I received notice that I was one of the 18,000 employees laid off from Amazon. I’m sad to say that my rollercoaster ride at Amazon Global Robotics has come to an end. The bottom line: Just because it could be done doesn't mean it will be done, as VC-backed "unicorn" disruption rarely extends to their own securities.I woke up, I realized how uncertain/unfair career and life is as a whole. Airbnb makes all sorts of sense for its anticipated offering, which we now hear is more likely in Q1 2020 than in Q4 2019, but it's unclear if CFO Dave Stephenson has the same HBS case study ambitions as Spotify's Barry McCarthy.Then narrow it even further, as most companies don't want the hassle of working out all the complications with SEC officials (that price range issue would be thorny). There's still a belief that direct listings will only work with a "household name" issuer (yes, Slack counted), and that's a limited universe. The highest hurdle, banking sources tell me, would be finding a company that wants to do it. And, again, lockups shouldn't be an issue.
But it would solve the "price guess" dilemma, provide liquidity and give some greater control over the public investor base - all while also adding cash to corporate coffers.It would differ from what Google did in that it would provide 100% insider liquidity and not use a preliminary price range.It wouldn't be as clean as a direct listing in that it would move a bit slower with more Wall Street involvement.To create a hybrid structure, an issuer would borrow from the Spotify precedent and add in elements of the modified Dutch auction process that Google used to go public in 2004 (which was viewed dimly at the time, thus discouraging copycats, but which worked in retrospect). We're seeing more flexible lockups structures in traditional listings and a company could theoretically IPO without any lockups (if it could get underwriter approval). There's also been discussion of how direct listings enabled both Spotify and Slack to (mostly) eliminate lockups, but that's correlation without causation.Two of its primary features were that a direct listing couldn't include underwriting (i.e., no intermediaries that sell or forecast, nor pricing stabilization) and that its registration statement needn't include bona fide pricing estimates before being made effective by the SEC. Slack drafted behind a legal framework developed last year by Spotify and securities regulators. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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