You’ve got Spotify pursuing this alternate IPO, Eric Ries starting the alternative stock exchange. Wood: There’s also this talk in the venture community about public markets being broken.

Five years later, nobody knows who they were. We’ve had many companies, and 80 percent of our companies have been sold versus gone public, and the companies that have been sold, in general, evaporate in terms of the public consciousness. It’s the best marketing event you can have. Wood: Yeah, talk to me a little bit about that branding event. Once your evaluation - even Dropbox - gets to be 5, 7, $10 billion, how many purchases are there of assets of that scale? So if the founder’s goal is to build a lasting iconic company, then eventually he probably wants to go public, partly as a branding event and also a liquidity event. You know, it’s hard, particularly in companies like Airbnb and Uber - they’re not going to be sold. It is the rank and file, it’s the employees. Is that because investors want to get paid back?Īnnie Lamont: Absolutely. Molly Wood: It feels like there’s all this pressure for these companies to go public.

Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks to venture capitalist Annie Lamont, co-founder and managing partner of Oak HC/FT and Oak Investment Partners, about the tech IPO drought. Stripe, SpaceX, WeWork, Slack … maybe?īut with private valuations super high, some investors are saying that public markets aren’t even the right fit for companies anymore.

Market volatility aside, Dropbox probably is going public in 2018.

Dropbox stock going public