heavily discussed. As a professional reading a WSJ journalist’s article, I still hope it can have some simple logic structure first to give out background , like Issuer: XXX , money raised, IPO year, through what kind of IPO, when/how long it takes approved. On first three chapters, too much storytelling on how big names CEO flies here and there to negotiating without giving details on the deal, not sure whether the focuses are right. Maybe the author wants to focuses on how CEO of public companies driven to changes how they raise money from public investors.

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful primer on IPOs and the related thought and practical processes. The book mainly focuses on some of the most widely known tech companies we interact with daily. An interesting read for anyone who’s curious about how these giants came to be.

[Marc Weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great history about IPOs and the strategy behind each one in the first half. Second half focused too much on recent examples of direct listings with multiple chapters on one company. If each chapter was about a different company, it would be 5 stars. thoroughly enjoyed.

[Grant Walther · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a professional in Finance for the last 10+ years, there aren’t really any surprises that come from this book. While it certainly contains some intriguing IPO stories since Google in 2004, it didn’t really seem to get deeper than your average WSJ or CNBC news article.

[Ryan Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

not always well edited and does a lot more explaining of concepts than it needs to, but the stories are told in an interesting way and are unique cases framed around the idea of the how and why of IPOs changing

[Tasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful reflection on the hot tech IPOs that have consumed the media over the last few years. I enjoyed learning about how IPOs in the early 2000s (Apple and Google) still had influence over today's deal. Well researched and presented - not too dense, but also not lacking details.

[Rosalind Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an investor in stocks for decades, I have followed business information in the New York Times and
the Philadelphia Inquirer. As I read “Going Public” by Dakin Campbell, I realized there was a tremendous back story that I was totally unfamiliar with. Although the underwriters mentioned, such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, and the technology companies, such as Google, Spotify and Airbnb, were known to me, the inside story was all new. I found it a fascinating and enlightening page-turner. I believe anyone working in finance or technology would find this behind-the-scenes book even more compelling than I did.

[Joel Hoeffler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now I know who the sucker is when companies IPO. Enjoyed historical timeline of some of Silicon Valley’s top tech firms’ path to the public markets.

[Kseniya Kosmina · Rating 2 out of 5]

not as interesting as I thought it would be. some chapters and stories were quite drawn out and convoluted with details and unexplained terminology that did not improve the narrative.