ipo

IPOs a thing of the past?

HALF MOON BAY, Calif.--When bonds are paying yields like stocks and blue-chip companies are severely undervalued, who wants to invest in equities, let alone an IPO?

Those are just some of the challenges companies face in attracting investors in this current economic climate, noted panelists Tuesday during the AlwaysOn Venture Summit West conference here.

Despite the dire economic climate and the market meltdown, the panelists noted "good companies" will still have an opportunity to go public--it just may take longer.

Investors, such as mutual funds, asset managers, pension funds and hedge funds, are holding a significant amount … Read more

Rackspace Hosting makes two acquisitions

Correction: The month of the company's IPO has been fixed.

Rackspace Hosting, flush with cash post IPO, announced Thursday it has acquired two companies as part of a retooled cloud hosting strategy.

Rackspace, a hosting services provider based in San Antonio, Texas, snapped up Xen-based virtual machine hosting company Slicehost and cloud storage company Jungle Disk. Terms of the deals were not disclosed.

"Cloud computing offers tremendous benefits to our customers that complement our traditional managed hosting services," Lanham Napier, Rackspace Hosting CEO, said in a statement.

With the acquisitions and deeper dive into cloud computing, Rackspace … Read more

Glam Media replaces chief financial officer

Could an initial public offering be on the way for the highly ambitious Glam Media? The Valley-based advertising and media company has hired a new chief financial officer, Stephen E. Recht, who was the CFO of photo-printing site Shutterfly when it went public in 2006.

Recht replaces Ernie Cicogna, a co-founder of Glam. Cicogna will remain with the company as executive vice president of Glam Partners and general manager of the Glam Publisher Network.

"(Glam) has perfected a unique media business model and established itself as the leader in vertical content networks online," Recht said in a release. &… Read more

VCs throw cold water on portfolio companies

One after another, venture capitalists are stating the obvious to the companies they've invested in: Now would be a very good time to keep your money under lock and key.

From Sequoia Capital, which has had parts of its dire economic presentation to its portfolio companies aired out in the press, as reported in VentureBeat and GigaOm, to angel investor Ron Conway in his letter to his portfolio companies, the message is clear and persistent: prepare for the worst.

And that preparation, as Conway noted in his letter to portfolio companies, includes cutting marketing costs, general and administrative expenses … Read more

Happy ninth (public) birthday, Red Hat

I had nearly overlooked the fact that Red Hat went public nine years ago on August 11, 1999 with one of the top-ten single biggest gains in Wall Street history. Impressive.

And yet those stock gains weren't to last.

What did endure, however, was Red Hat's commitment to open source. Nine years later, Red Hat has yet to reach $1 billion in sales, but it gets closer each year and has provided cover for a wide array of open-source startups aiming to get funded as the "Red Hat of [insert application category]." Cumulatively, Red Hat has … Read more

Rackspace IPO: Wall Street does cloud computing

Wall Street gave a nod to cloud computing as San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace Hosting on Friday opened for trading on the New York Stock Exchange following its initial public offering Thursday.

However, its shares fell 20 percent in their first day of trading, which came as a disappointment for the first venture-backed company to go public in nearly five months, according to a MarketWatch report. Rackspace has received backing from Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners, according to MarketWatch.

The hosting company, which boasts 30,000 customers, is trading under the ticker symbol "RAX." It raised $187.5 … Read more

Employees unloading stock options? It's the hot new thing

On Monday we heard that Facebook was allowing current employees to sell a delineated portion of their common stock, something that the company confirmed on Tuesday.

Now, VentureBeat's Eric Eldon, who also originally reported the Facebook tidbit, says that LinkedIn employees are going to have the option of doing the same. The business social network, Eldon wrote, is allowing current employees to sell 20 percent of their equity in the company at a $500 million valuation. That's quite a bit lower than the billion-dollar valuation reportedly bestowed upon the company after its recent $53 million Series D funding … Read more

GT Solar's shares slide following IPO

Shares of GT Solar stock fell by 15 percent on the second day of trading. The Merrimack, N.H., company calls itself one of the largest suppliers of silicon photovoltaic solar equipment.

Its stock, under the ticker symbol SOLR on the NASDAQ market, was priced at $16.50 per share for the $500 million initial public offering of 30.3 million shares Thursday. That fell to $12.36 per share in midday trading.

The company declined to comment.

GT Solar's stock was overpriced by as much as two times compared to close competitor Centrotherm of Germany, said Ted Sullivan, … Read more

Back when open source truly was overhyped

Remember 1999? Back then investors were throwing money at anything that moved and, in the case of Linuxcare, they were also throwing money at things that could barely manage a crawl. Open-source vendors VA Linux and Red Hat enjoyed massive IPOs...IPOs that quickly fell back to earth.

Linuxcare never made it that far, opting to pull its IPO, replace its CEO, and fire much of its staff.

Before we got to that point, however, someone came up with this lovely Linuxcare pre-IPO poster to celebrate, however. I had a hard time getting a good picture of it (and it was too big to scan in), but it does a great job of describing the tenor of the time, showing who the movers and shakers (and shaken) of the time were:… Read more