Going Public

How Silicon Valley Rebels Loosened Wall Street’s Grip on the IPO and Sparked a Revolution

By: Dakin Campbell

Narrated by: Brian Troxell

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 Twelve

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

"For thousands of years, dating back at least to the time of the Romans, investors have acquired and swapped stakes in private entities seeking new sources of funding. In GOING PUBLIC, Dakin Campbell skillfully illuminates this often arcane process, its history, its importance, its perils, and most crucially its dramatic transformation in the pressurized board rooms and c-suites of modern Silicon Valley. The result is a rollicking, behind-the-scenes tale, populated by big personalities, pioneering technologists, and storied tech companies as they make the momentous, heady, hazardous leap of an initial public offering. It’s a valuable, gripping read that will delight anyone interested in the thermodynamics of business innovation and financial markets. GOING PUBLIC will change the way you understand who profits from the technological revolutions coursing through the American economy, how they profit, and where it is all heading." —Felix Gillette, writer for Bloomberg Businessweek and author of It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO

"In GOING PUBLIC, Dakin Campbell expertly elucidates the wisdom, as well as the flaws, in the way the big Wall Street investment banks raise equity capital for companies all across the world; Campbell then traces how innovation is starting to break the hammerlock hold that Wall Street has had on that process for decades, giving some hope to both issuers and retail investors that the rigged game finally may be changing for the better."—William D. Cohan, a Vanity Fair writer and author of Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon

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.

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

Just some stories without order

I expected more for this book. It was just a couple of stories without order