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mattbrewsbytes • today at 4:59 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

An interesting difference between the AI boom and the dot com boom is that back then companies would IPO to raise capital and might have been forced to IPO when they were beyond 500 investors incl employees. These days these companies have already raised capital via private equity and the laws changed which allow them to not count employees with equity and have much higher investor counts. An IPO by either of the frontier labs companies is really a cash-out and payback on the capital they have borrowed. My thinking is the stock price would go down, possibly significantly, after an IPO.

Oracle's credit rating is hovering just above junk bond level. I think the capital agreements are similar to an Adjustable Rate Mortgage and monthly so if there's another rate increase from the Fed and Oracle can't find anyone to buy their bonds and/or their free cash flow continues to be negative then maybe that is a pin-prick in the stock bubble? Its sort of like if you keep bouncing around from 0% credit card offer for 12 months to another and then you stop getting 0% offers, then its time to face the music (those usually have a 3% transaction fee, at least a long time ago they did).


Replies

maerF0x0 • today at 5:14 PM

It's been a funny pairing of DotCom boom investors got burned buying paper with no revenue, and now investors complain about companies staying private till there is profit (or cashflow).

Analemma_ • today at 5:09 PM

I've been saying for a while now to stay the fuck away from tech IPOs for exactly this reason: it's no longer "we need to raise capital so we can get bigger", it's "we're tapped out on growth, and the last round of private investors needs to be paid back, plus employees need their equity to be worth something in order to stay". Private markets extract all the value and then dump the husk on the public.

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