My first experience helping take a company public was with Evolve Software when CEO John Bantleman asked me to assist with the process in March 2000. Our closest competitor Niku had just gone public and shot up to $100 per share (market cap exceeding $1B). The time was right and we had significant momentum.
I had accompanied John on a few “public” investor presentations to events such as the Robert Stephens conference at the Sheraton Palace hotel. It was quite a sight to see the countdown clock (10 mins to get your point across and get off) as well as demoed and pitched to major analysts such as Mary Meeker (Morgan Stanley “Queen of the Internet).
But this was the real thing. We had secured DB Alex Brown, CSFB and others as bankers, now was the time to file for an IPO.
I’ll add my exact diary information in future updated posts and will use this page as an index to the process and what transpired.
- Describing the S1 Graphic
- Providing the product and technology architecture descriptions
- This was an interesting job since I had been told that the feedback from the governing bodies who review the S1 on first pass typically come back with a set of “comments” about the S1 and it was not untypical to have hundreds of comments to be corrected. I had to clearly articulate what we do and how our products worked. An amusing anecdote was told to me about a company (Broadbase I think) who filed their S1 and they had hundreds of comments they had to address. But the funniest one was “After reading the entire S1 WE STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU DO”. I definitely had to avoid that and in the end I think I did a good job because we got minimal comments back for my sections.
- Providing the Customer Testimonials
- The actual first draft S1 filed on March 20th, 2000