Dakin Campbell - Going Public: How a Small Group of Silicon Valley Rebels Loosened Wall Streets Grip on the IPO and Sparked a Revolution

I first started thinking critically about IPOs during the summer of 2019 as the real estate startup WeWork prepared to sell shares to the public. A financial writer for more than a decade, I had a passing knowledge of how investment banks worked with private companies entering the public markets for the first time. It wasnt until my editors at Insider scrambled a team of reporters to dig into what was happening at WeWork that I got my first good look at the process.

I soon learned that startup founders, venture capitalists, and even some bankers had been raising questions for years about how IPOs were being handled. By the time of WeWorks planned offering, Spotify and Slack had already chosen an alternative approach to listing their shares. Venture capitalist Bill Gurley was loudly banging his drum for other startups to follow suit. Change was in the air.

That didnt make it any easier to understand what was really happening. IPOs were a world within a world, a corner of Wall Street made up of its own characters, customs, and regulations that was nearly as hard to pull apart as the mortgage bonds that sparked the global financial crisis. As WeWorks listing quickly slid off the rails, I set out to learn as much as I could.

I devoured news reports, perused research papers, and sought out startup executives, investors, bankers, and lawyers. By the time I was done, Id spoken to roughly 75 people over more than 150 interviews. Some of those agreed to speak on the record, many of them with the belief that their comments would help readers to understand and appreciate their perspective, and their voices are reflected in the text.

Most of them, however, asked for anonymity to describe private conversations. I have tried to verify their accounts from other sources who were in the room, news reports, official documents or government filings, text messages, videos, or PowerPoint slides, to name just some of the resources I relied upon. In a few cases, recollections contradict one another. I have been thoughtful about coming to an accurate version of events. A reader shouldnt assume that someone spoke to me just because I describe that persons thinking. In numerous cases, I reconstructed what an individual thought by speaking to others who spoke to them directly or were otherwise in a position to know.

Throughout the book, I have avoided adding unnecessary analysis to the text. My hope is that the reader will come to his or her own conclusion based on how the narrative unfolds and the specific details of each transaction. I readily acknowledge that there is a fierce debate swirling around the current IPO process and the importance of various actors such as investment banks to the process. This book wont settle that debate, but I hope it can add to the dialogue by bringing readers into the rooms where big decisions are being made.

I hope you leave this book with a richer and more nuanced understanding of IPOs, how Wall Street and Silicon Valley are jockeying for supremacy over the process, and what it would mean to most efficiently funnel capital to the companies doing the most to drive economic innovation.

Last, I hope you like reading the story as much as I enjoyed discovering it.

Thanks for reading.

Dakin Campbell

April 2022