Taking Stock of Our Netscape Moment

The LinkedIn IPO came out with a bang Thursday and in the intervening 72 hours the offering has already provoked sweeping re-assessments and re-appraisals of technology markets in general and the prospects for consumer web/social media IPOs in particular. It is hard to argue with success; and LNKD was nothing if not a wildly successful offering. Capital markets elites will bicker over some of the “inside baseball” issues having to do with “small float” mechanics or allegations of mispricing, but such quarrels are really just noise in the overall discussion.  LNKD was the largest technology IPO since Google in August 2004 and provided the much-needed confidence builder for the technology sector that market participants were hoping for. While there have been a number of well-received tech IPOs in recent years – OpenTable, Green Dot, to name a few — LinkedIn was arguably the highest profile name to go public in the past seven years and, as it happens, was one of the fabled five horsemen of consumer web/social media fame — a loose group which typically includes Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, and Groupon — that garner the greatest amount of attention from the media and the highest trading volume in the secondary market.

To be sure, it is hard to overstate the serious ramifications of a failed LinkedIn IPO. That the LNKD offering was an unqualified success bodes extremely well for the long-awaited offerings of Facebook and its peers and provides the proverbial rising tide to lift the respective boats of many lesser-known names in technology. The market validation accorded the LinkedIn offering will have a coat-tail effect across a broad swath of social media companies and venture investors will fast-track plans to find a public exit for many of these companies.

While it is still too early to divine what the long-term impact will be of the LNKD offering, it is undeniable that the morale boost it gave to founders and stakeholders is palpable. The IPO window for tech had been so constrained for so long that there will be some natural reassessment of IPO plans for dozens of companies that were all but assumed to be eventual M&A targets. This is a good and healthy exercise. The notion of “being a public company” has taken a drubbing in the past decade for any number of reasons — too expensive; too much regulation; required disclosures that would only help competitors; plenty of capital already available to good companies in the secondary market; management attention would be siphoned off to cater to Wall Street/institutional demands, and so on.

While the debate over being a public company vs. staying a private one is perhaps a topic for another post, I am in the camp that believes that many of the anti-IPO arguments most often raised in recent years are either overblown or are rapidly losing their relevancy. There are intangible benefits of being a publicly traded technology company that most criticisms — even the valid ones — fail to adequately counter. In the case of LNKD, getting a lofty public market valuation — and, by extension, validation — was critical for the company and for the dozens of social media/Web 2.0 companies that will all but assuredly follow LNKD into the public markets over the coming year or so. The LinkedIn IPO validated recent secondary market valuations of the company and provided the critical corroboration that venture investors and secondary buyers were not simply drinking their own Kool Aid. In time, owning a position in LNKD will become important for many large financial institutions and asset managers, which will in turn support the company’s and the sector’s long-term valuation as well as buoy the prospects of other talked-about social media/consumer web companies as they consider wading into the public markets. And that is a very good thing.