Steve Cakebread - The IPO Playbook: An Insiders Perspective on Taking Your Company Public and How to Do It Right

Steve Cakebread knows the capital markets like few others, having shepherded three tech companies from private ownership to their IPOs and beyond. Readers seeking to learn strategies and key moves around going publicand what followswill find valuable information in Steves insights.

Stacey Cunningham, president, New York Stock Exchange

The public market is a public reckoning for businesses, bringing much-needed transparency, governance, and accountability. Steve Cakebreads The IPO Playbook is the ultimate guide to taking a company public.

Marc Benioff, chairman and co-CEO, Salesforce

Its hard to imagine anyone with more experience going public than Steve. His advice for the entire processfrom choosing bankers, to directing a very productive roadshow, to pricing and selecting investorswas perfect. Steve helped me and the entire Bill.com team have an amazing experience. Ultimately, following his advice is the best advice I can give anyone.

Ren Lacerte, CEO, Bill.com

The IPO Playbook is essential reading for anyone contemplating a public offering. Pulling from the expertise he gained from leading three successful IPOs, Steve Cakebread lays out how to build teams and set policies, procedures, and controls that support not just a successful public offering but the companys continued growth.

Kevin Thompson, president and CEO, SolarWinds

Steve Cakebreads The IPO Playbook is a real game-changer for corporate executives interested in creating credibility in the market through an IPO. Steve has transformed disruptive technology business models into monetization opportunitiesfirst with the IPO at Salesforce, then at Pandora, and now as the CFO of a hot startup, Yext. In The IPO Playbook, Steve shares practical examples of the IPO process from start to finish and, at the same time, demonstrates the significant advantages not just in securing capital to fund growth but also in attracting key talent who will help lead that growth.

Michael J.T. Steep, founder and executive director of the Disruptive Technologies and Digital Cities Program at Stanford University, author of First Light of Day

Going public is a major endeavor for any company, and Steve Cakebreads The IPO Playbook provides a valuable perspective on what it takes to do it right. Steve knows first-hand the many challenges and rewards of going through this process and details step-by-step what is involved in setting a company on the path that creates value for all stakeholdersshareholders, customers, employees, partners, and the community.

Mark Hawkins, president and CFO, Salesforce

I know first-hand the value of Steve Cakebreads advice. In The IPO Playbook, Steve shares the kind of advice that only someone who has led three successful IPOs could give. He breaks down the considerations on whether or not to go public, the steps to get there, and what to do after the IPOand presents it in an enjoyable, easy-to-read book. If you want to understand how to do an IPO right, read this book.

John Rettig, CFO, Bill.com

Steve Cakebreads book is a unique look behind the magic IPO curtain. As the CFO who took Salesforce, Pandora, and Yext publiccompanies that made history because of their disruptive technologySteve was the architect and conductor of complex IPO processes. Ive had the pleasure of working with Steve for fifteen years and have seen him in action. This book distills valuable business insight on the inside perspective for the timing and the transition from a private to a public company.

Dominic Paschel, senior vice president, Yext

Copyright 2020 Steve Cakebread

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Silicon Valley Press, Saratoga CA
Siliconvalleypress.net

Cover design: Anna Curtis
Cover image: Shutterstock/Matej Kastelic

ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-7339591-2-4
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-7339591-3-1
LCCN: 2019920409

May 29, 2020

Today as I forward this book to my publisher for printing, we are in the middle of a pandemic that has reached every country on the globe and taken the lives of nearly one hundred thousand in the United States alone. The impact of this pandemic will be felt for years to come.

As we slowly recover and rebuild our lives, the stock market will play a vital role in the economic recovery of public and private organizations, retirement funds, and the portfolios of small, individual investors.

Initial public offerings feed the market and create new opportunities for these investors. These public offerings fuel the ingenuity of innovative start-ups that need capital for research and expansion. Also, the public markets provide a wide range of access to capital from additional primary offerings to convertible debt to conventional debt. Being public affords numerous ways to raise capital in challenging times as well as times of growth.

This book is written for the leaders of these promising companies and outlines the process of preparing a successful public offering. It is my hope that these companies go public early enough, so the offering price is affordable not just for institutional investors but also for individual investors.

Stay healthy.

Steve Cakebread

It has been thirteen years since Yext was founded. Then, we were just a small group of employees, most of us with ponytails, housed in a room on the Upper West Side in Manhattan.

Today, we are an enterprise valued at nearly $2.3 billion, headquartered in a nine-story building downtown in Chelsea, with more than a thousand employees working in offices from Shanghai to Berlin.

Most of all, we are now a public corporation.

Two years ago, we had our initial public offering (IPO). Looking back, it has proven to be a total game changerboth for the access to capital it provided and because it changed the perception of the company around the world. Im not talking about capital markets here; Im talking about the markets in which we sell software.

Needless to say, when your company grows that fast, its story is filled with important events and turning points that were crucial to its success. But looking back, going public was the most important turning point in making Yext what it is today.

Unless they have been an intimate part of an IPO, most people see going public only as a liquidation event, where investors, employees, and other shareholders who have labored for years to make the company a success get a big payout for their sacrifices.

Thats certainly what I thought in the early days of Yext. Indeed, I never imagined the company going public. It seemed an outdated strategy that had been discredited at the beginning of the century when the dot-com bubble burst. I didnt even know any companies our age that had gone public. Most were just working toward a future acquisition by a big firm.

Looking back, I couldnt have been more wrong. Going public involves so much more: it makes a company better. The person who taught me that truth is the author of this book. Steve Cakebread has a gold-plated reputation as the master of taking technology companies public, beginning with his extraordinary success in doing so at Salesforce and, of course, Yext.