Netscape, Yelp, and the Tech IPO Boom of 2010
I’m wagering we’re about to enter a similar period in 2010. The last one was initiated by the Netscape IPO, one of the first commercial browser makers. Its IPO, less than two years after the company was founded, triggered an avalanche of similar offerings, and thus helped cause the dot-com episode that characterized the market’s madness of the late-1990s. All it would take to make it happen again is another Netscape moment, as it were.
And what is a Netscape moment? It’s not just a moonshot IPO from a fast-growing company with all the right moves. It’s also a company that represents a cohort of IPO-able fast-growers, any one of which bankers can track down and take public once the initial companies are successfully public. “Get me another one of those!”, is what investors (and bank executives) will say to investment bankers after the first company in the cohort goes public. And bankers can be criticized for many things, but being slow to follow profitable orders is not one of them.