I'm always confused when stories like these are spun as a "strong debut" rather than saying Box left a lot of value on the table. Why do we care more about the people who've held the stock for < 1 day than the capitalization of the company?
It's understood that a tech company releases a small minority of shares at IPO and follows up with a secondary in a year or so. Someone else observed that they raised only a year's worth of money and from what I've read, they don't know when they'll be profitable, so it's quite obvious that they're going to do a secondary and that will be when they really raise some capital.
Because the financial companies that control everything on Wall St. hate them. Box isn't a very powerful company - they're no Google - and can't easily go against the grain. Box desperately needed that IPO, they're burning very large sums of red ink.
The amount of shares on offer is typically only a fraction of all outstanding shares. So underpricing the IPO shares isn't such a huge deal if company insiders who are under sales lockups hold many times more shares. It might actually be beneficial to company execs if they wish to offload their stock after escrow ends.
reply