First through the Wall: AirBnB's IPO
Plus 2 Financings, 7 Pieces of News, 7 Articles, and a Podcast worth your time.
It’s finally happening.
12 years after its founding, AirBnB is going public. (See my link below in News)
This is interesting and meaningful for PropTech for several reasons. I’ll write a deeper-dive on Medium later, but let’s touch the high points here.
PropTech will have a big exit. We need a big bell-cow to IPO and now we are getting one. I’ve written about this a bunch. Watch everyone in Silicon Valley have a dedicated “PropTech Person” by Q1. (How innovative and forward-thinking!)
12 years to exit is long (but not too long). If you were the first money in AirBnB, 2020 would be year 12 of your hold period. Presumably you’ve had some partial liquidity, but you’ve been waiting for your full exit. That has implications on stock vesting, fund math, and more.
Employee stock cliffs are getting addressed. There are two tranches of AirBnB employee stock that (allegedly) start to expire in Nov 2020. This is a way to take care of those who stuck around and made AirBnB what it is today.
AirBnB survived the biggest hospitality disruption in a hundred years. If you’re a public market investor and that’s not impressive, you might be a touch jaded. Just saying.
Silver Lake is about to look very smart. Some of us already knew they were, but for the rest of you, welcome to the Silver Lake Late-Stage Investing MasterClass.
AirBnB got lucky. In the post-WeWork IPO world, they learned about what the public market wants from its high-growth venture-backed companies in the property space. Post-COVID, it was forced to right-size and refocus on the core business. AirBnB had absolutely nothing to do with WeWork or COVID-19 but it benefited HUGELY from both events hitting before the IPO. Let’s not even start with what Spotify and Slack did on paving the way for a direct listing.
As I said, I’ll spend some more time in the coming weeks on the implications and ins-and-outs of this IPO. I’ll also give my (mostly useless) opinion on the long-term prospects on the stock.
If you think I missed something or want to explore something deeper here, let me know.
On to this week’s deals and data:
Fundings:
Congrats to our friends at Fetch Package that closed on an $18M Series B from Iron Gate and Pando.
Same for Atticus at PadSplit for the $10M A round led by Core Innovation Capital.
News:
Better late than never, AirBnB.
Well, at the very least Amazon will be back in offices in a big way ($).
Looks like we have another PropTech SPAC.
Congrats to our friend James for making Nexus (smart building newsletter/community) a full-time pursuit!
Kudos to Simon for being creative and investing in Brooks Brothers. Time will tell whether that particular struggling brand was the best investment . . .
Domio’s in trouble.
I think Landlord Tech Watch is a great idea.
Funds:
Paid Subscribers Only.
Articles:
NfX has another long-but-useful guide to fundraising on Zoom.
Check out Bloomberg’s piece on the Economics of Remote Work.
Dror thinks (and I agree) that WeWork and AirBnB will be fine.
Goodwin’s ongoing series on the future of CRE covers Multifamily this week.
Well that would be cool (if it works).
Propmodo thinks touchless offices are the future, pandemic or not.
15-minute cities are coming on strong.
Listen:
to James Dice of Nexus talk to Deb Noller of Switch Automation about the acceleration of Smart Building adoption.
Thanks for reading!
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