
Going Public
How Silicon Valley Rebels Loosened Wall Street’s Grip on the IPO and Sparked a Revolution
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Narrated by:
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Brian Troxell
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By:
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Dakin Campbell
About this listen
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 listeners 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.
©2022 Dakin Campbell (P)2022 TwelveListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Dakin Campbell has written the definitive account of that most crucial and nailbiting of days in a company's history: their IPO. Expertly and engagingly written, GOING PUBLIC reveals what goes on behind the scenes when the world's best-known companies comes to market, and how that is evolving."—Liam Vaughan, author of Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, A Global Manhunt and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History
What listeners say about Going Public
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jordan Kelly
- 04-22-24
Good listen
I enjoyed the insight on how the ipo process works def worth listening to.. mostly ipos the were in the past four years
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- Alexander J. Millner
- 11-08-22
Interesting!!
This book is great. I was not well versed in IPO or even finance but this book was exciting to read as an example of people that think in new ways to change an outdated and dysfunctional system. It also paints a grey picture - so it's not just that the old way is terrible and the new way is amazing but there are tradeoffs and part of the excitement is the story of how people made those tradeoffs and navigated the existing system to do things in a completely new way.
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- Arturo Torres Camelo
- 11-28-22
Just some stories without order
I expected more for this book. It was just a couple of stories without order
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