Wednesday, September 25, 2013

2013 Tech IPOs - Healthy and Power Law Distribution

The tech IPO pipeline has been healthy through Q3 2013. 15 companies are now actively trading on US public markets at a collective market capitalization of over $20B at the time of writing. A number of notable venture-backed companies like Chegg, Violin Memory and RingCentral have not priced yet. This is plenty of public-market liquidity to keep the traditional technology venture and growth capital industry thriving. There is much talk of 'disruption' to the VC industry, but this discussion almost always only means changes in the seed-stage deal-sourcing environment. The back-end IPO market is healthy and consistent.

The most notable feature is the excess returns that accrue to the winners even within the select group of companies that IPO. Similar to 2012 when Facebook's market capitalization dwarfed the rest of the 2012 IPO companies, Twitter's estimated IPO value of around $15B compares favorably to the $20B of combined market cap of all tech IPOs through the first 3 quarters of this year.

 

No comments: